Countries that go to the IMF expecting to have to make the sort of changes to their economy that Western nations would expect in order to consider them for a "payday loan" level credit offering will do just fine. Just like a "payday loan" if you can survive without it, you should...If an IMF loan isn't going to force a country to do what it doesn't want, and be fiscally responsible...I'll bet if Germany had kept that money, they would have spent some of it on investments that have a real return...
German citizens were saving too much money. I saw the posters urging people to dig the Deutchmarks from their back yards and exchange them for Euro. Yes saving is good, but Euros buried in back gardens to not lead to new businesses or a vibrant economy. So Germany used their influence and encouraged the ECB to print money and lower interest rates. This worked brilliantl... for Germany. Their sluggish economy began to pick up. But the one-size-fits Germany fiscal policy punished savers and rewarded debt in all Euro countries including Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal. All this free money was floating around the EU, punishing savers in Greece and Ireland and blowing asset bubbles all over Europe. By time young Irish people had 10% down of a mortgage, the house had doubled in price. Everyone knew this was a bubble but saving was punished so severely that even those who opted for the fiscally responsible path are in worse shape then the 90% who spent money at a time when ECB policy punished fiscal responsible behavior.
The ECB, US Fed and other central banks use their tools to help themselves and those with first access to the money (wealth, banks, corporations). A wiser economic policy in the computer age would allow for a variety of currencies in different economic zones within a country. Lower Alabama and East Saint Louis should not have the same monetary policy as Manhattan and Beverly Hills. Germany shouldn't have the same monetary policy as Greece. The fictional fiscal world we create is punishing the young and poor
The austerity already adopted by Ireland (the EU's golden-child) has a severe mis-allocation of public resources, rapidly increased homelessness and deaths. The fact is that people were punished for saving and then later punished for not saving.
"Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." -John Maynard Keynes
I would have to say the technological part was not so bad, but we played with Hitler's love of the occult in 1954 and that ended the separation of church and state, it has been a downhill run ever since here.
OK so Godwin's Law holds true. I was going to send this link to a highly intelligent friend who constantly doubts his self worth but this whole tangle of threads proves that any mention of intelligence on Slashdot soon evaporates into a singularity of shallow thoughts about politics and religion.
I'm depressed not because I'm intelligent but because the world must face such vast infinities of stupid...
Please put some near Cuba so that the technology donated by organizations such as Roots of Hope can help Cuba avoid a collapse from a pseudo-communist totalitarian plutocracy like the Soviet Union to a pseudo-capitalist totalitarian plutocracy like China.
Unfortunately, peak fraud is ahead of us with the widespread adoption of a poor implementation of RFID. The EU and ROW were wise to jump to chip and pin while the US dragged its feet for a decade with cashiers expected to be CSI signature verification specialists. But the move to pinless RFID rolls security back to the days when cashiers were expected to peer through lists of bad credit card numbers. Actually it's worse than that because card dup information is conveniently broadcast on 13.5 MHz, in the 22 meter amateur radio band. This is a great frequency for over the horizon broadcasting in summer. Not so good for secure communication over a distance that is supposed to be in the range of a few centimeters.
Its sad because properly implemented RFID has the potential for enhancing the security of paypoint transactions. This implementation will have so much fraud, people will forever associate RFID with fraud.
How would you explain the relationship between music and mathematics? How can this relationship be leveraged to help reduce innumeracy? (For example a two dimensional touch screen can be used as a visual theremin where each axis plays a frequency. The frequencies can be continuous or as steps in integer ratios corresponding to chromatic, pentatonic, pythagorean, blues, arabic and other musical scales.)
Some mathematical savants express a type of mathematical synesthesia. That is, numbers are experienced as having textures, colors and shapes. Have you experienced this? How can this effect can be leveraged as an educational tool for the general public?
Put your electronic flash next to an AM radio (you might find one in an antique shop;-) You'll find considerable EMF comes from the electronic flash circuit as it charges the big capacitor. For fun we used to heterodyne this against the EMF from an LED pocket calculator for some very bizarre spacy effects.
In the US homeschooling is more popular with the religious right who don't want them "larnin' bout how we's sended from munkehs". In the UK, it's more associated with drippy-hippy Woodcraft-folk types.
This stereotype holds only for those who are unfamiliar with the reality of American public schools. In the US, homeschooling is more popular with parents who understand that typical US public school systems are a collision of bureaucracy, politics and labor unions where education is an afterthought. It is popular amongst parents who understand that No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) obsession with exams leaves behind children with special needs and punishes educational creativity. It is popular amongst parents who believe that being bullied by a drug-soaked mob of feral children and exposed to peer terrorism and gunplay is not a mandatory component of healthy socialization. It is popular amongst parents who believe that by banning Christianity and a handful of religions from public schools while allowing pseudo-scientific dogma, mammon worship, celebrity worship, political party tribalism, sports worship, brand idolatry, gun idolatry, flag idolatry, Apple idolatry and other forms of materialism provides a toxically unbalanced view of reality.
As far back as the early 80s I noticed that Radio Shack rarely had the parts to service its own branded consumer electronic products. It's only in retrospect that I understand that this lack of serviceability was being built into all consumer products and was not specific to Radio Shack
It's unfortunate that Radio Shack's leadership missed the Maker movement and hacker renaissance. It didn't help that RS management's obsession with employee polygraph tests in the 1980s drove out the last of the nerds and hackers from their staff. Shortly after RS's CEO announced a return to its hobbyist roots I asked staff at our relatively well-stocked local branch about ultraviolet LEDs and arduinos. They had never heard of either even though both were on their shelves.
Radio Shack nearly killed all independent electronics stores while it killed itself. Thankfully a few brick and mortar independents such as Chester Electronics (ignore their vacuum tube era website) and American Science and Surplus still survive.
We should double the proposed off-shoring tax to 28%. The US dollar has risen more than 28% against the Euro so even with a 28% off-shoring tax, the cost of operating the Irish facade would be the same as it was in 2008.
This would also be the perfect time to impose a 50% tax on oil. This too would be easily absorbed as oil priced have dropped by more than 50% since 2008. A higher oil tax would keep domestic oil and alternative energy industries alive and it would provide Americans with a buffer against future OPEC price volatility. It would also weaken OPEN and give us more control over oil prices.
We don't need a corporate Berlin wall, we need to balance a toxic asymmetry: Jobs can be exported with very little economic friction while labor faces considerable friction when it attempts to follow those jobs.
If a country wants to export labor, export commodities or import jobs from the US market, they should balance this against labor imports, job exports and commodity imports. Taxes must provide just enough friction to correct any imbalance and compensate for the jobs sucked out of the US market. Is this unfair use of US hegemony? Maybe but US hegemony currently benefits only the 1% while the 99% suffer the resulting wars and economic ruin
While we're on the topic of hegemony, why do US corporations get a free ride at destroying our reputation overseas while ordinary American citizens who misbehave have their passports revoked? Since US corporations have the same legal rights and responsibilities as US citizens, corporations should be required to hold passports.
Corporations which do not behave responsibly should have their passports revoked and should not be allowed to operate overseas. Most of us can come up with examples of corporations which have committed acts of treason. These should not only have their passports revoked, they should face the possibility of execution.
Sure, there are large layoffs in the tech industry, but big layoffs are not a new thing.
Two of the largest layoffs in US history occurred in 1993. 60K employees at IBM and 50K employees at Sears/KMart.
Big layoffs are a result of other business conditions, including.
An actual need to cut expenses -- bloated, slow-moving companies find themselves in the condition of declining sales, and big losses.
Or cutting product lines because they only make a few percent in profit or a decent percentage profit but not enough revenue to make a dent in a goliath company's portfolio. This leaves gaps in the market which can be filled by small companies which is a good thing. If government weren't so entangled with the goliath companies, the corporate ecosystem would be much more weighted towards start-ups and we'd have a much more inventive and agile economy.
A desire to increase profit margins, often linked to increased stock prices -- CEO's can get lots of bonus compensation in this form
When SEC reporting rules punished companies with a business plan extending beyond 90 days "in order to prevent fraud", they allowed a kind of fraud where hiring, layoffs and inventive accounting are regularly used to game the 90 day reporting cycle.
Even if the canal were closed, it is a just a matter of time until someone with an evil bent or an adolescent sense of humor deliberately introduces a few carp into the lake -- that's all that's needed.
To those who still claim that humans are far too small to effect the environment, the Great Lakes are a great counterexample. Three times in my lifetime I've watched the biological ecosystem of these lakes change dramatically. The 70s Alewife invasions made hundreds of miles of beaches unbearable, the zebra mussels cleared the water but gave small fish no place to hide and allowed sunlight through to cause the huge blue-green algae blooms that shutdown Toledo's water supply this summer.
The Asian carp carp invasion of the Great Lakes is a foregone conclusion. Their DNA is already in Lake Michigan and more exotic species such as the Yangzee river freshwater jellyfish are already found in tiny isolated inland lakes in the Wisconsin north woords. There isn't enough law enforcement to check all of the jet skis, kayaks, ski-boats, sailboats, fishing boats and prevent deliberate introduction. It's already too late, sustainability is impossible. Resilience and/or recovery are our only options.
Jobs face little friction as they migrate towards the places where the cost of labor is lowest. Workers, however, face considerable friction when attempting to follow those jobs. What affect will this imbalance have on the average worker? Will the affect be greater than or less than the affect of robots?
According to the world bank, 215 million people live outside of the country of their birth. If counted separately, this "Nomadistan" would be the 4th largest nation in the world, ahead of Pakistan, Brazil, Japan, Mexico and all of the countries of Europe, Africa and South America. The people of Nomadistan don't have the same rights as natives of their adopted home. They face xenophobia, political scapegoating, economic hardship, workplace discrimination, racial profiling and harassement and very few have the right to vote in their new home. Facing barriers to full integration, many will chose to align their alliegence along political, religious or ethnic dimensions rather than by geography. With global communication replacing the the geographically cohesive forces of religion, television and radio-- the people of Nomadistan ever be accepted into their geographic melting pot. How can we prevent wars between the colocated nations of Nomadistan and Proxima Xenophobica?
There is a positive feedback between human confirmation bias and reliance on information sources which increasingly give us what we want (e.g. Google/Facebook "filter bubbles", Amazon "if you like this... you'll like that." Do you expect this to create more social balkanization and extremism or other social effects? Is there anything we can do to stop or slow this process?
"Cardinal directions within the Discworld are not given as North, South, East and West, but rather as directions relating to the disc itself: Hubward (towards the centre), Rimward (away from the centre) and to a lesser extent, turnwise (direction of the disc's rotation) and widdershins."
ESA (who launched this probe) and NASA (who once had an interplanetary space program) probably use the same terminology. Suppose you have a probe to earth bandwidth of between 7 bits per second and 28 kbps. How do you use this bandwidth?
Telemetry indicating health of space probe (e.g. whether or not the harpoons fired?)
Navigational telemetry (including position of various movable parts)
Scientific data collected from planned experiments (e.g. photograph, spectrographs, audio...
Non-scientific data to help inspire humans (Vger's pale blue dot photo fits into this category)
Moon landing take 2: Ok Neil, but this time you need to say, "One step for A man... one giant leap for mankind." Don't flub your line or "One small step fur man" will be in the history books.
911 Conspiracy take 2: The first take was Ok but we need to swap out the Saudis and Egyptian hijackers. You guys are supposed to be our allies. Can we get at least one Iranian, Iraqi or Afghani hijackers? How the heck are we gonna start a war? How about a North Korean?
The genocide of the native American Indian population was thought to have contributed to passenger pigeon's emergence as an outbreak species at populations which proved to be unsustainable. It is possible that during this time, the birds evolved their one egg per year, clustering and other behaviors which eventually contributed to their demise. One effect of the passenger pigeon's extinction is the spread of Lyme disease, another is the preservation of the American Bison.
Tools don't obey the laws of fashion and planned-obsolecense. A tool remains useful until it wears out or is replaced with something that replaces a tool in all of its use-cases without adding additional practical or economic downsides. So we use manual screwdrivers for some jobs where electric screwdrivers would either break things or wouldn't fit into a tight space. Artists still use paint and pencil where these allow more efficient expression than digital photographs and photoshop. Here are some technologies I'd love to replace if a replacement were available:
"Dumb" old cell phone. I have an indestructible Nokia "phone only" phone. I recently charged it because I like to put it in a zip-lock and take it windsurfing or kayaking-- but after nearly a year off the charger, it was still fully charged. It's water resistant, lasts for days on a battery, has good signal range and sound quality. My slightly newer QWERTY Nokia is useful when I'm writing. I've heard other writers use Psion or other old QWERTY PDAs but 2006 was a sweet spot for these "slightly smart" phones.
Musical instruments. Forget the fact that you'd spend $3000 on an electric piano with the sound and key-action of a $500 used upright and forget that guitars and most other stringed and woodwind instruments have no digital equivalent, even older electronic instruments are difficult to find modern equivalents. I'd love to replace my late 1980s consumer level samping keyboards with a modern sampler with high sampling rate, thousands of sample storage, effects... but no such consumer device exists. So I'm stuck with something with about the same S/N ration and frequency range as a mellotron.
Solar powered scientific calculator. You call that a smart phone? The pocket calculator's built into the iPhone and most androids is a joke. Many of these can't even count up to the US national debt-- which might explain a few things.
Solar and wind-powered clothes dryer. I don't get the US. Land of the free and yet there are multiple levels of regulations for everything. Uzis and AK-47s seem to be legal anywhere beyond a stone's throw from a school, but try to use a clothespin to hang your clothes from a line and you're likely to get in trouble with some authority. Yeah it's old technology, but it works and is used in almost every other country. Update it with supermagnet clothespins and you could probably make it convenient. But I don't mind the inconvenience. I meet my neighbors, spend some time in the sun and save an average of about $2 per load in electricity.
Transistor radio. Given the poor quality and high cost of US oligopoly cell phone service, you shouldn't stray far from Wifi if you want to stream music. But some of us have a life, sailing, hiking, camping... outside of Wifi's range. Yeah podcasts and downloaded music are fun but they lack the regional immediacy of radio. Compared to most bland streaming stations, clear-channel is that stoner running a pirate station from his dorm. Seriously, when they ask what the $*&# happened to good music, point to your iPod and sing, "The day the music died."
I used this Oscilloscope based on an Arduino and ATMega328 running with a 16MHz crystal. It's more of a toy/demo scope, not even great for audio frequencies and for lower scales you probably want to add an instrumentation amp front end. The thing I like about it is that it reuses/upcycles all of those pocket NTSC (or PAL) analog TVs obsoleted by the FCC a couple of years ago.
A few years ago when there was a concern that not enough analog engineers were being trained to meet demand, lecturers at Georgia Tech and others suggested the use of Field Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAA) in order to let students get their hands dirty with real analogue electronics with some of the convenience of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs.) While purists might believe that analog without the mess of breadboards, wire-wraps and soldering isn't analog, it fills a real-world need.
Unfortunately it seems that interest in FPAAs peaked too early-- before the Maker and openhardware movement might have driven up demand and driven down costs.Anadigm does have some products I'd love to see packged as an Arduino shield. Who wouldn't want a pocket Moog Synthesizer?
Slashdot Mirror
Countries that go to the IMF expecting to have to make the sort of changes to their economy that Western nations would expect in order to consider them for a "payday loan" level credit offering will do just fine. Just like a "payday loan" if you can survive without it, you should...If an IMF loan isn't going to force a country to do what it doesn't want, and be fiscally responsible...I'll bet if Germany had kept that money, they would have spent some of it on investments that have a real return...
German citizens were saving too much money. I saw the posters urging people to dig the Deutchmarks from their back yards and exchange them for Euro. Yes saving is good, but Euros buried in back gardens to not lead to new businesses or a vibrant economy. So Germany used their influence and encouraged the ECB to print money and lower interest rates. This worked brilliantl... for Germany. Their sluggish economy began to pick up. But the one-size-fits Germany fiscal policy punished savers and rewarded debt in all Euro countries including Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal. All this free money was floating around the EU, punishing savers in Greece and Ireland and blowing asset bubbles all over Europe. By time young Irish people had 10% down of a mortgage, the house had doubled in price. Everyone knew this was a bubble but saving was punished so severely that even those who opted for the fiscally responsible path are in worse shape then the 90% who spent money at a time when ECB policy punished fiscal responsible behavior.
The ECB, US Fed and other central banks use their tools to help themselves and those with first access to the money (wealth, banks, corporations). A wiser economic policy in the computer age would allow for a variety of currencies in different economic zones within a country. Lower Alabama and East Saint Louis should not have the same monetary policy as Manhattan and Beverly Hills. Germany shouldn't have the same monetary policy as Greece. The fictional fiscal world we create is punishing the young and poor The austerity already adopted by Ireland (the EU's golden-child) has a severe mis-allocation of public resources, rapidly increased homelessness and deaths. The fact is that people were punished for saving and then later punished for not saving.
"Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." -John Maynard Keynes
I would have to say the technological part was not so bad, but we played with Hitler's love of the occult in 1954 and that ended the separation of church and state, it has been a downhill run ever since here.
OK so Godwin's Law holds true. I was going to send this link to a highly intelligent friend who constantly doubts his self worth but this whole tangle of threads proves that any mention of intelligence on Slashdot soon evaporates into a singularity of shallow thoughts about politics and religion.
I'm depressed not because I'm intelligent but because the world must face such vast infinities of stupid...
Please put some near Cuba so that the technology donated by organizations such as Roots of Hope can help Cuba avoid a collapse from a pseudo-communist totalitarian plutocracy like the Soviet Union to a pseudo-capitalist totalitarian plutocracy like China.
Unfortunately, peak fraud is ahead of us with the widespread adoption of a poor implementation of RFID. The EU and ROW were wise to jump to chip and pin while the US dragged its feet for a decade with cashiers expected to be CSI signature verification specialists. But the move to pinless RFID rolls security back to the days when cashiers were expected to peer through lists of bad credit card numbers. Actually it's worse than that because card dup information is conveniently broadcast on 13.5 MHz, in the 22 meter amateur radio band. This is a great frequency for over the horizon broadcasting in summer. Not so good for secure communication over a distance that is supposed to be in the range of a few centimeters.
Its sad because properly implemented RFID has the potential for enhancing the security of paypoint transactions. This implementation will have so much fraud, people will forever associate RFID with fraud.
How would you explain the relationship between music and mathematics? How can this relationship be leveraged to help reduce innumeracy? (For example a two dimensional touch screen can be used as a visual theremin where each axis plays a frequency. The frequencies can be continuous or as steps in integer ratios corresponding to chromatic, pentatonic, pythagorean, blues, arabic and other musical scales.)
Some mathematical savants express a type of mathematical synesthesia. That is, numbers are experienced as having textures, colors and shapes. Have you experienced this? How can this effect can be leveraged as an educational tool for the general public?
Put your electronic flash next to an AM radio (you might find one in an antique shop ;-) You'll find considerable EMF comes from the electronic flash circuit as it charges the big capacitor. For fun we used to heterodyne this against the EMF from an LED pocket calculator for some very bizarre spacy effects.
In the US homeschooling is more popular with the religious right who don't want them "larnin' bout how we's sended from munkehs". In the UK, it's more associated with drippy-hippy Woodcraft-folk types.
This stereotype holds only for those who are unfamiliar with the reality of American public schools. In the US, homeschooling is more popular with parents who understand that typical US public school systems are a collision of bureaucracy, politics and labor unions where education is an afterthought. It is popular amongst parents who understand that No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) obsession with exams leaves behind children with special needs and punishes educational creativity. It is popular amongst parents who believe that being bullied by a drug-soaked mob of feral children and exposed to peer terrorism and gunplay is not a mandatory component of healthy socialization. It is popular amongst parents who believe that by banning Christianity and a handful of religions from public schools while allowing pseudo-scientific dogma, mammon worship, celebrity worship, political party tribalism, sports worship, brand idolatry, gun idolatry, flag idolatry, Apple idolatry and other forms of materialism provides a toxically unbalanced view of reality.
As far back as the early 80s I noticed that Radio Shack rarely had the parts to service its own branded consumer electronic products. It's only in retrospect that I understand that this lack of serviceability was being built into all consumer products and was not specific to Radio Shack
It's unfortunate that Radio Shack's leadership missed the Maker movement and hacker renaissance. It didn't help that RS management's obsession with employee polygraph tests in the 1980s drove out the last of the nerds and hackers from their staff. Shortly after RS's CEO announced a return to its hobbyist roots I asked staff at our relatively well-stocked local branch about ultraviolet LEDs and arduinos. They had never heard of either even though both were on their shelves.
Radio Shack nearly killed all independent electronics stores while it killed itself. Thankfully a few brick and mortar independents such as Chester Electronics (ignore their vacuum tube era website) and American Science and Surplus still survive.
We should double the proposed off-shoring tax to 28%. The US dollar has risen more than 28% against the Euro so even with a 28% off-shoring tax, the cost of operating the Irish facade would be the same as it was in 2008.
This would also be the perfect time to impose a 50% tax on oil. This too would be easily absorbed as oil priced have dropped by more than 50% since 2008. A higher oil tax would keep domestic oil and alternative energy industries alive and it would provide Americans with a buffer against future OPEC price volatility. It would also weaken OPEN and give us more control over oil prices.
We don't need a corporate Berlin wall, we need to balance a toxic asymmetry: Jobs can be exported with very little economic friction while labor faces considerable friction when it attempts to follow those jobs.
If a country wants to export labor, export commodities or import jobs from the US market, they should balance this against labor imports, job exports and commodity imports. Taxes must provide just enough friction to correct any imbalance and compensate for the jobs sucked out of the US market. Is this unfair use of US hegemony? Maybe but US hegemony currently benefits only the 1% while the 99% suffer the resulting wars and economic ruin
While we're on the topic of hegemony, why do US corporations get a free ride at destroying our reputation overseas while ordinary American citizens who misbehave have their passports revoked? Since US corporations have the same legal rights and responsibilities as US citizens, corporations should be required to hold passports.
Corporations which do not behave responsibly should have their passports revoked and should not be allowed to operate overseas. Most of us can come up with examples of corporations which have committed acts of treason. These should not only have their passports revoked, they should face the possibility of execution.
Sure, there are large layoffs in the tech industry, but big layoffs are not a new thing.
Two of the largest layoffs in US history occurred in 1993. 60K employees at IBM and 50K employees at Sears/KMart.
Big layoffs are a result of other business conditions, including.
An actual need to cut expenses -- bloated, slow-moving companies find themselves in the condition of declining sales, and big losses.
Or cutting product lines because they only make a few percent in profit or a decent percentage profit but not enough revenue to make a dent in a goliath company's portfolio. This leaves gaps in the market which can be filled by small companies which is a good thing. If government weren't so entangled with the goliath companies, the corporate ecosystem would be much more weighted towards start-ups and we'd have a much more inventive and agile economy.
A desire to increase profit margins, often linked to increased stock prices -- CEO's can get lots of bonus compensation in this form
When SEC reporting rules punished companies with a business plan extending beyond 90 days "in order to prevent fraud", they allowed a kind of fraud where hiring, layoffs and inventive accounting are regularly used to game the 90 day reporting cycle.
Even if the canal were closed, it is a just a matter of time until someone with an evil bent or an adolescent sense of humor deliberately introduces a few carp into the lake -- that's all that's needed.
To those who still claim that humans are far too small to effect the environment, the Great Lakes are a great counterexample. Three times in my lifetime I've watched the biological ecosystem of these lakes change dramatically. The 70s Alewife invasions made hundreds of miles of beaches unbearable, the zebra mussels cleared the water but gave small fish no place to hide and allowed sunlight through to cause the huge blue-green algae blooms that shutdown Toledo's water supply this summer. The Asian carp carp invasion of the Great Lakes is a foregone conclusion. Their DNA is already in Lake Michigan and more exotic species such as the Yangzee river freshwater jellyfish are already found in tiny isolated inland lakes in the Wisconsin north woords. There isn't enough law enforcement to check all of the jet skis, kayaks, ski-boats, sailboats, fishing boats and prevent deliberate introduction. It's already too late, sustainability is impossible. Resilience and/or recovery are our only options.
The US ranks 22nd in personal freedom 10th in overall prosperityand Nobel prizes per capita. 101st in peace index 34th by life expectency I could go on but hey, at least the US is still #1 in military spending!
Jobs face little friction as they migrate towards the places where the cost of labor is lowest. Workers, however, face considerable friction when attempting to follow those jobs. What affect will this imbalance have on the average worker? Will the affect be greater than or less than the affect of robots?
According to the world bank, 215 million people live outside of the country of their birth. If counted separately, this "Nomadistan" would be the 4th largest nation in the world, ahead of Pakistan, Brazil, Japan, Mexico and all of the countries of Europe, Africa and South America. The people of Nomadistan don't have the same rights as natives of their adopted home. They face xenophobia, political scapegoating, economic hardship, workplace discrimination, racial profiling and harassement and very few have the right to vote in their new home. Facing barriers to full integration, many will chose to align their alliegence along political, religious or ethnic dimensions rather than by geography. With global communication replacing the the geographically cohesive forces of religion, television and radio-- the people of Nomadistan ever be accepted into their geographic melting pot. How can we prevent wars between the colocated nations of Nomadistan and Proxima Xenophobica?
There is a positive feedback between human confirmation bias and reliance on information sources which increasingly give us what we want (e.g. Google/Facebook "filter bubbles", Amazon "if you like this... you'll like that." Do you expect this to create more social balkanization and extremism or other social effects? Is there anything we can do to stop or slow this process?
... except on Discworld where:
"Cardinal directions within the Discworld are not given as North, South, East and West, but rather as directions relating to the disc itself: Hubward (towards the centre), Rimward (away from the centre) and to a lesser extent, turnwise (direction of the disc's rotation) and widdershins."
ESA (who launched this probe) and NASA (who once had an interplanetary space program) probably use the same terminology. Suppose you have a probe to earth bandwidth of between 7 bits per second and 28 kbps. How do you use this bandwidth?
Moon landing take 2: Ok Neil, but this time you need to say, "One step for A man... one giant leap for mankind." Don't flub your line or "One small step fur man" will be in the history books.
911 Conspiracy take 2: The first take was Ok but we need to swap out the Saudis and Egyptian hijackers. You guys are supposed to be our allies. Can we get at least one Iranian, Iraqi or Afghani hijackers? How the heck are we gonna start a war? How about a North Korean?
Well, if you're a journalism major, there is this.
The genocide of the native American Indian population was thought to have contributed to passenger pigeon's emergence as an outbreak species at populations which proved to be unsustainable. It is possible that during this time, the birds evolved their one egg per year, clustering and other behaviors which eventually contributed to their demise. One effect of the passenger pigeon's extinction is the spread of Lyme disease, another is the preservation of the American Bison.
Tools don't obey the laws of fashion and planned-obsolecense. A tool remains useful until it wears out or is replaced with something that replaces a tool in all of its use-cases without adding additional practical or economic downsides. So we use manual screwdrivers for some jobs where electric screwdrivers would either break things or wouldn't fit into a tight space. Artists still use paint and pencil where these allow more efficient expression than digital photographs and photoshop. Here are some technologies I'd love to replace if a replacement were available:
I used this Oscilloscope based on an Arduino and ATMega328 running with a 16MHz crystal. It's more of a toy/demo scope, not even great for audio frequencies and for lower scales you probably want to add an instrumentation amp front end. The thing I like about it is that it reuses/upcycles all of those pocket NTSC (or PAL) analog TVs obsoleted by the FCC a couple of years ago.
A few years ago when there was a concern that not enough analog engineers were being trained to meet demand, lecturers at Georgia Tech and others suggested the use of Field Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAA) in order to let students get their hands dirty with real analogue electronics with some of the convenience of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs.) While purists might believe that analog without the mess of breadboards, wire-wraps and soldering isn't analog, it fills a real-world need.
Unfortunately it seems that interest in FPAAs peaked too early-- before the Maker and openhardware movement might have driven up demand and driven down costs.Anadigm does have some products I'd love to see packged as an Arduino shield. Who wouldn't want a pocket Moog Synthesizer?