I can cite three sources after just a few minutes of research which seem to indicate anywhere from a 25% to 65% chance of severe defects in father/daughter-brother/sister offspring.
So in other words a 35%-75% chance of having a normal baby, thats more then good enough for me, especially since we have the tech to screen for defects pre-birth. But if you look at the law (64,65), thats not even what is outlawed, there is no mention of making babies, what is outlawed is having sex, even if its the oral or anal or two brothers or two sisters that have no chance of ever making a baby.
Brother and Sister is information readily available to everyone without violating anyone's privacy.
So is down syndrome, dwarfism and a ton of other gene defects, after all if a defect wouldn't have obvious consequences it wouldn't be that bad a defect to begin with. Should we stop all those people from having children too? Especially since the chance of defect in the children might be a good bit higher then with incest.
In Germany it is especially weird, doing embryo screening to check for defects is actually outlawed and incest outlawed as well. So you have one law passively encouraging defects and another trying to prevent them. And of course there is still the issue with the law not outlawing the baby making, but the sex, which today just seems out of date, as making babies without is doable just as having sex without risk of a baby is doable.
The kind of freedom you support, is not freedom at all.
You seem to have a very weird definition of "freedom", the Nazi Germany kind of it seems, where the state can decide who shall and shall not mate with each other and who shall get eradicated from the gene pool.
To put it another way, do you support two people having children if there is a 90-100% chance of having a "flipper" baby?
Yes, because its their choice to make, not mine. We don't disallow people with gene defects having children either and those can have an even higher chance of the children having the same defect. On top of that its not even the 'having children' part that its outlawed, its only the 'having sex' part, so making babies without sex (not really a problem with todays tech) would actually be ok with the law.
This really is just a mix of bigotry and eugenics at work and its quite disgusting that this is enforced by the law.
Consider that today, you can be gay and a programmer, and nobody cares except the bigots.
And yet when you have consenting sex with your sister you will still get thrown into jail for up to two years, as it still seems accepted to punish people for whom they chose as partner. I would prefer it when they would clean up the other unjust laws that are still left, instead of just apologizing for those that already got fixed.
They still draw power constantly to display an image.
Sure, but PixelQi stuff is quite conservative on the power, a OLPC last around 12 hours if you disable WiFi and with a better battery that could likely be extended a good bit, which should be enough for a book or two. In addition display speed isn't just needed for video, its also needed for browsing books. The 1sec refresh time works well enough if you just read linearly, but if you want to quickly flip a few pages forward or backward it totally kills the experience.
I have that netbook (the red one in the video), and it doesn't even approach the readibility in sunlight of a Sony Reader I borrowed.
Sure about that? I don't think PixelQi screens have hit the market yet.
If I'm lying on the couch using my netbook, once the sun moves round I have to close the curtains.
That doesn't sound like a PixelQi screen. I have an OLPC which uses a earlier version of the PixelQi technology and that one gets better the more sunlight you have, not worse (you lose color in direct sunlight, but triple your resolution). The only disadvantage the OLPC screen has is that it isn't white like normal paper, but more greyish like recycling paper.
Also, black and white (maybe with 2 greys) is fine for most of what I do
Its not good enough for the Internet and when I have the choice between carring an eBook and a Laptop or just a LCD based eBook, i'd take the LCD based eBook any day.
It also makes them slow, expensive, black&white-only and unusable for the Internet or video. A good LCD screen, such as the ones from PixelQi, can give you something very close to the resolution and sunlight readability of ePaper while also giving you color and video and that at a low cost. Now of course if they actually use such an good LCD or just stuck in one of those crappy shiny Laptop screen that are unusable outside remains to be seen.
Unlikely, Dvorak is never going to go mainstream, to much QWERTY in the wild. But what I don't understand is why all mainstream keyboards still have the keys offset in that non-symmetrical typewriter-way instead of having a regular matrix layout, that should be easily fixable and would have some instant improvements without to much relearning.
Water does not "try" to drown you, in fact if you take your own air, it can be fun.
And when you run out of air you have to return back to where you came from... thats not quite good enough when you want to have a self sustaining outer space colony, as returning back to earth and refueling resources just isn't an option when its a 5 light year trip.
The earth ecosystem doesn't work so well for it by random chance, but because we are an evolved part of it. Chances of finding a compatible one are pretty slim.
Humans have evolved over quite a long while to fit onto this rock and its environment, the chance that you will find a better one are pretty much zero.
Space is for most part just empty room that will try to kill you and non-earth planets aren't really much better.
Most PDF manuals I get are very well bookmarked and emenantly searchable....
Search is a different thing then browsing, as with search you have to know exactly what you are looking for. With a book you can grab it, flip through the pages and just look at random stuff. With a PDF on a computer that is already uncomfortably slow as the rendering often can't keep up with quick page flipping. When you take a ePaper device its even worse, as those tend to take a solid second to flip a single page, so instead of taking a few seconds to flip through a 300 page book, it takes you 5 minutes to do the same task with the glorious new technology. Then there is of course the matter of screen space, a few books on the desk don't waste screen space, a PDF viewer on the other side does. Having multiple ePaper devices would of course fix this issue, but those are still to expensive to have multiple of them.
Now that isn't to say electronic reading is inferior, I prefer my OLPC to a regular book when it comes to linear text. As having a flat display instead of a curly paperback makes things more comfortable, but when it comes to quick page flipping paper just is a few orders of magnitudes faster and more comfortable then a PDF. Technology however might fix that in a few years.
If eBook readers would be more solid and common place with everybody owning them and the whole copyright trouble and DRM issues with eBooks would be solved I could see some point in getting rid of paper books, but doing such a thing today sounds like madness. One just as to look at the numbers: They replace 20.000 books with 18(!) eBook readers...
It kind of depends on what you want to show. In Germany boobs are not a problem and you see plenty of that stuff on regular television, softcore isn't much of a problem either. The whole HotCoffee thing was a total non-issue for the rating organization, as games with such content only get an 'age 16' rating here and GTA:SA already had that.
But when it comes to hardcore porn its quite a different story, as that stuff is regulated by law and underlies much of the same restrictions as indexed games or movies (i.e. can't be advertised, sold in places where people below age 18 have access, etc.). So while violent stuff has the chance to get an less restrictive 'age 18' rating, hardcore pornography is pretty much indexed by default and thus you don't see it right next to violent movies in the next shopping mall.
By the way that was a sloppy application coding problem
Bullshit. It was crappy file system design and nothing more. A file system that is incapable of storing files properly and randomly deletes stuff on crash is just plain broken, especially when there exist plenty of other file systems around that don't suffer from that brain damaged behavior. Its a clear example of optimizing gone wrong, as the goal shouldn't be to produce a file system that squeezes a few milisec of in some theoretical benchmark, but one that works in the real world.
But hey, common sense seems to be something to abstract and weird for some people...
why wouldn't they be less expensive than fossil fuels?
Renewability. Fossil fuels are a finite resource, they are only cheap as long as you have plenty of them left, once you run out of them, you have a big problem at hand. So it might be a good idea to switch to a renewable energie source before that happens.
Software that automatically changes menus or frequently-used options around as a "favor" to the user was bad UI practice five years ago in Windows and Office, and it's bad UI practice today in Firefox.
The Awesomebar is quite a different thing then Office menus. Office changes stuff around that used to be static and turns finding a menu entry into a hide&seek game. The Awesomebar one the other side just keeps track of your history and lets you search it. Sure, it moves things around to, but thats because searching the history naturally will give different results when the history changes. Nothing wrong with that. If you want it static use good old bookmarks and assign keywords to them, the Awesomebar doesn't stop you from using these features.
There are more people on the planet then IPv4 addresses. So no matter what kind of reorganization and cleanup you will do, we will run out of IPv4 new addresses really soon. The trouble of course is that this simply means IPv4 addresses will get more expensive and people will fudge around with even more NAT, not that ISPs will switch to IPv6. After all why replace a valuable resource with a free one, there is nothing to gain for the ISPs with IPv6 at the moment.
Strangely enough, I am still convinced that the evidence behind the causes and effects of global warming is much less than watertight.
They might be imperfect, but when exactly was the last time that large scale pollution ending up being a good thing? Most of the time such stuff has nasty consequences in the long run, so cutting exhaust down doesn't seem like such a bad idea, even if the exact consequences might not be known. On top of that, oil will run out, so no matter if global warming is real or not, we have to change to alternative energy sources anyway, so why not do it sooner and leave some oil for future generation, maybe they'll have better use for it then just burning it.
That depends on the language. In C goto is used a lot as a simple function-scope exception mechanism, as the language doesn't have real exceptions and doesn't support RAII there really isn't a better way then to use goto to handle cleanup after an error. Nested if's would of course also do, but lead to a lot of code duplication.
In C++ on the other side you have exceptions and RAII und thus no longer need the goto-trick.
Of course goto can be abused as a replacement for 'for' and 'while' loops as done in early BASIC dialects, but I haven't seen such use of goto in a long long while. Even inexperienced programmers no longer code stuff like that, as their first language no longer is BASIC.
Because nobody would buy a piece of software that requires a reboot just to start it, the days of DOS and custom bootdisks are luckily long gone and nobody with a sane mind would want them back.
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I can cite three sources after just a few minutes of research which seem to indicate anywhere from a 25% to 65% chance of severe defects in father/daughter-brother/sister offspring.
So in other words a 35%-75% chance of having a normal baby, thats more then good enough for me, especially since we have the tech to screen for defects pre-birth. But if you look at the law (64,65), thats not even what is outlawed, there is no mention of making babies, what is outlawed is having sex, even if its the oral or anal or two brothers or two sisters that have no chance of ever making a baby.
Brother and Sister is information readily available to everyone without violating anyone's privacy.
So is down syndrome, dwarfism and a ton of other gene defects, after all if a defect wouldn't have obvious consequences it wouldn't be that bad a defect to begin with. Should we stop all those people from having children too? Especially since the chance of defect in the children might be a good bit higher then with incest.
In Germany it is especially weird, doing embryo screening to check for defects is actually outlawed and incest outlawed as well. So you have one law passively encouraging defects and another trying to prevent them. And of course there is still the issue with the law not outlawing the baby making, but the sex, which today just seems out of date, as making babies without is doable just as having sex without risk of a baby is doable.
The kind of freedom you support, is not freedom at all.
You seem to have a very weird definition of "freedom", the Nazi Germany kind of it seems, where the state can decide who shall and shall not mate with each other and who shall get eradicated from the gene pool.
To put it another way, do you support two people having children if there is a 90-100% chance of having a "flipper" baby?
Yes, because its their choice to make, not mine. We don't disallow people with gene defects having children either and those can have an even higher chance of the children having the same defect. On top of that its not even the 'having children' part that its outlawed, its only the 'having sex' part, so making babies without sex (not really a problem with todays tech) would actually be ok with the law.
This really is just a mix of bigotry and eugenics at work and its quite disgusting that this is enforced by the law.
Consider that today, you can be gay and a programmer, and nobody cares except the bigots.
And yet when you have consenting sex with your sister you will still get thrown into jail for up to two years, as it still seems accepted to punish people for whom they chose as partner. I would prefer it when they would clean up the other unjust laws that are still left, instead of just apologizing for those that already got fixed.
They still draw power constantly to display an image.
Sure, but PixelQi stuff is quite conservative on the power, a OLPC last around 12 hours if you disable WiFi and with a better battery that could likely be extended a good bit, which should be enough for a book or two. In addition display speed isn't just needed for video, its also needed for browsing books. The 1sec refresh time works well enough if you just read linearly, but if you want to quickly flip a few pages forward or backward it totally kills the experience.
I have that netbook (the red one in the video), and it doesn't even approach the readibility in sunlight of a Sony Reader I borrowed.
Sure about that? I don't think PixelQi screens have hit the market yet.
If I'm lying on the couch using my netbook, once the sun moves round I have to close the curtains.
That doesn't sound like a PixelQi screen. I have an OLPC which uses a earlier version of the PixelQi technology and that one gets better the more sunlight you have, not worse (you lose color in direct sunlight, but triple your resolution). The only disadvantage the OLPC screen has is that it isn't white like normal paper, but more greyish like recycling paper.
Also, black and white (maybe with 2 greys) is fine for most of what I do
Its not good enough for the Internet and when I have the choice between carring an eBook and a Laptop or just a LCD based eBook, i'd take the LCD based eBook any day.
Ever seen a PixelQi screen? Sounds like you haven't, but hey, that can be helped: Pixel Qi vs Kindle vs Toshiba R600 vs regular LCD tablet.
Cool, but e-ink is what makes e-readers so great,
It also makes them slow, expensive, black&white-only and unusable for the Internet or video. A good LCD screen, such as the ones from PixelQi, can give you something very close to the resolution and sunlight readability of ePaper while also giving you color and video and that at a low cost. Now of course if they actually use such an good LCD or just stuck in one of those crappy shiny Laptop screen that are unusable outside remains to be seen.
Unlikely, Dvorak is never going to go mainstream, to much QWERTY in the wild. But what I don't understand is why all mainstream keyboards still have the keys offset in that non-symmetrical typewriter-way instead of having a regular matrix layout, that should be easily fixable and would have some instant improvements without to much relearning.
Water does not "try" to drown you, in fact if you take your own air, it can be fun.
And when you run out of air you have to return back to where you came from... thats not quite good enough when you want to have a self sustaining outer space colony, as returning back to earth and refueling resources just isn't an option when its a 5 light year trip.
The earth ecosystem doesn't work so well for it by random chance, but because we are an evolved part of it. Chances of finding a compatible one are pretty slim.
Humans have evolved over quite a long while to fit onto this rock and its environment, the chance that you will find a better one are pretty much zero.
Space is for most part just empty room that will try to kill you and non-earth planets aren't really much better.
Most PDF manuals I get are very well bookmarked and emenantly searchable....
Search is a different thing then browsing, as with search you have to know exactly what you are looking for. With a book you can grab it, flip through the pages and just look at random stuff. With a PDF on a computer that is already uncomfortably slow as the rendering often can't keep up with quick page flipping. When you take a ePaper device its even worse, as those tend to take a solid second to flip a single page, so instead of taking a few seconds to flip through a 300 page book, it takes you 5 minutes to do the same task with the glorious new technology. Then there is of course the matter of screen space, a few books on the desk don't waste screen space, a PDF viewer on the other side does. Having multiple ePaper devices would of course fix this issue, but those are still to expensive to have multiple of them.
Now that isn't to say electronic reading is inferior, I prefer my OLPC to a regular book when it comes to linear text. As having a flat display instead of a curly paperback makes things more comfortable, but when it comes to quick page flipping paper just is a few orders of magnitudes faster and more comfortable then a PDF. Technology however might fix that in a few years.
If eBook readers would be more solid and common place with everybody owning them and the whole copyright trouble and DRM issues with eBooks would be solved I could see some point in getting rid of paper books, but doing such a thing today sounds like madness. One just as to look at the numbers: They replace 20.000 books with 18(!) eBook readers...
It kind of depends on what you want to show. In Germany boobs are not a problem and you see plenty of that stuff on regular television, softcore isn't much of a problem either. The whole HotCoffee thing was a total non-issue for the rating organization, as games with such content only get an 'age 16' rating here and GTA:SA already had that.
But when it comes to hardcore porn its quite a different story, as that stuff is regulated by law and underlies much of the same restrictions as indexed games or movies (i.e. can't be advertised, sold in places where people below age 18 have access, etc.). So while violent stuff has the chance to get an less restrictive 'age 18' rating, hardcore pornography is pretty much indexed by default and thus you don't see it right next to violent movies in the next shopping mall.
By the way that was a sloppy application coding problem
Bullshit. It was crappy file system design and nothing more. A file system that is incapable of storing files properly and randomly deletes stuff on crash is just plain broken, especially when there exist plenty of other file systems around that don't suffer from that brain damaged behavior. Its a clear example of optimizing gone wrong, as the goal shouldn't be to produce a file system that squeezes a few milisec of in some theoretical benchmark, but one that works in the real world.
But hey, common sense seems to be something to abstract and weird for some people...
Which is why they plan to have their servers spread all over the globe, instead having them all in a single central location.
why wouldn't they be less expensive than fossil fuels?
Renewability. Fossil fuels are a finite resource, they are only cheap as long as you have plenty of them left, once you run out of them, you have a big problem at hand. So it might be a good idea to switch to a renewable energie source before that happens.
Software that automatically changes menus or frequently-used options around as a "favor" to the user was bad UI practice five years ago in Windows and Office, and it's bad UI practice today in Firefox.
The Awesomebar is quite a different thing then Office menus. Office changes stuff around that used to be static and turns finding a menu entry into a hide&seek game. The Awesomebar one the other side just keeps track of your history and lets you search it. Sure, it moves things around to, but thats because searching the history naturally will give different results when the history changes. Nothing wrong with that. If you want it static use good old bookmarks and assign keywords to them, the Awesomebar doesn't stop you from using these features.
I honestly don't even think IPv6 is needed.
There are more people on the planet then IPv4 addresses. So no matter what kind of reorganization and cleanup you will do, we will run out of IPv4 new addresses really soon. The trouble of course is that this simply means IPv4 addresses will get more expensive and people will fudge around with even more NAT, not that ISPs will switch to IPv6. After all why replace a valuable resource with a free one, there is nothing to gain for the ISPs with IPv6 at the moment.
Strangely enough, I am still convinced that the evidence behind the causes and effects of global warming is much less than watertight.
They might be imperfect, but when exactly was the last time that large scale pollution ending up being a good thing? Most of the time such stuff has nasty consequences in the long run, so cutting exhaust down doesn't seem like such a bad idea, even if the exact consequences might not be known. On top of that, oil will run out, so no matter if global warming is real or not, we have to change to alternative energy sources anyway, so why not do it sooner and leave some oil for future generation, maybe they'll have better use for it then just burning it.
That depends on the language. In C goto is used a lot as a simple function-scope exception mechanism, as the language doesn't have real exceptions and doesn't support RAII there really isn't a better way then to use goto to handle cleanup after an error. Nested if's would of course also do, but lead to a lot of code duplication.
In C++ on the other side you have exceptions and RAII und thus no longer need the goto-trick.
Of course goto can be abused as a replacement for 'for' and 'while' loops as done in early BASIC dialects, but I haven't seen such use of goto in a long long while. Even inexperienced programmers no longer code stuff like that, as their first language no longer is BASIC.
Because nobody would buy a piece of software that requires a reboot just to start it, the days of DOS and custom bootdisks are luckily long gone and nobody with a sane mind would want them back.
Isn't the %eth0 nonsense only needed for link-local addresses (fe80::) and disappears when you start using a globally scoped address?
Not a movie, but the TV series 4400 goes into a pretty similar direction, except they have a bunch of time traveling humans instead of aliens.