You can still get some work done without access to the central server, whether it's down or your WiFi connection is down or your VPN is down.
Same is true for subversion. In both cases you can develop and test your code and review your changes against what was last seen original copy. All the rest (preparing commits early so you can push them faster when connectivity is restored) is just a detail.
Github changes git into centralized subversion-like system, just with a lot better branching/merging mechanism (which is a HUGE difference, don't get me wrong) - but if it is down, your cooperation workflow is going to suffer badly.
If you can create AR device with better quality than dedicated, no-see-through VR, then just slap black box behind the AR googles and you have created better VR. So from very definition, AR is at most as good as VR and in real life (object detection, depth detection, variable lighting etc) is expected to be at least a bit worse.
This is why when I see concept demos which are way ahead of current Oculus/etc offerings and nobody mentions taking over VR device space, but instead touts AR gimmics, I just don't believe it.
If you have killer retina projector, put it into VR and start selling. Then spend another few years on getting all extra AR complexities solved.
Except it is not a solar radiation you need protecting against (Sun is very far), but Jupiter radiation. Unfortunately despite magnetosphere, Ganymede gets around 8 rem of radiation per day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_the_outer_Solar_System#Ganymede), which is bit too much for life as we know it. Fortunately, it is not going to be an issue 300km below the surface - but at that depth, you don't need magnetosphere anyway.
I think that biggest problem for life there would be availability of energy. 300km of crust is probably shielding external energy too well, so internal heat would be probably only viable source of that. Might be not enough to sustain life (or even more, to produce it randomly)
From wiki about the planet itself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3... "This planet has minimum mass nearly 10 times that of Jupiter. Because inclination is not known, its true mass is unknown."
They should make same experiment with helping man versus woman. I'm quite sure that male participants would rescue more females than males. I wonder how it would other way - there is a good chance that female test subjects would also rescue females more often. If this is the case, we would have a perfect proof for gender discrimination and should invest into "leave women to burn" sensitivity trainings for everybody. With further studies, they would determine than attractive females are more often rescued then ugly ones, by both sexes. We can then do obligatory anti-discrimination 102 course, "Let pretty ones burn to death". We could practice by burning barbie dolls, as they are promoting unhealthy body proportions. Which would be strange, because it would mean that they are pretty, which they should not be. So, we should be burning dolls with more realistic body build. But should they be white? If they are white, we will get sued for saying that only white ones are pretty. If they are black... HR sensitivity training based around burning black dolls... not good. We want WHITE pretty girls to die, not black pretty girls. Marshmallows ! Maybe this will go into subconcious part of the mind - if you burn enough white marshmallows, it will come natural to you later with real fire.
Now, when I think about our last team building event, there was almost unlimited supply of marshmallows next to the bonfire... can it be already happening?
And how security flaws in java affect standalone game installed on your machine and run with your user permissions? Do you think that having it written in C# or C++ would protect your PC better against malicious _Minecraft_ code or mods?
Adn this will help exactly how versus his private details being available on unsecured webpage? Is process of withdrawing money somehow securing this data? We dont' know details, these things can stay there forever, even if he closes the account/stops dealing with them. Most companies/banks are not allowed to remove traces of anything happening for at least 5+ years.
42 artificial intelligences = 42 instances of same AI. It is opposite of having a car race where 42 people would drive same kind of car to see who is the best. It is a car race, where 42 clones of same person drive different cars starting in different race tracks under different weather conditions.
"Ninety per cent of pregnant French women use homeopathy. Astrology is a useful diagnostic tool enabling us to see strengths and weaknesses via the birth chart."
At first, I have failed to see the common ground between homeopathy and astrology - these two sentences sounded completely unrelated. But they are actually related - it says "90% of French women are gullible enough to fall for homeopathy. This means that most of them are stupid enough to also believe astrology crap, so market is ripe"
This is not that obvious. If hypernova expode 5 LY away from us and points gamma ray burst at us, we boil away. If 'normal' nova expodes 10000LY away from us, then we we hardly notice that.
Between nova, supernova and hypernova and 5, 600 and 10000LY there is a lot of difference. I was hoping for some more exact data about Betelgeuse in particular...
Seems to depend on type of nova: http://news.nationalgeographic... Here, they claim 6500 light years - but it might be for hypernova rather than supernova.
I was under impression that gamma bursts are a lot more interesting things when supernova expodes. What are the chances of it hitting Earth (they are focused, not omnidirectional ?) and how bad it would be for supernova so close to us?
Like they did for salt study? After 20 years and taking another 20 years to get that into public knowledge? This is same as with open source. Fact that anybody can find bugs in open source program doesn't mean it doesn't have bugs.
Sometimes it is 'later' enough to influence entire generation of people in doing wrong or useless things. For example salt in food http://www.scientificamerican.... One wrong study done in 70ties and entire generation of people were scared from using salt. Bluff was called 20 years later but it took _another_ 20 years to officially admit 70ties findings were completely wrong - and I suppose another 20 years are needed before 'salt if white death' people will finally die out. I think similar thing (other direction) happened with tabacco.
Climate is complicated enough that it is not really an 'objective reality'. Given all the possibilities of handpicking data points and applying arbitrary correction factors, you can manipulate data in subtle ways, rather than blatantly fake it. And as it is complicated enough that normal people cannot really doublecheck data, we are left to believe the 'consensus'.
I had same social issues - having to learn how people emotions work by reasoning and hard trial and error. Spending concious effort on 'how I would feel about what I'm saying if I'm on the other side' game with each sentence I'm speaking. Learning to play that game in first place after observing people are showing unexplained emotional distress after something I said. Said that, I don't think it is autism or asperger. It IS part of asperger, but I think you need multiple other issues to be classified so - repetitive behaviours, _lack of interest in fiction_, atypical speech patterns, motoric issues, sleep issues etc.
As somebody already mentioned in comments, spectrum goes like that asshole->asperger->autism with assholes too often diagnosed or self-diagnosed to be further down the spectrum, because either them or their peers do not care.
Fortunately, I was growing up in times and country where people who were not following strict ethical code of politically correct expectations were not medicated or sent for counseling. Or being suspended on terrorist charges.
I think that everybody who wants to play with bitcoins should first play a year or two of Eve Online. This can teach a lot about dangers of unregulated virtual currency at fraction of cost. From that point on you will approach all financial transactions with question "HOW they want to scam me?" rather than "Is there a chance it might be not as good as they promise? Naaah, somebody would say something if it is a scam."
Or an episode, where she sleeps with journalist to get better review for her application... after all, this is not something which should be ridiculed or condemned, right?
From the chart they have presented: - Swift is less popular on github that Emacs Lisp and Lua and considerably less popular than VimL - Swift is about same popular on stack overflow as Assembly, ColdFusion, Dephi and Powershell
Too bad they don't provide raw numbers. Currently Swift is ranked at '75' while Javascript is ranked as '100'. What it really means that there are 1,161,994 repositories marked as javascript, and 17,413 repositories maked as Swift. Pascal, which has '50' in that axis has 4348 projects.
Minecraft is written in java. How many usable DirectX bindings do you know for java? Of course, they can as well rewrite Minecraft from the scratch in C++ or C# and port it to DirectX at same time. And maybe change the name. And gameplay. And developer team. And make it runnable only on Windows. At this point, discussion stops to be technical and starts to be philosophical - if they rewrite every single part of it, is it still same game?
Not kill. Try to reduce population in 100 year horizon. Stop society which is dependent on population growth to maintain itself.
People are saying 'with such and such technologies and reducing useless consumption, Earth can sustain n (10,15,50) billions of people'. Sure. But what for? I don't think that we should test limits of Earth. There is no reason to have 10 billion people, even if we can. We should ask ourselfs, what is the minimal amount of population which gives enough stability, protection from plagues and other disasters and can produce enough science output to go forward to next stage evolution/colonization/whatever.
I think that 1-2 billions of people on well balanced world can produce a lot more science output than 10 billions fully driven by requirements of sustenance.
We need to colonize universe - we cannot keep all eggs in single basket. Direct colonization by sending billions of people on starships is just not going to happen - energy costs are too high. For me, hard AI, mind upload and heavy bioengineering (growing modified organizms and bodies tailored for target environment) is only remotely possible way of achieving it (2 of these are probably enough). But to achieve that, you need a lot of research and very stable base for hundreds of years. It will NOT solve population problem, it will not solve resource issue. Earth as a civiliasation center is going to die. I think that we should aim for having it running for tens of thousands of years with smaller population (but big enough to expand scientifically), rather than burning out in few hundred years with all the efforts in meantime spent on maintaing that population.
Obviously, realist in me knows that it will never happen. It would require world-wide totalitarian government with no revolution of 'populists' and if such government appears, it will spend effort in preserving and strengthening itself rather than any external goals.
10 bilions is number which they are forecasting assuming current mode of development/civilisation - which is scenario a). Main limiting factor of population growth here is education/freedom of women in developed world. It doesn't matter if birth control is working - it is important if women are allowed to use it and if they actually care. If your only role in life is childbearing, you might not even consider that.
My stab at 15 billions (which is of course random number, just want to make it bigger than 10 billion) is that if we go into fully green/sustainable model at reduced consumption, sacrificing development/science and giving priority to 'life' and humanity, is that IMHO, we will degrade culture wise in these aspects. Focus will move to critical things - farming, _basic_ healthcare, environment protection, while sacrificing things like people mobility, global communication, freedom, etc. I expect that closed, smaller communities will then start perceiving role and rights of women bit differently. We will go from 35-year old single ladies with birth-control jumping parties in big cities back to big Mormon-like families, with women being responsible for the house and child bearing. At the same time, reasonable basic healthcare and hugely improved farming will allow population growth higher than it was possible back in earlier ages.
Life survived. Some of it. I have no doubt that SOME life will survive on Earth, it might be just not primates, including us. As for innovation - yes, if change is rapid enough and we got enough 'transhumanist' movement it is possible. But way it looks like now, resources and innovation will be rather put into feeding as many people as possible, while desperately trying to preserve status quo. Add few uprisings due to failing social security, fanatical religion takeovers here and there (not neccesarily muslim, other ones are also dangerous if things will start to look dim) and there will be no enough drive/resources/skill to really innovate on needed solutions.
There seem to be two prevailing concepts how to progress further: a) ignore environment and try to use as much resources as possible, get to 10 billion people and waste everything around to provide luxury for 5% and survivable poverty to 95% rest till we run out of everything b) focus on environment, try to reduce resource usage as possible, get to 15 billion people and waste everything around slowly to provide passable live for 10% and survivable poverty to rest 90% till we run out of everything in bit longer time
I think that both of these solutions will ultimately lead to collapse of civilization, without any chance of recovering in future (due to lack of easily accessible, low-tech, high-energy fuels to boostrap technology again) I think that we should rather aim more to c) reduce population to 1-2 billion, focus on high energy solutions like fission 4/5th gen, fusion etc, while keeping environment in line due to reduced population usage, try to provide luxury to 50% and passable live to other 50% and focus on advanced, distruptive research - hard AI, body replacement, mind uploads etc.
Then, in few hundred years we can really laugh in face of climate disasters, big asteroids and other extinction levels; but this is pure s-f unfortunately, because it goes against all current tenets of society (social security based on piramid generation scheme, religion as driving force for majority of population, elections/government responsible for keeping people content till next election, majority of clueless people driven by fears and fuds about things like GMO and vaccination not going to ever accept more radical solutions to bio engineering). Plus, there is no guarantee that any of these things is really possible/sustainable due to physic limitations. And if it is not, we will die out anyway, just bit later than scenario b.
Regarding violent death - we are in a lot better shape than in previous years. Amount of people dying in wars and conflicts is getting smaller and smaller. It is just that our information coverage of that is getting better and better.
These days, environmental issues (be it global warming, overfishing, pollution, sweet water depletion, pick your one) seem to be a lot more dangerous to our civilization than wars. 50 years ago, there was a chance that huge mutual nuclear war will wipe humanity off the planet. This was what doomdays clock is about. Doomsday clock doesn't care if you have local war with million casualties. Million deaths yearly due to wars or eating McDonald food is not going to make any difference to humanity as whole. Making Earth Venus-like does, even if it happens in 400 years, but cannot be prevented.
Slashdot Mirror
You can still get some work done without access to the central server, whether it's down or your WiFi connection is down or your VPN is down.
Same is true for subversion. In both cases you can develop and test your code and review your changes against what was last seen original copy. All the rest (preparing commits early so you can push them faster when connectivity is restored) is just a detail.
Github changes git into centralized subversion-like system, just with a lot better branching/merging mechanism (which is a HUGE difference, don't get me wrong) - but if it is down, your cooperation workflow is going to suffer badly.
If you can create AR device with better quality than dedicated, no-see-through VR, then just slap black box behind the AR googles and you have created better VR. So from very definition, AR is at most as good as VR and in real life (object detection, depth detection, variable lighting etc) is expected to be at least a bit worse.
This is why when I see concept demos which are way ahead of current Oculus/etc offerings and nobody mentions taking over VR device space, but instead touts AR gimmics, I just don't believe it.
If you have killer retina projector, put it into VR and start selling. Then spend another few years on getting all extra AR complexities solved.
Except it is not a solar radiation you need protecting against (Sun is very far), but Jupiter radiation. Unfortunately despite magnetosphere, Ganymede gets around 8 rem of radiation per day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_the_outer_Solar_System#Ganymede), which is bit too much for life as we know it. Fortunately, it is not going to be an issue 300km below the surface - but at that depth, you don't need magnetosphere anyway.
I think that biggest problem for life there would be availability of energy. 300km of crust is probably shielding external energy too well, so internal heat would be probably only viable source of that. Might be not enough to sustain life (or even more, to produce it randomly)
From wiki about the planet itself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3...
"This planet has minimum mass nearly 10 times that of Jupiter. Because inclination is not known, its true mass is unknown."
Maybe we can make it go up to 13? ;)
They should make same experiment with helping man versus woman. I'm quite sure that male participants would rescue more females than males. I wonder how it would other way - there is a good chance that female test subjects would also rescue females more often.
If this is the case, we would have a perfect proof for gender discrimination and should invest into "leave women to burn" sensitivity trainings for everybody.
With further studies, they would determine than attractive females are more often rescued then ugly ones, by both sexes. We can then do obligatory anti-discrimination 102 course, "Let pretty ones burn to death". We could practice by burning barbie dolls, as they are promoting unhealthy body proportions. Which would be strange, because it would mean that they are pretty, which they should not be. So, we should be burning dolls with more realistic body build. But should they be white? If they are white, we will get sued for saying that only white ones are pretty. If they are black... HR sensitivity training based around burning black dolls... not good. We want WHITE pretty girls to die, not black pretty girls.
Marshmallows ! Maybe this will go into subconcious part of the mind - if you burn enough white marshmallows, it will come natural to you later with real fire.
Now, when I think about our last team building event, there was almost unlimited supply of marshmallows next to the bonfire... can it be already happening?
And how security flaws in java affect standalone game installed on your machine and run with your user permissions? Do you think that having it written in C# or C++ would protect your PC better against malicious _Minecraft_ code or mods?
Adn this will help exactly how versus his private details being available on unsecured webpage? Is process of withdrawing money somehow securing this data? We dont' know details, these things can stay there forever, even if he closes the account/stops dealing with them. Most companies/banks are not allowed to remove traces of anything happening for at least 5+ years.
42 artificial intelligences = 42 instances of same AI.
It is opposite of having a car race where 42 people would drive same kind of car to see who is the best. It is a car race, where 42 clones of same person drive different cars starting in different race tracks under different weather conditions.
Well, amount of pregnant women is big enough to be representative. Unless there is a selection bias which links pregnacy to stupidity/gullability...
"Ninety per cent of pregnant French women use homeopathy. Astrology is a useful diagnostic tool enabling us to see strengths and weaknesses via the birth chart."
At first, I have failed to see the common ground between homeopathy and astrology - these two sentences sounded completely unrelated. But they are actually related - it says
"90% of French women are gullible enough to fall for homeopathy. This means that most of them are stupid enough to also believe astrology crap, so market is ripe"
This is not that obvious.
If hypernova expode 5 LY away from us and points gamma ray burst at us, we boil away.
If 'normal' nova expodes 10000LY away from us, then we we hardly notice that.
Between nova, supernova and hypernova and 5, 600 and 10000LY there is a lot of difference. I was hoping for some more exact data about Betelgeuse in particular...
Seems to depend on type of nova:
http://news.nationalgeographic...
Here, they claim 6500 light years - but it might be for hypernova rather than supernova.
I was under impression that gamma bursts are a lot more interesting things when supernova expodes. What are the chances of it hitting Earth (they are focused, not omnidirectional ?) and how bad it would be for supernova so close to us?
Like they did for salt study? After 20 years and taking another 20 years to get that into public knowledge?
This is same as with open source. Fact that anybody can find bugs in open source program doesn't mean it doesn't have bugs.
Sometimes it is 'later' enough to influence entire generation of people in doing wrong or useless things. For example salt in food
http://www.scientificamerican....
One wrong study done in 70ties and entire generation of people were scared from using salt. Bluff was called 20 years later but it took _another_ 20 years to officially admit 70ties findings were completely wrong - and I suppose another 20 years are needed before 'salt if white death' people will finally die out.
I think similar thing (other direction) happened with tabacco.
Climate is complicated enough that it is not really an 'objective reality'. Given all the possibilities of handpicking data points and applying arbitrary correction factors, you can manipulate data in subtle ways, rather than blatantly fake it. And as it is complicated enough that normal people cannot really doublecheck data, we are left to believe the 'consensus'.
I had same social issues - having to learn how people emotions work by reasoning and hard trial and error. Spending concious effort on 'how I would feel about what I'm saying if I'm on the other side' game with each sentence I'm speaking. Learning to play that game in first place after observing people are showing unexplained emotional distress after something I said.
Said that, I don't think it is autism or asperger. It IS part of asperger, but I think you need multiple other issues to be classified so - repetitive behaviours, _lack of interest in fiction_, atypical speech patterns, motoric issues, sleep issues etc.
As somebody already mentioned in comments, spectrum goes like that
asshole->asperger->autism
with assholes too often diagnosed or self-diagnosed to be further down the spectrum, because either them or their peers do not care.
Fortunately, I was growing up in times and country where people who were not following strict ethical code of politically correct expectations were not medicated or sent for counseling. Or being suspended on terrorist charges.
I think that everybody who wants to play with bitcoins should first play a year or two of Eve Online. This can teach a lot about dangers of unregulated virtual currency at fraction of cost. From that point on you will approach all financial transactions with question "HOW they want to scam me?" rather than "Is there a chance it might be not as good as they promise? Naaah, somebody would say something if it is a scam."
Or an episode, where she sleeps with journalist to get better review for her application... after all, this is not something which should be ridiculed or condemned, right?
From the chart they have presented:
- Swift is less popular on github that Emacs Lisp and Lua and considerably less popular than VimL
- Swift is about same popular on stack overflow as Assembly, ColdFusion, Dephi and Powershell
Too bad they don't provide raw numbers. Currently Swift is ranked at '75' while Javascript is ranked as '100'. What it really means that there are 1,161,994 repositories marked as javascript, and 17,413 repositories maked as Swift. Pascal, which has '50' in that axis has 4348 projects.
Unfortunately, that site already got nvidiadotted....
Minecraft is written in java. How many usable DirectX bindings do you know for java?
Of course, they can as well rewrite Minecraft from the scratch in C++ or C# and port it to DirectX at same time. And maybe change the name. And gameplay. And developer team. And make it runnable only on Windows.
At this point, discussion stops to be technical and starts to be philosophical - if they rewrite every single part of it, is it still same game?
Not kill. Try to reduce population in 100 year horizon. Stop society which is dependent on population growth to maintain itself.
People are saying 'with such and such technologies and reducing useless consumption, Earth can sustain n (10,15,50) billions of people'. Sure. But what for? I don't think that we should test limits of Earth. There is no reason to have 10 billion people, even if we can. We should ask ourselfs, what is the minimal amount of population which gives enough stability, protection from plagues and other disasters and can produce enough science output to go forward to next stage evolution/colonization/whatever.
I think that 1-2 billions of people on well balanced world can produce a lot more science output than 10 billions fully driven by requirements of sustenance.
We need to colonize universe - we cannot keep all eggs in single basket. Direct colonization by sending billions of people on starships is just not going to happen - energy costs are too high. For me, hard AI, mind upload and heavy bioengineering (growing modified organizms and bodies tailored for target environment) is only remotely possible way of achieving it (2 of these are probably enough). But to achieve that, you need a lot of research and very stable base for hundreds of years. It will NOT solve population problem, it will not solve resource issue. Earth as a civiliasation center is going to die. I think that we should aim for having it running for tens of thousands of years with smaller population (but big enough to expand scientifically), rather than burning out in few hundred years with all the efforts in meantime spent on maintaing that population.
Obviously, realist in me knows that it will never happen. It would require world-wide totalitarian government with no revolution of 'populists' and if such government appears, it will spend effort in preserving and strengthening itself rather than any external goals.
10 bilions is number which they are forecasting assuming current mode of development/civilisation - which is scenario a). Main limiting factor of population growth here is education/freedom of women in developed world. It doesn't matter if birth control is working - it is important if women are allowed to use it and if they actually care. If your only role in life is childbearing, you might not even consider that.
My stab at 15 billions (which is of course random number, just want to make it bigger than 10 billion) is that if we go into fully green/sustainable model at reduced consumption, sacrificing development/science and giving priority to 'life' and humanity, is that IMHO, we will degrade culture wise in these aspects. Focus will move to critical things - farming, _basic_ healthcare, environment protection, while sacrificing things like people mobility, global communication, freedom, etc. I expect that closed, smaller communities will then start perceiving role and rights of women bit differently. We will go from 35-year old single ladies with birth-control jumping parties in big cities back to big Mormon-like families, with women being responsible for the house and child bearing. At the same time, reasonable basic healthcare and hugely improved farming will allow population growth higher than it was possible back in earlier ages.
Life survived. Some of it. I have no doubt that SOME life will survive on Earth, it might be just not primates, including us.
As for innovation - yes, if change is rapid enough and we got enough 'transhumanist' movement it is possible. But way it looks like now, resources and innovation will be rather put into feeding as many people as possible, while desperately trying to preserve status quo. Add few uprisings due to failing social security, fanatical religion takeovers here and there (not neccesarily muslim, other ones are also dangerous if things will start to look dim) and there will be no enough drive/resources/skill to really innovate on needed solutions.
There seem to be two prevailing concepts how to progress further:
a) ignore environment and try to use as much resources as possible, get to 10 billion people and waste everything around to provide luxury for 5% and survivable poverty to 95% rest till we run out of everything
b) focus on environment, try to reduce resource usage as possible, get to 15 billion people and waste everything around slowly to provide passable live for 10% and survivable poverty to rest 90% till we run out of everything in bit longer time
I think that both of these solutions will ultimately lead to collapse of civilization, without any chance of recovering in future (due to lack of easily accessible, low-tech, high-energy fuels to boostrap technology again)
I think that we should rather aim more to
c) reduce population to 1-2 billion, focus on high energy solutions like fission 4/5th gen, fusion etc, while keeping environment in line due to reduced population usage, try to provide luxury to 50% and passable live to other 50% and focus on advanced, distruptive research - hard AI, body replacement, mind uploads etc.
Then, in few hundred years we can really laugh in face of climate disasters, big asteroids and other extinction levels; but this is pure s-f unfortunately, because it goes against all current tenets of society (social security based on piramid generation scheme, religion as driving force for majority of population, elections/government responsible for keeping people content till next election, majority of clueless people driven by fears and fuds about things like GMO and vaccination not going to ever accept more radical solutions to bio engineering). Plus, there is no guarantee that any of these things is really possible/sustainable due to physic limitations. And if it is not, we will die out anyway, just bit later than scenario b.
Regarding violent death - we are in a lot better shape than in previous years. Amount of people dying in wars and conflicts is getting smaller and smaller. It is just that our information coverage of that is getting better and better.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
These days, environmental issues (be it global warming, overfishing, pollution, sweet water depletion, pick your one) seem to be a lot more dangerous to our civilization than wars. 50 years ago, there was a chance that huge mutual nuclear war will wipe humanity off the planet. This was what doomdays clock is about. Doomsday clock doesn't care if you have local war with million casualties. Million deaths yearly due to wars or eating McDonald food is not going to make any difference to humanity as whole. Making Earth Venus-like does, even if it happens in 400 years, but cannot be prevented.