The finger of God. However you have a good point. Matter spontaneously organises itself in order to reach maximum entropy in minimum time, Brian Cox has done an excellent documentary series about this stuff. At first glance life ( and tornadoes ) appear to go against the laws of thermodynamics by making itself more organised but such observations (often made by creationists) ignore the rate of increase in entropy of the system as a whole. Like tornadoes, life will spontaneously arise where there is an energy gradient and the right kind of matter, it will continue to evolve into more complex forms until it brings the energy gradient down tom zero. The "right type" of matter for life to arise just happens to be made from the most common types of atoms in the universe. By induction life must be at least as common as vortexes throughout the universe, it's just that you need to look for it with a microscope, not a telescope
The size theory does not hold water when you look at places like Australia and Canada, even New Zealand way down in the Southern ocean which is connected to everything by sea floor cabling has better retail speeds than most US cities. The major difference between the US and Oz/Europe is that the US ISP market is not a free market, it's a series of government granted monopolies which are by their nature are heavily weighted against consumer choice. Consumer choice is what drives competition in any market, the dismal state of retail internet in the US is entirely predictable and has nothing to do with an averaged US population density.
Trivia: Oz is ~0.8X the size of the US but the US has ~15X as many people. Canada is slightly larger than the US, shares the same continent with the US, has ~0.12X the US population, and yet both nations provide faster (average) speeds than the US.
The rest of the western world can clearly see that American's are getting screwed in broad daylight by telco's and health insurance companies because people like you still believe (and parrot) the ridiculous excuses these corporations and their pet poli-critters have to offer. Europeans are no more or less "geographically challenged" than Americans, rather your natural tribal instinct has been expertly manipulated* by corporate propaganda to fight against your own best interest. In other words we can see the root problems in the US and are trying to tell you there are better ways to structure the telco/health markets. It's you who does not understand what is happening to you and why.
manipulated* - We are all heavily influenced by what we read, hear and watch, the only effective defense is to practice self-skepticism, ie: don't just blindly accept one cherry-picked data point, pick your own comparisons and do some basic sanity tests on the "economies of scale" excuse.
Australia's land mass is comparable to that of the US but with roughly half the population of California, however there's more competition between ISP's in rural Ballarat than there is in downtown Los Angeles.\
I just tested my speed on zdnet and it comes out at ~18mbps, a pleasant surprise since it was ~12mbps for many years, the faster speed has not increased my bill. ZDnet also have an informative list of average speeds by nation, spoiler the US can't even keep up with NZ.
It can't be avoided. "Men at work" lost several million dollars because they had "stolen" 2 bars of "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree". It's almost certain the band had innocently re-invented the same sequence of notes. Most people (including the band) didn't notice until it was pointed out but once pointed out you can't miss it. M@W lost the case becuse the argument that they didn't "steal" it was irrelevant in the eyes of the law.
Can't play video games because they stereotypes women, can't listen to taylor swift because she stereotypes blacks, can't watch BBT because it stereotypes geeks....WTF is wrong with you people?
I read the speech yesterday, seemed rather tame compared to the hate US politicians regularly spout. His main point was that Ukraine must negotiate a ceasefire directly with the rebels. Russia has the upper hand, yet it is the Russians who are pressing for a diplomatic solution, Ukraine (and presumably their western sponsors) are refusing to negotiate with "terrorists". The bit about nukes was not a threat it was a defiant warning to the west, "don't fuck with Russia", it was made in the context of a plea to the west to help solve the dispute in a "modern way", ie: through diplomacy.
Putin has demonstrated he has a stronger influence over the rebels than the west has over Ukraine, a few days ago he averted a potential slaughter by calling on the rebels to open a corridor so that surrounded and outnumbered Ukrainian troops could withdraw, sadly I haven't seen any reports of efforts to defuse the situation by the Ukrainian government or the west. The consistent response of Ukraine to military defeats in various towns and cities has been to shell the people they are trying to "liberate" with heavy artillery. Such actions do nothing but kill civilians, destroy infrastructure, and ultimately swell the ranks of the rebels.
I was born in 1959 at the height of the cold war, the enthusiasm of the western media to label Putin as a modern day Hitler is troubling, the fact that a large chunk of western society believes it, is frightening. The village idiot who's running things down here in Oz has been thrusting his chin in the air and sprouting macho bullshit, he's threatened to stop Putin attending the G20 meeting in Brisbane. He does not represent my views, my view is that our government should be supporting the call Putin made in the speech for a "modern" solution to what is essentially a proxy war between the nuclear heavyweights.
Indeed. Our ancestral relatives bred with our other ancestral relatives.
Circular logic then suggests we are but the spawn of incestuous breeding.
It's said that all people with blue eyes are descendant from one person who lived near the black sea some 10-12ky ago. Since you need two parents with the blue gene to have blue eyes this means the person who first obtained the mutation did not have blue eyes, nor could his children have them. His grandchildren are the first possible blue eyed people if they bred with a sibling, more likely the first blue eyes were several generations removed from the person who got the original mutation.
As for TFA, the picture clearly demonstrates Neandertals invented tic-tac-toe.
Renewables can and will eventually replace coal, that is a GoodThing(TM), sure they have an ecological footprint but (like nuclear power) it's virtually zero compared to coal. The question isn't nukes vs solar, the question is what combination of current technologies will replace coal's market dominance, current nuclear technologies cannot do this alone for several reasons, expense, limited fuel reserves, plain old fear. Solar is now significantly cheaper and certainly much cleaner than imported brown coal, which is why India has embarked on a solar project to supply power to 400M people (40% of the population).
Replacing coal sounds like a massive task but consider that every coal plant on the planet was built during my lifetime, some were even built and rebuilt. The economics is such that I'm now confident they will be replaced with solar/wind farms in the next 50yrs. The hydro dams are already in place and there aren't many suitable sites left for new ones. All forms of power generation must match supply to demand on the grid, ie: they need a buffer to be able to match the "wavy" demand curve of a typical city. Coal produces a flat supply curve (so called "base load"), it already uses the existing dams as giant batteries by pumping water uphill during off-peak times and pulling it back onto the grid during peak times. As renewables start replacing coal why would they not also use the existing hydro infrastructure to similar effect?
The radiation is harmful to wildlife but no where near as harmful as plain old human habitation. Wildlife thrives in the Chernobyl exclusion zone not because the radiation is harmless but because there are no people. The DMZ on the korean peninsula is the same, no people, plenty of land mines and wildlife.
BTW: Coulter is a troll and Greenpeace did not kill nuclear power, Chernobyl did that, yes there were exceptional circumstances as there was with the BP oil spill but Joe Average doesn't give a shit about excuses when the inevitable mega-fuck-up occurs.
"W" is the 23rd letter of the alphabet, W = 23 = 2 X 3 = 6 : WWW = 666. Isaac Newton wrote almost a million words on the numerology of 666, in fact he wrote a lot more about theology than science. Thing is nobody remembers him for his prolific "contributions" to theology.
My family treasure is box full of super-8 home movies from the early 80's and a projector that still works. There's about 3hrs worth of 3min films spliced together on 20min reels, the grandkids get a buzz seeing their parents as toddlers. The other bit of tech memorabilia I won't part with is my dad's 1976 HP21C calculator, still in it's original leather case, perfect working order but no manual, can't even find a copy on the internet. Most people I've shown it to have never heard of reverse polish notation, grandkids are unimpressed by it.:)
"misogyny, racism, and homophobia" were all considered pollitically correct in their day, and that's exacty what was wrong with them. Political correctness in the opposite direction is no better because it's also predicated on an ideologically driven notion of "balance". Telling women they should be on WP is no different to telling them they belong in the kitchen.
Also why is it that WP should do more to appeal to females but FB doesn't need to do more to appeal to males? An individual or organisation that tries too hard to appeal to everybody, ends up appealing to nobody. Self exclusion is not discrimination, it plain old "personal taste".
90% of the "natural language" data on the internet is sarcasm and/or trolls
The Jepordy stunt demonstrated Watson can filter out trolls better than humans and it does that by assigning credibility rankings to sources of data. Most of the work on Watson is directed at medical research, it's sources are things like the pubmed database, not slashdot comments.
IBM are sitting on a revolutionary advance in software engineering, they're not interested in selling it, they want to rent it and claim slice of whetever their "partner" organisations find. It will revolutionise research in the same way CAD/CAM and physics engines have revolutionised engineering over the last 3-4 decades and IBM look set to reap the enoumous potential of their billion dollar investment in basic research.
This shouldn't be part of being a "public figure"....Why would you think it's acceptable? Whether in jest or not?
I was replying to my own post since I had gained the erroneous impression that menacing "vigilantes" were hanging around her home. What is it about my post that makes you (and the mods) believe I think the abusive and threatening trolls are acceptable? I can assure you I don't, I don't like wars of aggression either but they are both a fact of life, which is why I put "sadly" in the words.
Having said that, all but one of these threats was at the low end of seriousness. This woman is a professional victim and is milking the trolls bad behaviour for sympathy. You don't defeat trolls by re-posting their trolls, you defeat them by denying them their oxygen. She's a marketing major, she knows a lot more about manipulating audiences than either of us. Having watched this woman and her critics for some time now I believe TFA is a cynical attempt on her behalf to link real world violent misogyny to people who play video games, it confirms everything she has been saying about gamers - but when you peel back the marketing hype, it doesn't.
I think you ought to consider not clicking on such articles. By that, I mean surely you've been around long enough to realise that it's the number of clicks that count when selling eyeballs. If you know upfront the content will burn your eyeballs, why click?
It's a new twist on and old journalistic trick they pull out on a "slow news day" where they advertise and run a human interest story about the people who determine TV ratings, turns out those people like watching stories about themselves and consequently the shows ratings go through the roof. Of course the trick is not to do it every week, just pull it out occasionally when they are really desperate for advertising dollars.
I've watched some of her videos and watched some of her consistently angry but peaceful YT critics. The critics win hands down, as for violent critics TFA says she received one serious death threat in a YT post with her address attached. That happens to anyone in public life, just ask John Lennon or better still, the slashdot editors, I'm fairly confident they could come up with a whole page full of threats with phone numbers and addresses that have been censored on slashdot for obvious reasons.
Aside from that, slashdot anonymity is really just decent psuedo-anonymity, making such threats on the internet and backing them up with an address is possibly one of the dumbest things a potential rapist or murder could do, they may as well just nail their drivers license to the victims forehead.
Damn I feel foolish now I've RTFA, she's complaining about YT trolls, there's no actual violence. One person posted a death threat with her address attached. Everyone from climate scientists to Exxon executives get that sort of shit continuously, it's (sadly) part of being a public figure.
I think this woman is a liar and an attention seeker, but she certainly doesn't deserve that sort of attention. An violent mob is morally repugnant, a self promoting professional victim is simply a pitiful individual.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you think a tornado is?
The finger of God. However you have a good point. Matter spontaneously organises itself in order to reach maximum entropy in minimum time, Brian Cox has done an excellent documentary series about this stuff. At first glance life ( and tornadoes ) appear to go against the laws of thermodynamics by making itself more organised but such observations (often made by creationists) ignore the rate of increase in entropy of the system as a whole. Like tornadoes, life will spontaneously arise where there is an energy gradient and the right kind of matter, it will continue to evolve into more complex forms until it brings the energy gradient down tom zero. The "right type" of matter for life to arise just happens to be made from the most common types of atoms in the universe. By induction life must be at least as common as vortexes throughout the universe, it's just that you need to look for it with a microscope, not a telescope
Actually, in colloquial use "theory" means any form of speculation.
The size theory does not hold water when you look at places like Australia and Canada, even New Zealand way down in the Southern ocean which is connected to everything by sea floor cabling has better retail speeds than most US cities. The major difference between the US and Oz/Europe is that the US ISP market is not a free market, it's a series of government granted monopolies which are by their nature are heavily weighted against consumer choice. Consumer choice is what drives competition in any market, the dismal state of retail internet in the US is entirely predictable and has nothing to do with an averaged US population density.
Trivia: Oz is ~0.8X the size of the US but the US has ~15X as many people. Canada is slightly larger than the US, shares the same continent with the US, has ~0.12X the US population, and yet both nations provide faster (average) speeds than the US.
The rest of the western world can clearly see that American's are getting screwed in broad daylight by telco's and health insurance companies because people like you still believe (and parrot) the ridiculous excuses these corporations and their pet poli-critters have to offer. Europeans are no more or less "geographically challenged" than Americans, rather your natural tribal instinct has been expertly manipulated* by corporate propaganda to fight against your own best interest. In other words we can see the root problems in the US and are trying to tell you there are better ways to structure the telco/health markets. It's you who does not understand what is happening to you and why.
manipulated* - We are all heavily influenced by what we read, hear and watch, the only effective defense is to practice self-skepticism, ie: don't just blindly accept one cherry-picked data point, pick your own comparisons and do some basic sanity tests on the "economies of scale" excuse.
Australia's land mass is comparable to that of the US but with roughly half the population of California, however there's more competition between ISP's in rural Ballarat than there is in downtown Los Angeles.\
I just tested my speed on zdnet and it comes out at ~18mbps, a pleasant surprise since it was ~12mbps for many years, the faster speed has not increased my bill. ZDnet also have an informative list of average speeds by nation, spoiler the US can't even keep up with NZ.
It can't be avoided. "Men at work" lost several million dollars because they had "stolen" 2 bars of "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree". It's almost certain the band had innocently re-invented the same sequence of notes. Most people (including the band) didn't notice until it was pointed out but once pointed out you can't miss it. M@W lost the case becuse the argument that they didn't "steal" it was irrelevant in the eyes of the law.
Can't play video games because they stereotypes women, can't listen to taylor swift because she stereotypes blacks, can't watch BBT because it stereotypes geeks....WTF is wrong with you people?
He has autistic tendencies, sex is simply not part of his routine because he's too busy with his other obsessions.
I read the speech yesterday, seemed rather tame compared to the hate US politicians regularly spout. His main point was that Ukraine must negotiate a ceasefire directly with the rebels. Russia has the upper hand, yet it is the Russians who are pressing for a diplomatic solution, Ukraine (and presumably their western sponsors) are refusing to negotiate with "terrorists". The bit about nukes was not a threat it was a defiant warning to the west, "don't fuck with Russia", it was made in the context of a plea to the west to help solve the dispute in a "modern way", ie: through diplomacy.
Putin has demonstrated he has a stronger influence over the rebels than the west has over Ukraine, a few days ago he averted a potential slaughter by calling on the rebels to open a corridor so that surrounded and outnumbered Ukrainian troops could withdraw, sadly I haven't seen any reports of efforts to defuse the situation by the Ukrainian government or the west. The consistent response of Ukraine to military defeats in various towns and cities has been to shell the people they are trying to "liberate" with heavy artillery. Such actions do nothing but kill civilians, destroy infrastructure, and ultimately swell the ranks of the rebels.
I was born in 1959 at the height of the cold war, the enthusiasm of the western media to label Putin as a modern day Hitler is troubling, the fact that a large chunk of western society believes it, is frightening. The village idiot who's running things down here in Oz has been thrusting his chin in the air and sprouting macho bullshit, he's threatened to stop Putin attending the G20 meeting in Brisbane. He does not represent my views, my view is that our government should be supporting the call Putin made in the speech for a "modern" solution to what is essentially a proxy war between the nuclear heavyweights.
Indeed. Our ancestral relatives bred with our other ancestral relatives.
Circular logic then suggests we are but the spawn of incestuous breeding.
It's said that all people with blue eyes are descendant from one person who lived near the black sea some 10-12ky ago. Since you need two parents with the blue gene to have blue eyes this means the person who first obtained the mutation did not have blue eyes, nor could his children have them. His grandchildren are the first possible blue eyed people if they bred with a sibling, more likely the first blue eyes were several generations removed from the person who got the original mutation.
As for TFA, the picture clearly demonstrates Neandertals invented tic-tac-toe.
Renewables can and will eventually replace coal, that is a GoodThing(TM), sure they have an ecological footprint but (like nuclear power) it's virtually zero compared to coal. The question isn't nukes vs solar, the question is what combination of current technologies will replace coal's market dominance, current nuclear technologies cannot do this alone for several reasons, expense, limited fuel reserves, plain old fear. Solar is now significantly cheaper and certainly much cleaner than imported brown coal, which is why India has embarked on a solar project to supply power to 400M people (40% of the population).
Replacing coal sounds like a massive task but consider that every coal plant on the planet was built during my lifetime, some were even built and rebuilt. The economics is such that I'm now confident they will be replaced with solar/wind farms in the next 50yrs. The hydro dams are already in place and there aren't many suitable sites left for new ones. All forms of power generation must match supply to demand on the grid, ie: they need a buffer to be able to match the "wavy" demand curve of a typical city. Coal produces a flat supply curve (so called "base load"), it already uses the existing dams as giant batteries by pumping water uphill during off-peak times and pulling it back onto the grid during peak times. As renewables start replacing coal why would they not also use the existing hydro infrastructure to similar effect?
The radiation is harmful to wildlife but no where near as harmful as plain old human habitation. Wildlife thrives in the Chernobyl exclusion zone not because the radiation is harmless but because there are no people. The DMZ on the korean peninsula is the same, no people, plenty of land mines and wildlife.
BTW: Coulter is a troll and Greenpeace did not kill nuclear power, Chernobyl did that, yes there were exceptional circumstances as there was with the BP oil spill but Joe Average doesn't give a shit about excuses when the inevitable mega-fuck-up occurs.
"W" is the 23rd letter of the alphabet, W = 23 = 2 X 3 = 6 : WWW = 666. Isaac Newton wrote almost a million words on the numerology of 666, in fact he wrote a lot more about theology than science. Thing is nobody remembers him for his prolific "contributions" to theology.
Believe what I say or I will hurt you
Not sure if it was opportunity or its twin, but one of them required a modem reset not long after landing.
I don't care if your bleeding from the eyeballs, leave my cigarettes alone!
My family treasure is box full of super-8 home movies from the early 80's and a projector that still works. There's about 3hrs worth of 3min films spliced together on 20min reels, the grandkids get a buzz seeing their parents as toddlers. The other bit of tech memorabilia I won't part with is my dad's 1976 HP21C calculator, still in it's original leather case, perfect working order but no manual, can't even find a copy on the internet. Most people I've shown it to have never heard of reverse polish notation, grandkids are unimpressed by it. :)
"misogyny, racism, and homophobia" were all considered pollitically correct in their day, and that's exacty what was wrong with them. Political correctness in the opposite direction is no better because it's also predicated on an ideologically driven notion of "balance". Telling women they should be on WP is no different to telling them they belong in the kitchen.
Also why is it that WP should do more to appeal to females but FB doesn't need to do more to appeal to males? An individual or organisation that tries too hard to appeal to everybody, ends up appealing to nobody. Self exclusion is not discrimination, it plain old "personal taste".
90% of the "natural language" data on the internet is sarcasm and/or trolls
The Jepordy stunt demonstrated Watson can filter out trolls better than humans and it does that by assigning credibility rankings to sources of data. Most of the work on Watson is directed at medical research, it's sources are things like the pubmed database, not slashdot comments.
IBM are sitting on a revolutionary advance in software engineering, they're not interested in selling it, they want to rent it and claim slice of whetever their "partner" organisations find. It will revolutionise research in the same way CAD/CAM and physics engines have revolutionised engineering over the last 3-4 decades and IBM look set to reap the enoumous potential of their billion dollar investment in basic research.
In a democratic republic, the president plays the role of emporer. Why does that surprise you?
I was giving her the benefit of the doubt but even with that advantage she doesn't have a leg to stand on.
This shouldn't be part of being a "public figure"....Why would you think it's acceptable? Whether in jest or not?
I was replying to my own post since I had gained the erroneous impression that menacing "vigilantes" were hanging around her home. What is it about my post that makes you (and the mods) believe I think the abusive and threatening trolls are acceptable? I can assure you I don't, I don't like wars of aggression either but they are both a fact of life, which is why I put "sadly" in the words.
Having said that, all but one of these threats was at the low end of seriousness. This woman is a professional victim and is milking the trolls bad behaviour for sympathy. You don't defeat trolls by re-posting their trolls, you defeat them by denying them their oxygen. She's a marketing major, she knows a lot more about manipulating audiences than either of us. Having watched this woman and her critics for some time now I believe TFA is a cynical attempt on her behalf to link real world violent misogyny to people who play video games, it confirms everything she has been saying about gamers - but when you peel back the marketing hype, it doesn't.
I think you ought to consider not clicking on such articles. By that, I mean surely you've been around long enough to realise that it's the number of clicks that count when selling eyeballs. If you know upfront the content will burn your eyeballs, why click?
It's a new twist on and old journalistic trick they pull out on a "slow news day" where they advertise and run a human interest story about the people who determine TV ratings, turns out those people like watching stories about themselves and consequently the shows ratings go through the roof. Of course the trick is not to do it every week, just pull it out occasionally when they are really desperate for advertising dollars.
I've watched some of her videos and watched some of her consistently angry but peaceful YT critics. The critics win hands down, as for violent critics TFA says she received one serious death threat in a YT post with her address attached. That happens to anyone in public life, just ask John Lennon or better still, the slashdot editors, I'm fairly confident they could come up with a whole page full of threats with phone numbers and addresses that have been censored on slashdot for obvious reasons.
Aside from that, slashdot anonymity is really just decent psuedo-anonymity, making such threats on the internet and backing them up with an address is possibly one of the dumbest things a potential rapist or murder could do, they may as well just nail their drivers license to the victims forehead.
Damn I feel foolish now I've RTFA, she's complaining about YT trolls, there's no actual violence. One person posted a death threat with her address attached. Everyone from climate scientists to Exxon executives get that sort of shit continuously, it's (sadly) part of being a public figure.
I think this woman is a liar and an attention seeker, but she certainly doesn't deserve that sort of attention. An violent mob is morally repugnant, a self promoting professional victim is simply a pitiful individual.