>After all, something similar is my explanation as to how life appeared on earth in the first place (transported from Mars on asteroids)
Panspermia just moves the problem of how biogenesis happened one step further back. I also find the idea of Mars as a better warm wet rock on which life could form than Earth to be very iffy.
After all, it may not even have been potentially habitable for as long as we believe it took life to appear on Earth, a few billion years ago the Sun was a bit cooler, and we don't know what kind of magnetic field Mars had back in the day.
It's an interesting theory, but (IMHO) not worth seriously working on until we've managed to reasonably exclude the possibility of local biogenesis... and we don't understand enough to do anything like that just yet.
>there is not enough time to get enough of humanity off the planet
Sure there is. If we discovered the Earth was doomed (say, a Mars-sized rock was headed our way but we had a few decades), we could (in theory) put a massive concrete cylinder in orbit, spin it for artificial gravity, build a city inside, have a few hundred years' worth of spares and replacement volatiles, and put a big-ass nuclear Orion drive on the back end and ship off a sustainable breeding population to an extra-solar planet.
> in order for it to survive.
Oh. Well, if you're going to be THAT picky... we probably need a couple of hundred years' worth of medical and environmental technology advancements if we expect to have great odds of surviving the trip, and non-zero odds of surviving at the destination.
>Computers have managed to decimate that 30-minute attention span to about 3 minutes. It's fucking pathetic how quickly people drift away these days. In any other time in history, this lack of an ability to focus and pay attention would have been classified as some form of mental retardation.
I'm more or less in agreement. Compare Mr. Wizard to Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye's show was not a great achievement in teaching kids, it was a symptom of a failure to raise them properly.
>Now, it's practically fashionable and socially acceptable to have this trait, probably because of the obscene profits made by treating this thing we now call ADHD, along with the popularity of abusing Ritalin as a fucking "study aid".
First, I'm not sure it's that bad, and second, don't be too quick to judge on ADHD. While there may be over-diagnosis of the younger and abuse by the older, it IS a thing, and various stimulants do help those kids handle environmental stimulation better so they can socialize properly and achieve more in school.
>TL; DR - The intelligent mind is never truly bored. Those who find themselves bored quite often, are likely idiots.
>As opposed to all those other people who attended lectures before them without laptops and where able to concentrate and do well in the class. Moron.
Distraction issues due to boredom predate computers in the classroom and have always been an issue with student's learning efficiency... computers give us something to keep us from returning focus to the lecture after we've already drifted away.
If you were smarter, maybe you'd have been able to figure that out on your own instead of calling me a moron because you couldn't.
Humans just can't concentrate on a speaker for very long before their minds get bored and wander. As a communications channel, speech is slow compared to the rate at which we can process information. Even for dull folks.
There are endless theories about how to adjust for this, but generally the answer is frequent breaks and practical work between brief lectures. Brief as in '15 minutes is pushing it quite a bit'.
And of course you could always put institution-owned computers at the desks with limited software and access, dumping student work to an externally-accessible file share.
We should currently count ourselves as in the year 12017... because human civilization is more or less 10K years old (a nice common zero point for all cultures that have moved beyond the hunter-gatherer stage), and tweaking it so the last 4 digits match the Gregorian makes for easy compatibility with most of the world.
Essentially it GO made for a global scavenger hunt. Those things are cool.
The next step, I'd think, would be an app where you can publish your own waypoints to a server for private or public groups to utilize, and perhaps add varying degrees of difficulty (like the range at which items show up), items that give up clues to the location of the next one, perhaps tie scores to real world rewards at an after-game party.
You could also make a rally app... pretty much anything location-based people have ever done for recreation could be 'GOed'.
>Can you imagine working in a company where the boss sends you an email and calls 30 minutes later: "did you receive my email?"....
30 minutes? LUXURY!
I am an information junkie so it took me a long time to 'unplug' after 24/7 connectivity became a thing, but I DID learn.
My phone only accepts calls from a select few contacts, and phone calls are the only thing that make noise - everything else is generally vibration only, and I turn that off too when I want peace and quiet.
I grew up in a time when your parents would ask you 'do you have a quarter?' when you left the house, so you'd be able to make a payphone call if you needed help. At least people like me know what the disconnected life was like... it must be so much more difficult to realize its something worth having when you've never lived it in the first place.
Then again, I still look back at much of the remaining generation prior to mine with pity; the ones who never figured out how to get 'online' in the first place, the ones who don't know how to use a search engine when they want to check a fact or find the nearest restaurant or whatever.
It's all about finding a happy medium. Connected enough to get what you need, disconnected enough not to be pestered by what you don't.
Flakes are hardly new. The writer is either young or stupid (and possibly both).
The difference between today and yesteryear is that now pretty much everyone is connected 24/7, so there's more pressure to actually communicate that you're going to be a no-show instead of simply not showing up.
I'd also expect Tesla to start the state-side work well ahead of that signing, so the post-signature project is more of a 'deliver and install' than 'design, fabricate, test, deliver and install'.
And given the mass and distances we're talking about, I'd not even be surprised if there were components on Australia-bound ships before the signing, too.
It'd be a gamble, but a pretty solid one, with a huge publicity payoff.
...if there was competition in the market instead of regional monopolies and cartels.
Imagine you had (at least) two potential ISPs ready to provide service, and one throttles and the other doesn't...
Make the means of communication (the fibre, copper, and wireless spectrum) public infrastructure, lease access to private entities to provide whatever services they want (like connecting you up to the infrastructure, providing email, tech support, etc.). Anything less is going to result in the sub-standard service you're getting today.
Imagine if you only had toll roads if you wanted to travel by car, and only two possible routes to work. Data's not much different.
Nielson ratings were garbage in the early days because they were based on diaries filled out by hand by selected viewers. People who might be embarrassed to admit they watched trash television or blue movies, or fell asleep, or whatever. Chances are there was a lot of lying going on during the data collection phase.
I believe later they moved to electronic collection, but that failed to account for people who left the TV on, or watched something on tape (or later DVD... I don't know if they fixed this by the time Blu-ray came along).
It's always been mostly made up crap based on mostly made up crap, but advertisers wanted something to judge the reach of their ads and networks wanted something to judge the rate they should charge for ad space... so Nielson.
Streaming is a Nielson nightmare - there's no need for middle-man analysis, it's all right there, to the frame. And in many cases, there's even less need because the media provider is on a subscription based revenue model and doesn't care about advertising.
It would be better if there was a policy (with funding) that required schools to provide sufficient guidance services to all graduates who request them to help them find that first job, apprenticeship program, or post-secondary institution that will take them. Guidance services that should probably start in their freshman high school year.
"Do this difficult adult thing, kid, or we will hobble your future" is nasty. "Here, let me help you do this difficult thing because that piece of paper alone won't cut it" isn't.
It would certainly be interesting. I know in my university days we just used the student community center bulletin board. (Yeah, pre-Internet days unless you were in a CS course)
You'd need some kind of verification system (to limit the various risks). I think at a minimum you'd have to sign up with a credit card (good way to receive payment if you're a driver and make payment if you're a passenger), agree to a criminal background check prior to first use of the system, and vehicle history check for the plate you're driving with.
Set your rate, standard terms would be pickup and drop off at the nearest major transit hubs, but negotiable how far you'd be willing to deviate from your intended route for specific end points. You'd probably have to include music preferences, and your sex (as I expect there'd be some hesitation among many women to ride share with random men).
It'd be useful for pre-planned inter-city hauls, but probably a lot less useful for unplanned short trips that the taxi-like service Lyft provides.
The only thing worse than an unlicensed cab company is a licensed cab company.
You're seeing two groups of people in the same bottom-end job fighting over which master should rule the land. Neither master is kind or generous, but the workers know they have scraps from their current master and won't if the other master's workers take over.
>You can read it any way you want, but they outline everything they might retaliate against him for.
You can read it any way you want, but they outline everything that might make his identity newsworthy.
You are interpreting it as if CNN has some kind of grudge against the guy. I can't see how they could, at the corporate OR individual level. Rather, they're not giving up their right to report what may become newsworthy in future. That's something they do have an obvious and direct stake in.
As we automate more and more people out of work, as ownership of those automated facilities concentrates more and more, we MUST switch to UBI or admit we're making almost the entire population redundant. This isn't weavers destroying Jacquard looms - computers and robots are on the threshold of obliterating general labor as a way to make even a subsistence living.
And if we decide the general population is redundant, how long until someone who is in the 'have' group decides the 'have nots' need to starve to death or be killed off before they storm the gates looking for their share?
The problem is that while much of the rest of the world is at least slightly socialist already, the USA is still paranoid about communism and resists social programs even if they're dying as a result - the Republican support for repealing socialized healthcare being a textbook example.
So UBI may not fly in the USA until past the time when its needed, and then we will get to see if the masses die off before they revolt.
And in fact, CNN didn't threaten the guy (though the wording was shit-poor for people who write for a living and presumably have access to good lawyers).
I read it as, "We won't publish your identity unless and until you make it newsworthy to do so". Yes, that effectively silences the guy (if he likes hiding the fact that he finds spewing racist and homophobic shit entertaining), but it's also a perfectly legitimate stance for a news outlet to take.
I certainly believe that Tolkien wasn't pushing a message but 'merely' telling a story, but it really isn't difficult to see he was drawing on certainly topical themes to build that story upon.
Mainly, an idealized pre-industrial past vs. an evil caricature of the disruption of the industrial revolution. I think every generation uses a similar theme of 'better days' in its stories, it's hardly unique.
Or... you could recognize that a lot of art is crap that is only valued by pretentious art fans, and having algorithm-designed art that the public enjoys more shows that up for what it it.
Slashdot Mirror
Where will I spend my Bitcoin now?
>After all, something similar is my explanation as to how life appeared on earth in the first place (transported from Mars on asteroids)
Panspermia just moves the problem of how biogenesis happened one step further back. I also find the idea of Mars as a better warm wet rock on which life could form than Earth to be very iffy.
After all, it may not even have been potentially habitable for as long as we believe it took life to appear on Earth, a few billion years ago the Sun was a bit cooler, and we don't know what kind of magnetic field Mars had back in the day.
It's an interesting theory, but (IMHO) not worth seriously working on until we've managed to reasonably exclude the possibility of local biogenesis... and we don't understand enough to do anything like that just yet.
>there is not enough time to get enough of humanity off the planet
Sure there is. If we discovered the Earth was doomed (say, a Mars-sized rock was headed our way but we had a few decades), we could (in theory) put a massive concrete cylinder in orbit, spin it for artificial gravity, build a city inside, have a few hundred years' worth of spares and replacement volatiles, and put a big-ass nuclear Orion drive on the back end and ship off a sustainable breeding population to an extra-solar planet.
> in order for it to survive.
Oh. Well, if you're going to be THAT picky... we probably need a couple of hundred years' worth of medical and environmental technology advancements if we expect to have great odds of surviving the trip, and non-zero odds of surviving at the destination.
> Speeding through a shiny lit tunnel?
I doubt they'll bother to light the tunnel in production unless its out of service for repair. Why waste the power?
>Computers have managed to decimate that 30-minute attention span to about 3 minutes. It's fucking pathetic how quickly people drift away these days. In any other time in history, this lack of an ability to focus and pay attention would have been classified as some form of mental retardation.
I'm more or less in agreement. Compare Mr. Wizard to Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye's show was not a great achievement in teaching kids, it was a symptom of a failure to raise them properly.
>Now, it's practically fashionable and socially acceptable to have this trait, probably because of the obscene profits made by treating this thing we now call ADHD, along with the popularity of abusing Ritalin as a fucking "study aid".
First, I'm not sure it's that bad, and second, don't be too quick to judge on ADHD. While there may be over-diagnosis of the younger and abuse by the older, it IS a thing, and various stimulants do help those kids handle environmental stimulation better so they can socialize properly and achieve more in school.
>TL; DR - The intelligent mind is never truly bored. Those who find themselves bored quite often, are likely idiots.
Now that's complete bullshit.
>As opposed to all those other people who attended lectures before them without laptops and where able to concentrate and do well in the class. Moron.
Distraction issues due to boredom predate computers in the classroom and have always been an issue with student's learning efficiency... computers give us something to keep us from returning focus to the lecture after we've already drifted away.
If you were smarter, maybe you'd have been able to figure that out on your own instead of calling me a moron because you couldn't.
Humans just can't concentrate on a speaker for very long before their minds get bored and wander. As a communications channel, speech is slow compared to the rate at which we can process information. Even for dull folks.
There are endless theories about how to adjust for this, but generally the answer is frequent breaks and practical work between brief lectures. Brief as in '15 minutes is pushing it quite a bit'.
And of course you could always put institution-owned computers at the desks with limited software and access, dumping student work to an externally-accessible file share.
> reset the year count over to zero
We should currently count ourselves as in the year 12017... because human civilization is more or less 10K years old (a nice common zero point for all cultures that have moved beyond the hunter-gatherer stage), and tweaking it so the last 4 digits match the Gregorian makes for easy compatibility with most of the world.
Essentially it GO made for a global scavenger hunt. Those things are cool.
The next step, I'd think, would be an app where you can publish your own waypoints to a server for private or public groups to utilize, and perhaps add varying degrees of difficulty (like the range at which items show up), items that give up clues to the location of the next one, perhaps tie scores to real world rewards at an after-game party.
You could also make a rally app... pretty much anything location-based people have ever done for recreation could be 'GOed'.
>Can you imagine working in a company where the boss sends you an email and calls 30 minutes later: "did you receive my email?" ....
30 minutes? LUXURY!
I am an information junkie so it took me a long time to 'unplug' after 24/7 connectivity became a thing, but I DID learn.
My phone only accepts calls from a select few contacts, and phone calls are the only thing that make noise - everything else is generally vibration only, and I turn that off too when I want peace and quiet.
I grew up in a time when your parents would ask you 'do you have a quarter?' when you left the house, so you'd be able to make a payphone call if you needed help. At least people like me know what the disconnected life was like... it must be so much more difficult to realize its something worth having when you've never lived it in the first place.
Then again, I still look back at much of the remaining generation prior to mine with pity; the ones who never figured out how to get 'online' in the first place, the ones who don't know how to use a search engine when they want to check a fact or find the nearest restaurant or whatever.
It's all about finding a happy medium. Connected enough to get what you need, disconnected enough not to be pestered by what you don't.
Flakes are hardly new. The writer is either young or stupid (and possibly both).
The difference between today and yesteryear is that now pretty much everyone is connected 24/7, so there's more pressure to actually communicate that you're going to be a no-show instead of simply not showing up.
I'd also expect Tesla to start the state-side work well ahead of that signing, so the post-signature project is more of a 'deliver and install' than 'design, fabricate, test, deliver and install'.
And given the mass and distances we're talking about, I'd not even be surprised if there were components on Australia-bound ships before the signing, too.
It'd be a gamble, but a pretty solid one, with a huge publicity payoff.
...if there was competition in the market instead of regional monopolies and cartels.
Imagine you had (at least) two potential ISPs ready to provide service, and one throttles and the other doesn't...
Make the means of communication (the fibre, copper, and wireless spectrum) public infrastructure, lease access to private entities to provide whatever services they want (like connecting you up to the infrastructure, providing email, tech support, etc.). Anything less is going to result in the sub-standard service you're getting today.
Imagine if you only had toll roads if you wanted to travel by car, and only two possible routes to work. Data's not much different.
Nielson ratings were garbage in the early days because they were based on diaries filled out by hand by selected viewers. People who might be embarrassed to admit they watched trash television or blue movies, or fell asleep, or whatever. Chances are there was a lot of lying going on during the data collection phase.
I believe later they moved to electronic collection, but that failed to account for people who left the TV on, or watched something on tape (or later DVD... I don't know if they fixed this by the time Blu-ray came along).
It's always been mostly made up crap based on mostly made up crap, but advertisers wanted something to judge the reach of their ads and networks wanted something to judge the rate they should charge for ad space... so Nielson.
Streaming is a Nielson nightmare - there's no need for middle-man analysis, it's all right there, to the frame. And in many cases, there's even less need because the media provider is on a subscription based revenue model and doesn't care about advertising.
It would be better if there was a policy (with funding) that required schools to provide sufficient guidance services to all graduates who request them to help them find that first job, apprenticeship program, or post-secondary institution that will take them. Guidance services that should probably start in their freshman high school year.
"Do this difficult adult thing, kid, or we will hobble your future" is nasty. "Here, let me help you do this difficult thing because that piece of paper alone won't cut it" isn't.
Ahh. So the only question is whether you're a slave to a cab company or one of the evil SOBs who rents out a cab license.
It would certainly be interesting. I know in my university days we just used the student community center bulletin board. (Yeah, pre-Internet days unless you were in a CS course)
You'd need some kind of verification system (to limit the various risks). I think at a minimum you'd have to sign up with a credit card (good way to receive payment if you're a driver and make payment if you're a passenger), agree to a criminal background check prior to first use of the system, and vehicle history check for the plate you're driving with.
Set your rate, standard terms would be pickup and drop off at the nearest major transit hubs, but negotiable how far you'd be willing to deviate from your intended route for specific end points. You'd probably have to include music preferences, and your sex (as I expect there'd be some hesitation among many women to ride share with random men).
It'd be useful for pre-planned inter-city hauls, but probably a lot less useful for unplanned short trips that the taxi-like service Lyft provides.
The only thing worse than an unlicensed cab company is a licensed cab company.
You're seeing two groups of people in the same bottom-end job fighting over which master should rule the land. Neither master is kind or generous, but the workers know they have scraps from their current master and won't if the other master's workers take over.
>You can read it any way you want, but they outline everything they might retaliate against him for.
You can read it any way you want, but they outline everything that might make his identity newsworthy.
You are interpreting it as if CNN has some kind of grudge against the guy. I can't see how they could, at the corporate OR individual level. Rather, they're not giving up their right to report what may become newsworthy in future. That's something they do have an obvious and direct stake in.
As we automate more and more people out of work, as ownership of those automated facilities concentrates more and more, we MUST switch to UBI or admit we're making almost the entire population redundant. This isn't weavers destroying Jacquard looms - computers and robots are on the threshold of obliterating general labor as a way to make even a subsistence living.
And if we decide the general population is redundant, how long until someone who is in the 'have' group decides the 'have nots' need to starve to death or be killed off before they storm the gates looking for their share?
The problem is that while much of the rest of the world is at least slightly socialist already, the USA is still paranoid about communism and resists social programs even if they're dying as a result - the Republican support for repealing socialized healthcare being a textbook example.
So UBI may not fly in the USA until past the time when its needed, and then we will get to see if the masses die off before they revolt.
And in fact, CNN didn't threaten the guy (though the wording was shit-poor for people who write for a living and presumably have access to good lawyers).
I read it as, "We won't publish your identity unless and until you make it newsworthy to do so". Yes, that effectively silences the guy (if he likes hiding the fact that he finds spewing racist and homophobic shit entertaining), but it's also a perfectly legitimate stance for a news outlet to take.
I certainly believe that Tolkien wasn't pushing a message but 'merely' telling a story, but it really isn't difficult to see he was drawing on certainly topical themes to build that story upon.
Mainly, an idealized pre-industrial past vs. an evil caricature of the disruption of the industrial revolution. I think every generation uses a similar theme of 'better days' in its stories, it's hardly unique.
You need to go outside once in a while. LoTR is not meant to be a manifesto.
Or... you could recognize that a lot of art is crap that is only valued by pretentious art fans, and having algorithm-designed art that the public enjoys more shows that up for what it it.
More diversity makes you stronger up to the point where you're fighting each other more than you gain from the exposure to different viewpoints.
When 50% of the nation is dead set on stopping the other 50% from doing anything... you don't get a lot of progress.