As far as I know the vast majority of Google's developers use a MacBook Pro (previous generation).
A good half of those at least will shudder at the thought of no proper Esc key and gratuitous omission of at least one regular old USB 3 port, and 16GB RAM is looking small for a development box these days. Oh, and the sheer horrible design thinking exhibited by omitting the amazing magsafe connector will be enough to sway some of those.
So confronted by grumbling developers threatening to order Surface Pros, Google may just make a super-souped-up chromebook+ for developers by freeing up user access to more of the Linux OS underneath, adding a giant SSD, etc.
But isn't any disgruntled underpaid Uber driver free to rent a few AWS instances and build their own alternative ride-hailing system called, say, Newber, or Goober, which gives more of the revenue to drivers?
Ok but for the sake of argument, other than the following factors:
1) Name recognition and reputation 2) Resources and ability to write good quality software and maintain good databases with quality data (e.g. maps database, wifi IDs database)
Is there anything stopping open organization SPQR from creating
SPQR App Services for Android
and offering equivalents to the Google-branded services?
If resourceful, SPQR could convince phone makers to pre-load their phones with the SPQR app store and services.
My devil's advocate question is: Is this just jealousy that Google out-innovated and out-standardized others, and out-"take my free stuff"-offered others, creating a de-facto monopoly?
Is this just bitterness that the network effect (on adoption) is the network effect, and it's tough to compete with after a while?
Seriously, if there is a strong will (including possibly distributed financial backing) to have a good quality open alternative to Google services on Android, couldn't that be done in theory? There's nothing license-wise or artificial-technical-barrier preventing it, is there?
I mean Android is just a use of an OS kernel and some standard services, including application security, and some UI conventions.
Everyone's free to write their own apps for it to make phones do whatever. And that's much easier to do (and get wide user adoption) because the apps can target Android standard services.
If anything, there's too much diversity (not enough lockdown) due to carrier and/or phone maker mods of Android. So users can get befuddled when they get something different and thought they were getting Android. And developers have to target many different versions to reach a big market. That's all because of too MUCH freedom (about when to push OS updates etc), not too little.
If you want to tinker with an alternative or forked OS, nothing is stopping you. And if you do it significantly better than the prevailing standard, and also have the organization and business network to make it grow and stick, then more power to you. The core is all FOSS so embrace and extend and modify to your heart's content. I don't see the problem here.
The overwhelming number of users want something functional, regularly improved in the same way as their friends' phone, and something which supports the apps they and their friends want to use together. Are you people just cranky? What's the big problem with monolithic Android where the name means something singular and predictable?
Because human readability of code is much more important than machine readability of code. With a suitable parser, the machine will be able to read the code. The art is in creating a language in which the program is obvious to many humans, not just the person who wrote it.
IMHO Python is on the right track for that. The best way to ensure all programs written in a programming language are readable by many people is to have the language enforce a uniform style, with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. People who don't like the language-author's enforced style conventions can use another language. Programs written in the language will be reliably readable and maintainable, and that's way more important than giving freedom of artistic impression to the program writer.
Yes. I mentioned a simple carbon tax (e.g. per tonne CO2equiv at source).
The main problem with cap and trade is that it needs lots of accountants "measuring" lots of abstractions, and it can be gamed easily so that it APPEARS on the books to be effective but in atmospheric physics terms is not effective.
Example. I can say I should get carbon-credit for not cutting down this forest land in my country, and so if I don't cut down those forests, I should be allowed to produce and consume a whack more fossil fuel. Or I can pay you to not cut down and slash-burn the forest land in your country, and then keep consuming or producing fossil fuel at growing rates. But that assumes that the 0 of the 0 sum game is a state where there are no forests left, which is both an environmentally immoral state of affairs, and one that we cannot morally or economically assume is the default trend. It is funny math, and it just lets us keep increasing our rate of digging up and consuming fossil fuel that needs to stay in the ground. The 0-value for forest state carbon-credit should be how much forest there is left now. You should only get credit if you allow more land to be forested than you have now, and you should lose credit if you are currently net-deforesting your land.
They KNOW that tinfoil hats are just a conspiracy invented to make it easier to identify the wingnut conspiracy theorists.
That's why they wear INVISIBLE tinfoil hats, made out of transparent aluminum.
BTW did you know that tinfoil hats, invisible or otherwise, act as an echo chamber amplifying and scrambling thoughts (and trapped electromagnetic radiation)?
I don't recognize your legal right to say I owe someone else because you "sold" them "my debt (which was to you remember)". Screw that. If you sold them that, good on you for ripping them off.
Also, if I'm the US, as long as I have the nukes, I ain't paying. Get used to it. Why did you lend me the money in the first place? It was because the money you lent sits in a secure economy protected by nukes (and relative political stability).
That still doesn't mean you'll get that money back any decade soon. Especially if I freeze your assets til you give my UUW drone back, in working order.
...say a carbon tax designed to recoup the many trillions of dollars that will need to be spent on adaptation to fossil-fuel-caused climate change and on compensation of whole climate-displaced populations and farmers, fishers etc and reconstruction of infrastructure destroyed in climate-change-induced wars... (such as Syria, Sudan,...)
then wind and solar would already be far cheaper than fossil-fuel energy.
We don't have such a tax or tax ramp plan, since the people who control the oil resource have most of the money, and thus have most of the politicians, and have most of the voters who are subject to the messages in paid marketing and disinformation.
Prediction: Too much uncomfortable truth in one post will probably get this downmodded as troll. That just shows how imbalanced current discourse on this topic has become, due to oil money interests.
Yeah but that's just standard CYA legalese. Just like a click-to-agree EULA, no real user actually believes it or practices it. The whole point of "Autopilot", allegedly, is to take some cognitive burden off the driver so they're more well-rested. If it's doing that, then the driver, by definition, isn't paying as much attention to driving and external context as they were before. The machine is taking over some responsibility. If it didn't, it would be completely useless wouldn't it?
They probably have similar language in the Uber terms of use.
ok but when was space-scrolling first implemented in browsers, which is what I was talking about.
Also, maybe it's just me, but I would be hesitant to use the spacebar for some secondary purpose like this because I would always be afraid of inserting an extra space into some editable document / form field that just happens to have focus somewhere on my crowded screen. In other words, I think maintaining space-to-scroll feature in a multi-window context is pretty bad user interaction design.
I've read various estimates that it takes a human somewhere between 5 and 17 seconds to take over from a self-driving car when notfied, when they were concentrating on something else.
So this poses an interesting design dilemma. If you put in a steering wheel and manual brake pedal etc, and have a situation requiring emergency rapid action, and the automation system is in the middle of taking the action it computed is best, how do you PREVENT the human from providing contrary control input which in all likelihood will mess up the overall response to the situation, especially since they are very likely coming in way late.
In what circumstances do you keep the human input disabled, for reasons like mentioned above, and in what circumstances or after what delay do you let them take over. A combined control-input situation would be disastrous, like having the "backseat" driver sitting beside you grab the wheel in panic while you're in evasive driving.
Conclusion. Socialized medicine does just fine. And you don't have to continually worry that you might go bankrupt if you get sick. Sounds like a good deal.
But "navigation bars or toolbars at the top of the web page" do not fall into the category of WWW scourges.
That's been a standard web page design since about, I don't know, 1993.
And making the toolbar stay there while the rest of the content scrolls has been there since the invention of frames (1994?) and CSS (1996).
So whoever invented the clever space bar thing (probably sometime after those dates), should have taken all of those common page designs into account when implementing the scroll control feature.
They want to be closed worlds, revenue generating from everything you do on their network and with their business partners only.
They want perpetual customer lock-in, because each "carrier's" dog's breakfast of apps and locked-content portals would be so different from other carriers' offerings that it would be too confusing and too much work to ever change the "Carrier-net" (as opposed to Internet) that you belong to.
I only glanced at the news article summary of the research, but it seems like they're saying you need an exponential number of neuron groups compared to the amount of information in bits that is coming in or being classified. It's hard to see how ONLY this organizing principle could be efficient in terms of amount of matter and energy needed to store the info.
There must be another organizing principles going along with this, to make it representationally and physically efficient. Principles such as perhaps: 1) The cliques are organized in an efficient representation abstraction hierarchy 2) Only create neuron cliques for those combinations of things which DO occur, rather than the exponential number of possible combinations which do not occur in the world. i.e a sparse distributed representation, as has been suggested in other neuroscience and computational neuroscience research.
the challenge is to make truly decentralised versions of Internet communications technology popular and easy to use, therefore adopted widely....and to do this quickly, so decentral tech can be well established before governments try to make decentral and personally owned comms and encryption technology illegal.
England and Western Europe, for example, were forests.
In Canada, US, and South America, you only need to go back a couple of hundred years to get good perspective on the extent and acceleration of deforestation.
Slashdot Mirror
Robots that make things connected to drones that deliver things, all run by a computer algorithm in the cloud that no single human understands.
What could possibly go wrong?
As far as I know the vast majority of Google's developers use a MacBook Pro (previous generation).
A good half of those at least will shudder at the thought of no proper Esc key and gratuitous omission of at least one regular old USB 3 port, and 16GB RAM is looking small for a development box these days. Oh, and the sheer horrible design thinking exhibited by omitting the amazing magsafe connector will be enough to sway some of those.
So confronted by grumbling developers threatening to order Surface Pros, Google may just make a super-souped-up chromebook+ for developers by freeing up user access to more of the Linux OS underneath, adding a giant SSD, etc.
Please.
But isn't any disgruntled underpaid Uber driver free to rent a few AWS instances and build their own alternative ride-hailing system called, say, Newber, or Goober, which gives more of the revenue to drivers?
Ok but for the sake of argument, other than the following factors:
1) Name recognition and reputation
2) Resources and ability to write good quality software and maintain good databases with quality data (e.g. maps database, wifi IDs database)
Is there anything stopping open organization SPQR from creating
SPQR App Services for Android
and offering equivalents to the Google-branded services?
If resourceful, SPQR could convince phone makers to pre-load their phones with the SPQR app store and services.
My devil's advocate question is: Is this just jealousy that Google out-innovated and out-standardized others, and out-"take my free stuff"-offered others, creating a de-facto monopoly?
Is this just bitterness that the network effect (on adoption) is the network effect, and it's tough to compete with after a while?
Seriously, if there is a strong will (including possibly distributed financial backing) to have a good quality open alternative to Google services on Android, couldn't that be done in theory? There's nothing license-wise or artificial-technical-barrier preventing it, is there?
I mean Android is just a use of an OS kernel and some standard services, including application security, and some UI conventions.
Everyone's free to write their own apps for it to make phones do whatever.
And that's much easier to do (and get wide user adoption) because the apps can target Android standard services.
If anything, there's too much diversity (not enough lockdown) due to carrier and/or phone maker mods of Android.
So users can get befuddled when they get something different and thought they were getting Android.
And developers have to target many different versions to reach a big market.
That's all because of too MUCH freedom (about when to push OS updates etc), not too little.
If you want to tinker with an alternative or forked OS, nothing is stopping you.
And if you do it significantly better than the prevailing standard, and also have the organization and business network to make it grow and stick, then more power to you. The core is all FOSS so embrace and extend and modify to your heart's content. I don't see the problem here.
The overwhelming number of users want something functional, regularly improved in the same way as their friends' phone, and something which supports the apps they and their friends want to use together. Are you people just cranky? What's the big problem with monolithic Android where the name means something singular and predictable?
Larry Wall critiquing someone else's programming language? ROFL.
Given that he blessed us with:
Pre-
Encyphered
Rune
Language
Because human readability of code is much more important than machine readability of code. With a suitable parser, the machine will be able to read the code. The art is in creating a language in which the program is obvious to many humans, not just the person who wrote it.
IMHO Python is on the right track for that. The best way to ensure all programs written in a programming language are readable by many people is to have the language enforce a uniform style, with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. People who don't like the language-author's enforced style conventions can use another language. Programs written in the language will be reliably readable and maintainable, and that's way more important than giving freedom of artistic impression to the program writer.
Yes. I mentioned a simple carbon tax (e.g. per tonne CO2equiv at source).
The main problem with cap and trade is that it needs lots of accountants "measuring" lots of abstractions, and it can be gamed easily so that it APPEARS on the books to be effective but in atmospheric physics terms is not effective.
Example. I can say I should get carbon-credit for not cutting down this forest land in my country, and so if I don't cut down those forests, I should be allowed to produce and consume a whack more fossil fuel. Or I can pay you to not cut down and slash-burn the forest land in your country, and then keep consuming or producing fossil fuel at growing rates. But that assumes that the 0 of the 0 sum game is a state where there are no forests left, which is both an environmentally immoral state of affairs, and one that we cannot morally or economically assume is the default trend. It is funny math, and it just lets us keep increasing our rate of digging up and consuming fossil fuel that needs to stay in the ground. The 0-value for forest state carbon-credit should be how much forest there is left now. You should only get credit if you allow more land to be forested than you have now, and you should lose credit if you are currently net-deforesting your land.
They KNOW that tinfoil hats are just a conspiracy invented to make it easier to identify the wingnut conspiracy theorists.
That's why they wear INVISIBLE tinfoil hats, made out of transparent aluminum.
BTW did you know that tinfoil hats, invisible or otherwise, act as an echo chamber amplifying and scrambling thoughts (and trapped electromagnetic radiation)?
"Ecosystems span roads no problem." Naive.
http://journals.plos.org/ploso...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.safepassagecoalitio...
Here's the thing.
If I owe you, I owe YOU (that's the U in IOU).
I don't recognize your legal right to say I owe someone else because you "sold" them "my debt (which was to you remember)". Screw that.
If you sold them that, good on you for ripping them off.
Also, if I'm the US, as long as I have the nukes, I ain't paying. Get used to it. Why did you lend me the money in the first place?
It was because the money you lent sits in a secure economy protected by nukes (and relative political stability).
That still doesn't mean you'll get that money back any decade soon.
Especially if I freeze your assets til you give my UUW drone back, in working order.
...say a carbon tax designed to recoup the many trillions of dollars that will need to be spent on adaptation to fossil-fuel-caused climate change and on compensation of whole climate-displaced populations and farmers, fishers etc and reconstruction of infrastructure destroyed in climate-change-induced wars... (such as Syria, Sudan,...)
then wind and solar would already be far cheaper than fossil-fuel energy.
We don't have such a tax or tax ramp plan, since the people who control the oil resource have most of the money,
and thus have most of the politicians,
and have most of the voters who are subject to the messages in paid marketing and disinformation.
Prediction: Too much uncomfortable truth in one post will probably get this downmodded as troll. That just shows how imbalanced current discourse on this topic has become, due to oil money interests.
Yeah but that's just standard CYA legalese. Just like a click-to-agree EULA, no real user actually believes it or practices it. The whole point of "Autopilot", allegedly, is to take some cognitive burden off the driver so they're more well-rested. If it's doing that, then the driver, by definition, isn't paying as much attention to driving and external context as they were before. The machine is taking over some responsibility. If it didn't, it would be completely useless wouldn't it?
They probably have similar language in the Uber terms of use.
ok but when was space-scrolling first implemented in browsers, which is what I was talking about.
Also, maybe it's just me, but I would be hesitant to use the spacebar for some secondary purpose like this because I would always be afraid of inserting an extra space into some editable document / form field that just happens to have focus somewhere on my crowded screen. In other words, I think maintaining space-to-scroll feature in a multi-window context is pretty bad user interaction design.
Tesla vehicles have an autopilot mode. They seem to be driving all over the world without extra permits.
Why is the Uber situation substantially different, regulation-wise?
I've read various estimates that it takes a human somewhere between 5 and 17 seconds to take over from a self-driving car when notfied, when they were concentrating on something else.
So this poses an interesting design dilemma. If you put in a steering wheel and manual brake pedal etc, and have a situation requiring emergency rapid action, and the automation system is in the middle of taking the action it computed is best, how do you PREVENT the human from providing contrary control input which in all likelihood will mess up the overall response to the situation, especially since they are very likely coming in way late.
In what circumstances do you keep the human input disabled, for reasons like mentioned above, and in what circumstances or after what delay do you let them take over. A combined control-input situation would be disastrous, like having the "backseat" driver sitting beside you grab the wheel in panic while you're in evasive driving.
Cuba 79.1
USA 79.0
World Average 71.0
Conclusion. Socialized medicine does just fine. And you don't have to continually worry that you might go bankrupt if you get sick.
Sounds like a good deal.
But "navigation bars or toolbars at the top of the web page" do not fall into the category of WWW scourges.
That's been a standard web page design since about, I don't know, 1993.
And making the toolbar stay there while the rest of the content scrolls has been there since the invention of frames (1994?) and CSS (1996).
So whoever invented the clever space bar thing (probably sometime after those dates), should have taken all of those common page designs into account when implementing the scroll control feature.
four more words!
"American life expectancy declines..." Yeah, electing a hothead with his finger on the red button will do that to you.
They want to be closed worlds, revenue generating from everything you do on their network and with their business partners only.
They want perpetual customer lock-in, because each "carrier's" dog's breakfast of apps and locked-content portals would be so different from other carriers' offerings that it would be too confusing and too much work to ever change the "Carrier-net" (as opposed to Internet) that you belong to.
Seriously, extreme right-wing nutjob gun owners with mad cow disease dementia https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Run for your lives.
I only glanced at the news article summary of the research, but it seems like they're saying you need an exponential number of neuron groups compared to the amount of information in bits that is coming in or being classified. It's hard to see how ONLY this organizing principle could be efficient in terms of amount of matter and energy needed to store the info.
There must be another organizing principles going along with this, to make it representationally and physically efficient.
Principles such as perhaps:
1) The cliques are organized in an efficient representation abstraction hierarchy
2) Only create neuron cliques for those combinations of things which DO occur, rather than the exponential number of possible combinations which do not occur in the world. i.e a sparse distributed representation, as has been suggested in other neuroscience and computational neuroscience research.
this
the challenge is to make truly decentralised versions of Internet communications technology popular and easy to use, therefore adopted widely. ...and to do this quickly, so decentral tech can be well established before governments try to make decentral and personally owned comms and encryption technology illegal.
England and Western Europe, for example, were forests.
In Canada, US, and South America, you only need to go back a couple of hundred years to get good perspective on the extent and acceleration of deforestation.
to say "OMG The best movie I've seen this year!" etc. without disclosing you're being paid to post?