My post was obviously written tongue in cheek, but there's a grain of truth in it. Languages like Coffeescript and Typescript are gaining ground, and there are multiple fiercely competing and very talented teams working on Javascript engines. If you want to write an app once, and run it everywhere, it's going to be Javascript (or something which compiles to it) and HTML. And once you've learned (or been brainwashed to) code in Javascript, node.js is pretty great for backend (esp. if you code in another language which is then compiled to Javascript). JSON document databases are also increasing on popularity, and JSON seems to be preferred over XML in many cases which otherwise have nothing to do with Javascript.
World does not care what you or I think of Javascript, it just takes the road of least resistance to quarterly profits. And Javascript seems to be a highway today.
What I take it to mean is, diminishing returns direct investment in other avenues of research. What ever is most likely to produce increase in computing capacity (and hence enable sales of new tech down the line) is going to get research funding. Totally new tech and risky innovations will not get as much funding if same money gives better returns if it is spent on building a refined chip fan with mostly proven tech.
So for past decades we have been making better and better abacuses. What we'll invent when that road becomes too steep, I don't know, but I don't think we have found the ultimate tech in computing.
Yes, why don't we go back to the abacus, and see what new ideas come up!.
Logical fallacy, nobody is suggesting going back. If you want to take abacus as example, then what you are saying is, let's just keep adding beads and rows to our abacuses, and come up with ingenious bead sliding mechanisms to allow faster and faster movement of beads.
Now we're soon hitting the diminishing returns limit of this road, need to start inventing something else to make calculations faster, and perhaps open entire new ways of doing calculations, analogous to what you can do with a slide rule.
For the clearances to be right at operating temperature, they have to be far greater when cold. On cold starts, the blow-by will probably pretty bad - enough to fail US federal emissions limits; doubly so for California's.
If that is a problem, then a possible solution to that is to add (probably inductive) heating of the pistons. Note that engines are regularly heated in cold climates already today, mostly with sub-optimal heaters, because for some reason engine manufacturers don't bother to include an efficient way to pre-heat engines. So for some parts of the world, this would be a boon.
Perhaps a ceramic engine could run hot enough, that carbon at critical places will burn. Perhaps ceramics can be made with surface which resists carbon-build up. Perhaps ceramic material can be made so that it catalyzes burning of carbon. Perhaps some space can be reserved and gas flow around the piston can be designed so that carbon build-up happens at places where it does not matter. Perhaps increasing efficiency enabled by higher temps will simply allow so clean burning, that amount of unburnt carbon is reduced to the tenth of current minimum and it will not become a problem until it's necessary to overhaul the engine anyway.
To summarize, I'd wager carbon build-up is just an engineering challenge.
We might even stop writing everything in Javascript?
Indeed. JavaScript is the assembly language of the future, and we need to stop coding in it. There already are many nicer languages which are then compiled into Javascript, ready for execution in any computing environment.
I doubt it would work very well. Near earth objects would be moving fast, and be at unknown location, while this is designed to look at steady known object with really long exposure time and probably very narrow field of view.
Stressed ecosystem in my mind is one where specialized species are in decline and going extinct one after another, in a potentially accelerating cycle, leaving only generalist species, low genetic diversity and lower biological output (less total energy utilized from sun, slower recycling of nutrients, etc). I think we can say from fossil record, that recovery of diversity takes some millions of years, which is kinda long from human point of view. And our food plants are largely depending on this ecosystem existing around our fields. This gloomy future can perhaps be dodged with the same tech that may bring it forth, but only if we recognize the danger, and if corporations raking in the profits are forced to take responsibility (unlike the bailed out financial institutions responsible for the recent mayhem in their sector).
As for oaks and acorns... Soon we have gene tech to have domesticated acorns from anything, no need for oaks...
No, seriously. Copyright does more harm than good. Just get rid of the whole damn thing.
I think it'd be enough to make the Copyright holder have a right to a big slice of any revenue (not profits) made with use of copyrighted material without license. If there's no revenue, then there's no basis for demanding a slice of it.
And next 50 years are going to introduce more change, than past 5000 years. Turn that time into generations of important species in the ecosystem, which are going to interact with more and more radically engineered species out of corporate labs. You see no difference, no need to be cautious?
The main difference is going to be rate and magnitude of change, introduced to already very stressed ecosystem.
Another more human concern is, how much can a species be changed, before you need to start calling it something new? If you bring an allergen nut protein to wheat, how do you label that? This is a problem which is unlikely to arise with traditional technology, but trivial enough to achieve with gene tech, that it might happen accidentally or out of malignant negligence even.
Selecting individuals does not modify individuals. Species gets modified over time as a result, of course. But for most people today "genetic modification" means taking more active role than only selecting, it means producing modified individuals as starting point for selection. Intentionally introducing random mutations and selecting from them is borderline, similar to a non-skilled student hammering at excercise code randomly to get it to compile and not crash for test input is borderline programming.
While SC2 played back at its own era was one of the best games ever (I think I shed tears when that red glow got removed from around the Earth), by today's standard it's just too tedious. I tried playing UQM a while back and, well... Tedious, almost boring. It's a game from a more civilized era, let it stay there. A modern remake is just going to rape the memory, insult old fans and still leave new players wondering what's so great about it.
That's because targeted ads are failures. You research and then buy a pair of shoes online and they spam you with shoe ads for the next month when you are no longer interested.
Well, that's clearly the result of you not providing enough information. They know you were interested in shoes, but not that you bought them already. If only advertising companies had anonymous access to credit card purchases they could link to your all web browsing activity, you would get better adds.
Selecting something is not modifying it. Genetic modification (in today's context) is about producing individual specimens with modified or new genes, not just differently mixed genes of its parents. Trying to muddle this is dishonest.
Actual genetic modification is going to be the biggest revolution in human history, possibly biggest revolution in the history of life on this planet if we don't destroy our civilization before it becomes as ubiquitous as cell phones are today. Saying it's just extension of what we've been doing for millenia is like saying updating globally accessible Wikipedia article with mobile device on-location and real time is just extension of prehistoric people drawing stuff in sand with a stick. Sure, it is, if you select your viewpoint carefully.
The rebar should not matter much, it has too big holes to stop WiFi frequencies. It's just signal getting weaker when passing through the material. Rebar certainly plays a part in that, but does not stop the signal.
I think any modern intentional bombing of civilians pales in comparison to what happened to civilians in conquered cities before modern times. The whole remaining siege army pillaging, raping and murdering in a very close-and-personal way, with full approval of the commanders.
But more to the point, now nasty stuff like this is considered a war crime. Back then it was a reward for being a soldier in an invading army.
... not foreseeing how degenerate humanity can get.
Foreseeing? Humanity is at its least degenerate today, at least in the developed world. It's not long ago when things we now consider totally depraved were considered normal. Just think about the world wars of last century, then consider what was done in the age of colonialism, and things just get more grisly the farther back you go.
Getting some engineers of enemy tribe killed is nothing in the grand history of humanity.
D-Bus is still portable across multiple free Unices and even Windows. The standalone daemon isn't going away anytime soon, and I can't see the multitude of projects depending on it giving up cross-platform compatibility.
"D-Bus Is portable", but seems headed down the road of practical unportability (barring complete rewrite and parallel maintenance of critical parts of a complex software stack). This seems to be a package deal, systemd + kernel DBus. Seems very much like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: Integrate to Linux kernel, create growing ecosystem which depends on the new features of the Kernel version of DBus, abandon non-Linux kernel versions of DBus.
I truly hope I am wrong, but for now I will steer clear of systemd and any Linux distro which is going to use it. For me Linux comes with a bit of ideological baggage (you know, openness, freedom), and I'll not touch this particular bit of it until I am comfortable it is not going to shove something down my throat. And if it turns out to be difficult, then that more-or-less proves that my concern was valid.
The issue is UI. Try doing some desktop-like workflow on a tablet with mouse and keyboard. Awkward. And I doubt Android even provides APIs for proper mouse handling, such as desktop-style text selection. So there is a long long way to go. Desktop UX app is surprisingly different from touch UX, in some fundamental ways. Even if there is one maximized window, workflow still works.
Additionally, especially for anyone with just single screen, Aero snap or equivalent (drag a window to edge of screen and it fills that half of the screen, etc) are really useful in enabling two windows on screen without the usual juggling and resizing. And it allows making full use of a wide screen monitor (I'd actually prefer 2:1 instead of prevalent 16:9 and 16:10). And it's easy to discover by accident, so more people might be using it than you think.
You can't, because it's PROOF of global warming, because everything is.
Funny thing about real world natural science is, pretty much everything affects pretty much everything. So if AGW is really happening, then comparing against pretty much anything that has happened in Earth's history should be consistent with that. Past climate changes have had their causes, and assuming we have not missed remains of pre-human industrial civilization, these causes should be different than a civilization returning "fossil" carbon to atmosphere. On the other hand, current climate change should look like it is because of returning fossil carbon to atmosphere by us.
The AK-47's only purpose is to assist in killing people
Primary purpose is killing, that's what an assault rifle is designed for, but it is not the only purpose.
One purpose is: to be able to kill people, often in the hope that it will not be necessary, indeed with the hope that having a credible ability will avoid needing to actually do it.
Yet another purpose is to just have fun with target practice, without killing anyone.
And technically speaking, suppressive fire is not really intended for killing the enemy, it is intended for making it harder for the enemy to shoot and kill you.
Based purely on this/. article's comment's, I'd say she deserves a medal for bringing attention to the AIDS problem in Africa... Also, do you think her apology is insincere, or do you just generally not believe in forgiving?
No matter how high the resolution, this film is terrible...
Well, I think it is excellent at what it is. Everything could be better, but anything will quickly reach a point where making something better makes something else less good. And BBB is easily in the region, where making it better is hard, where any improvement is just making it less good in some other respect, just making it different.
Just because you did not enjoy it does not make it terrible. It only means your life is less enjoyable compared to those who liked it (well,,unless you get kicks out of calling it terrible).
Slashdot Mirror
My post was obviously written tongue in cheek, but there's a grain of truth in it. Languages like Coffeescript and Typescript are gaining ground, and there are multiple fiercely competing and very talented teams working on Javascript engines. If you want to write an app once, and run it everywhere, it's going to be Javascript (or something which compiles to it) and HTML. And once you've learned (or been brainwashed to) code in Javascript, node.js is pretty great for backend (esp. if you code in another language which is then compiled to Javascript). JSON document databases are also increasing on popularity, and JSON seems to be preferred over XML in many cases which otherwise have nothing to do with Javascript.
World does not care what you or I think of Javascript, it just takes the road of least resistance to quarterly profits. And Javascript seems to be a highway today.
What I take it to mean is, diminishing returns direct investment in other avenues of research. What ever is most likely to produce increase in computing capacity (and hence enable sales of new tech down the line) is going to get research funding. Totally new tech and risky innovations will not get as much funding if same money gives better returns if it is spent on building a refined chip fan with mostly proven tech.
So for past decades we have been making better and better abacuses. What we'll invent when that road becomes too steep, I don't know, but I don't think we have found the ultimate tech in computing.
Yes, why don't we go back to the abacus, and see what new ideas come up!.
Logical fallacy, nobody is suggesting going back. If you want to take abacus as example, then what you are saying is, let's just keep adding beads and rows to our abacuses, and come up with ingenious bead sliding mechanisms to allow faster and faster movement of beads.
Now we're soon hitting the diminishing returns limit of this road, need to start inventing something else to make calculations faster, and perhaps open entire new ways of doing calculations, analogous to what you can do with a slide rule.
For the clearances to be right at operating temperature, they have to be far greater when cold. On cold starts, the blow-by will probably pretty bad - enough to fail US federal emissions limits; doubly so for California's.
If that is a problem, then a possible solution to that is to add (probably inductive) heating of the pistons. Note that engines are regularly heated in cold climates already today, mostly with sub-optimal heaters, because for some reason engine manufacturers don't bother to include an efficient way to pre-heat engines. So for some parts of the world, this would be a boon.
Carbon build-up.
Perhaps a ceramic engine could run hot enough, that carbon at critical places will burn. Perhaps ceramics can be made with surface which resists carbon-build up. Perhaps ceramic material can be made so that it catalyzes burning of carbon. Perhaps some space can be reserved and gas flow around the piston can be designed so that carbon build-up happens at places where it does not matter. Perhaps increasing efficiency enabled by higher temps will simply allow so clean burning, that amount of unburnt carbon is reduced to the tenth of current minimum and it will not become a problem until it's necessary to overhaul the engine anyway.
To summarize, I'd wager carbon build-up is just an engineering challenge.
We might even stop writing everything in Javascript?
Indeed. JavaScript is the assembly language of the future, and we need to stop coding in it. There already are many nicer languages which are then compiled into Javascript, ready for execution in any computing environment.
I doubt it would work very well. Near earth objects would be moving fast, and be at unknown location, while this is designed to look at steady known object with really long exposure time and probably very narrow field of view.
Stressed ecosystem in my mind is one where specialized species are in decline and going extinct one after another, in a potentially accelerating cycle, leaving only generalist species, low genetic diversity and lower biological output (less total energy utilized from sun, slower recycling of nutrients, etc). I think we can say from fossil record, that recovery of diversity takes some millions of years, which is kinda long from human point of view. And our food plants are largely depending on this ecosystem existing around our fields.
This gloomy future can perhaps be dodged with the same tech that may bring it forth, but only if we recognize the danger, and if corporations raking in the profits are forced to take responsibility (unlike the bailed out financial institutions responsible for the recent mayhem in their sector).
As for oaks and acorns... Soon we have gene tech to have domesticated acorns from anything, no need for oaks...
No, seriously. Copyright does more harm than good. Just get rid of the whole damn thing.
I think it'd be enough to make the Copyright holder have a right to a big slice of any revenue (not profits) made with use of copyrighted material without license. If there's no revenue, then there's no basis for demanding a slice of it.
And next 50 years are going to introduce more change, than past 5000 years. Turn that time into generations of important species in the ecosystem, which are going to interact with more and more radically engineered species out of corporate labs. You see no difference, no need to be cautious?
The main difference is going to be rate and magnitude of change, introduced to already very stressed ecosystem.
Another more human concern is, how much can a species be changed, before you need to start calling it something new? If you bring an allergen nut protein to wheat, how do you label that? This is a problem which is unlikely to arise with traditional technology, but trivial enough to achieve with gene tech, that it might happen accidentally or out of malignant negligence even.
Selecting individuals does not modify individuals. Species gets modified over time as a result, of course. But for most people today "genetic modification" means taking more active role than only selecting, it means producing modified individuals as starting point for selection. Intentionally introducing random mutations and selecting from them is borderline, similar to a non-skilled student hammering at excercise code randomly to get it to compile and not crash for test input is borderline programming.
While SC2 played back at its own era was one of the best games ever (I think I shed tears when that red glow got removed from around the Earth), by today's standard it's just too tedious. I tried playing UQM a while back and, well... Tedious, almost boring. It's a game from a more civilized era, let it stay there. A modern remake is just going to rape the memory, insult old fans and still leave new players wondering what's so great about it.
That's because targeted ads are failures. You research and then buy a pair of shoes online and they spam you with shoe ads for the next month when you are no longer interested.
Well, that's clearly the result of you not providing enough information. They know you were interested in shoes, but not that you bought them already. If only advertising companies had anonymous access to credit card purchases they could link to your all web browsing activity, you would get better adds.
Selecting something is not modifying it. Genetic modification (in today's context) is about producing individual specimens with modified or new genes, not just differently mixed genes of its parents. Trying to muddle this is dishonest.
Actual genetic modification is going to be the biggest revolution in human history, possibly biggest revolution in the history of life on this planet if we don't destroy our civilization before it becomes as ubiquitous as cell phones are today. Saying it's just extension of what we've been doing for millenia is like saying updating globally accessible Wikipedia article with mobile device on-location and real time is just extension of prehistoric people drawing stuff in sand with a stick. Sure, it is, if you select your viewpoint carefully.
The rebar should not matter much, it has too big holes to stop WiFi frequencies. It's just signal getting weaker when passing through the material. Rebar certainly plays a part in that, but does not stop the signal.
I think any modern intentional bombing of civilians pales in comparison to what happened to civilians in conquered cities before modern times. The whole remaining siege army pillaging, raping and murdering in a very close-and-personal way, with full approval of the commanders.
But more to the point, now nasty stuff like this is considered a war crime. Back then it was a reward for being a soldier in an invading army.
... not foreseeing how degenerate humanity can get.
Foreseeing? Humanity is at its least degenerate today, at least in the developed world. It's not long ago when things we now consider totally depraved were considered normal. Just think about the world wars of last century, then consider what was done in the age of colonialism, and things just get more grisly the farther back you go.
Getting some engineers of enemy tribe killed is nothing in the grand history of humanity.
What?
D-Bus is still portable across multiple free Unices and even Windows. The standalone daemon isn't going away anytime soon, and I can't see the multitude of projects depending on it giving up cross-platform compatibility.
"D-Bus Is portable", but seems headed down the road of practical unportability (barring complete rewrite and parallel maintenance of critical parts of a complex software stack). This seems to be a package deal, systemd + kernel DBus. Seems very much like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: Integrate to Linux kernel, create growing ecosystem which depends on the new features of the Kernel version of DBus, abandon non-Linux kernel versions of DBus.
I truly hope I am wrong, but for now I will steer clear of systemd and any Linux distro which is going to use it. For me Linux comes with a bit of ideological baggage (you know, openness, freedom), and I'll not touch this particular bit of it until I am comfortable it is not going to shove something down my throat. And if it turns out to be difficult, then that more-or-less proves that my concern was valid.
(Yes, I'm the AC above.)
The issue is UI. Try doing some desktop-like workflow on a tablet with mouse and keyboard. Awkward. And I doubt Android even provides APIs for proper mouse handling, such as desktop-style text selection. So there is a long long way to go. Desktop UX app is surprisingly different from touch UX, in some fundamental ways. Even if there is one maximized window, workflow still works.
Additionally, especially for anyone with just single screen, Aero snap or equivalent (drag a window to edge of screen and it fills that half of the screen, etc) are really useful in enabling two windows on screen without the usual juggling and resizing. And it allows making full use of a wide screen monitor (I'd actually prefer 2:1 instead of prevalent 16:9 and 16:10). And it's easy to discover by accident, so more people might be using it than you think.
You can't, because it's PROOF of global warming, because everything is.
Funny thing about real world natural science is, pretty much everything affects pretty much everything. So if AGW is really happening, then comparing against pretty much anything that has happened in Earth's history should be consistent with that. Past climate changes have had their causes, and assuming we have not missed remains of pre-human industrial civilization, these causes should be different than a civilization returning "fossil" carbon to atmosphere. On the other hand, current climate change should look like it is because of returning fossil carbon to atmosphere by us.
Now, what does it look like to you?
The AK-47's only purpose is to assist in killing people
Primary purpose is killing, that's what an assault rifle is designed for, but it is not the only purpose.
One purpose is: to be able to kill people, often in the hope that it will not be necessary, indeed with the hope that having a credible ability will avoid needing to actually do it.
Yet another purpose is to just have fun with target practice, without killing anyone.
And technically speaking, suppressive fire is not really intended for killing the enemy, it is intended for making it harder for the enemy to shoot and kill you.
Based purely on this /. article's comment's, I'd say she deserves a medal for bringing attention to the AIDS problem in Africa... Also, do you think her apology is insincere, or do you just generally not believe in forgiving?
How does false trade volume increase real (taxable) revenue?
I mean, other than perhaps increasing real transaction volume, which is presumably the goal anyway.
No matter how high the resolution, this film is terrible...
Well, I think it is excellent at what it is. Everything could be better, but anything will quickly reach a point where making something better makes something else less good. And BBB is easily in the region, where making it better is hard, where any improvement is just making it less good in some other respect, just making it different.
Just because you did not enjoy it does not make it terrible. It only means your life is less enjoyable compared to those who liked it (well,,unless you get kicks out of calling it terrible).