A. Release software updates that can slow older phones down
B. Release software updates only for newer phones
Back in the early dark ages—before Microsoft's 30-year war on software quality (the early dark ages weren't great, but this was before the bubonic plague, which sure beat the middle dark ages)—nobody was drinking the Kool-Aid that there were only two options.
If you believe this now, you've been played.
It's funny what you can teach people to take for granted, after a looong trek through the parched Windows desert (not that Microsoft was the only culprit, but they sure blazed the trail).
If only we'd had text back in the day: the CTRL-ALT-DEL shrug emoticon would have flourished like an alien "Roundup" virus on planet Mesoamerica.
I have to say that namecheck, press-ganged into a verb, with the mainsail of semantic drift inflated to a D cup, made me throw up a little bit in my mouth.
Perhaps "blamecheck" could step into the breech, initially sounding twice as hipster refurb, though about 10% as asinine.
If you gave a shit about your own skin mattering, you wouldn't be posting as AC.
Just what everyone needs: advice in race relations from a translucent asshole who squirts through risibly Spartan "condensed" matter, and who moans like an abandoned, one-eyed walrus in the attic on dark, damp nights, because his entire social life consists of roaming the countryside rattling chains, but he doesn't want his last moth-eaten bedsheet to end up smelling of mildew as that might arouse the sleeping scent-hounds of common sense (spoiling his one true joy in life: duping naive, sleep-deprived misanthropes into into bedwetting their flannel jammies over a frantic misapprehension that the call is coming from inside the house) .
Oh, the agony of solitary troll confinement. We feel your pain. And your MO. And your BS. And your BO.
Betteridge bound and gagged in the trunk, but I can still hear him thumping.
The new paper, which was presented Monday at a gastroenterology conference in Vienna, could provide support for marine biologists who have long warned of the dangers posed by microplastics in our oceans.
Because salmon poo is a great delicacy of human cuisine.
Is this the kind of support that helps to persuade people who can't think straight, or the other kind of support which normally travels without the five-letter valet beginning with the letter "c"?
The products I've looked at usually translate to an implied endurance of 20,000 to 30,000 total drive writes (typically over a 5-year life cycle).
For a typical capacity, this translates to a rough maximum write duty cycle around 2% over the life of the drive.
Basically, you can burst 2 GB/s of sequential write traffic for one minute out of every hour, so long as you have 100% read traffic for the other 59 minutes, and not burn out your warranty before the rated five-year window expires.
For a ZFS ZIL cache (which is write intense), you'd want about 25x more endurance than that, to achieve a sane price/performance ratio. For a ZFS L2ARC cache, the cost is high, and the reduced latency is less of a big deal. Perhaps it would shine in an analytics application where you load the data up once per day, then ad hoc query the hell out of it all day long (and the dataset is big enough that you don't want to pay the DRAM price to keep the whole thing resident).
But for myself, I've yet to pencil in 3D XPoint in the sweet spot for any application I presently care about.
Well, because Slashdotters on the whole aren't very smart, we get asked the softball question: should this be happening?
Winner of the Softball Question of All Time Derby: Should every day be ice cream day?
Note: If you're being asked, it's by a children's book written at a grade-two reading level, intimating a terrible adult truth in a toddler-safe 1/4 teaspoon dose: that 90% of unintended consequences are entirely foreseeable, but for the thick and eternal haze of ice cream psychology.
Hardball question: is there any way to enforce an "optional" crunch time industry-wide workplace policy where your crunch time record doesn't serve as a plausibly deniable tie breaker at your next promotion (and every promotion opportunity thereafter?)
This discussion, as posed, doesn't even have the virtue of the childhood reader, which is at least intimating something dark about the universal will to consume ice cream.
The last whimper of principled conservatism, once a policy incorporates all their official desiderata except naked self-enrichment: "But all our businesses will flee to the other side!"
Which is rich, because the "other side" is a mirror image, all saying exactly the same thing (about the naked self-enrichment gap). And then they complain that government is wasteful, but no sane business would tolerate being raking over the jurisdictional coals by this game-theoretic slam dunk.
So government spends all the money up front to develop a sound policy framework, and then it doesn't get implemented—in favour of something else, far less sound, and far more open to counterproductive manipulation—because of this fatal "what about the other side?" fang.
A global minimum tax on high technology is government attempting to apply the rules of sane business management.
And there's nothing an unprincipled conservative hates more than government intruding upon competence.
Oh, the howls will be unbearable if this proposal so much as inches forward.
One of the reasons I write on social media is that the subconscious mind doesn't convey its knowledge in straight lines.
Maybe some people don't know this, but the five stages of grief model (formally Kübler-Ross) was basically a brilliant conversation starter. Constructive ways to talk about loss, grief, and death are relatively thin on the ground. Its half-century zeitgeist tenure was well deserved.
But the model itself is far from a physical constant of the universe, so I wasn't surprised that I got a memo from my subconscious mind right after pressing submit "you know, most people think this is a five stage model; it could even be that the only response your post gets is correcting four to five, and nobody even notices the central point."
Me to my subconscious: tell me about it.
I'm generally a stickler for precision when there's something to be precise about, but the "five" in five stages of grief functions as what linguists call a "bound lexeme". We've gotten into the habit, like the five senses (which are still the five main exo-senses, even though we've now added things like proprioception as interior senses; the bigger argument with "five" senses ought to involve its total exclusion of the entire category of wufullness—e.g. telepathy, premonition, and private messages from God about your true path in life, transmediated via the as-yet unidentified theochlorians, smack dab in the middle of the colour green, within a spectrum formed from a whole new photonic vibratory node physicists have yet to discover, though there's a flagrant clue in one of the 10^500 string theory universes, if we would just sit down and do the work).
My lexical mind still knows the difference between four/five stages of grief, but my semantic mind departed from this niggle long ago.
Then you see articles in major publications with headlines blaring: "The 12 reasons we should abandon the 5 stages". And suddenly the light dawns: Lego porn: it's a thing.
Oh, how that little number up front tickles our desire to stack conformable plastic bricks.
We used to think that young human males were particular prone to falling down antisocial rabbit holes, such as video gaming.
That was before we discovered social media. Now we know that young women fall down antisocial rabbit holes every bit as easily. As ever, men and women are mirror images, though often with the battery reversed.
In my first post, I pinned Lego porn onto a geek sub-tribe, implicitly male. My bad.
All this appeals to a specific sub-tribe of cultural stereotype 'stress kitten'.
So some publication writes up a study of how psychopathic personality types are discovered to be very good as passing themselves off as thoughtful, introverted wallflowers on eharmony.
And of course this immediately triggers the stress kitten version of the 4.5 stages of grief, covered over by a think foam topping of wankette creme: "oh, but this isn't the boy I'm chatting with, because I don't go into those dark corners (because my desktop computer never runs porous security containers chock to the brim with malignant JavaScript downloaded from hither and yon)".
Yeah, right, sweetie pie. I guess that works for you.
Slashdot: where the four stages of grief are buried under a think coat of foamy, wanker creme.
Despite their reputation, geeks are usually well informed about the world, including worldly matters we learned about at age 19 instead of age 14. Within those parameters, there's also a sub-tribe of geeks who rapidly become unmoored from reality when reality disrupts their innate sense of law and Lego order, who never outgrow the eternal adolescence of plastic bricks.
Zuckerberg also owns a whopping 441.6 million Class B shares. Control over nearly 89% of the Class B shares, gives Zuckerberg 60% voting rights in the company.
You'd think his giant position would incentivize him to be less of a dork. Except, Fratbook. Once an ogler, always an ogre.
Uncompressed cartridge formatting of up to 10 TB with the use of IBM Tape Cartridge 3592 Advanced Data (Type D).
Woof! The rest of the text would make paint cry.
That makes 230 PB of uncompressed storage.
But there's a more recent TS1170 with 40 TB raw capacity. So we could be looking at a raw 0.92 EB.
But that's assuming the new drive fits into the old frame, and I haven't sacrificed any recently warm chickens to the product matrix oracle on this quick scrape, so who's to say?
Apparently, you don't think America is renting machines that print money.
Apparently, you do think America is renting machines that spew giant piles of filth, that all has to be immediately carted off to the nearest landfill, at great expense.
Into which category goes a DVD? If it's a Gladiator DVD, soon enough it does go to the landfill, where it properly belongs (how did that abomination ever win Best Picture?)
However, if it's an instructional DVD titled "Machine Learning for Dummies"—though it might hasten to the landfill twice as fast—usually not until after the person consuming the DVD has absorbed the information and become an elite Machine Learning Ninja Turtle.
Advantage: America.
Moral of the story: Winners and losers in borrowed trade must be decided on a case by case basis. Because enlightened reinvestment is a win-win, any way you slice it.
This level of economic analysis requires 1/8 tablespoon more nuance than running around with your hair on fire chanting "derf derf deficit".
No self-respecting institution sits back and endures fraudulent misrepresentation (on an astroturf scale) if they can do something about it (and they can, because the government has entire agencies with the capabilities and powers to do exactly that).
Submitting false documents to the government is a form of trolling, and in many contexts is illegal. It can also be a form of identity fraud and doxing to slap other's people's personal names and private credentials on top. It can end up denying my legitimate input a proper voice (because my name is also on top of a fraudulent opposite).
Being illegal used to be fair cause to investigate something.
There may be elements of the present government wishing to normalize bullshit to such a degree that you now have to stop and ask "and what else?" before you investigate something merely because it appears to have broken a law.
There's a name for putting law and order in to your rearview mirror. It's called anarchy. I am not a fan.
I, for one, do not welcome our new bullshit overlords.
I copied my misspelling from an AC post I was replying too, who managed not to copy it correctly from a previous post where he had actually already quoted the correct spelling. It's properly Vic Gundotra.
Just what is it about AC that shaves off 30 IQ points, as a general starting point?
Yup, it was Google's real name policy and their policy of neutron bomb non-recourse to any errors on their side that caused me never even to consider learning the first thing about Google+.
And this from a position where I figure Google was already 100% under my personal privacy kimono, so I estimated my exposure to marginal privacy loss at close to zero. (For every other social media service, I either block cookies entirely, or use the service on a thin, sporadic basis at most.) So basically, Google+ was the only social media service I would even have considered seriously, and it was crossed off my list on day zero for exactly the reasons you gave above.
Given Google's outward profile, Vic Gundrota was a bad, bad hire.
He'd have been way better off staying at Microsoft (where he used to work), or being hired by Oracle or Amazon or Apple during one of its many heel turns, or any other outfit that celebrates scorched earth.
Aside from the technical challenges there's also vast uncertainty as to whether or not we've sabotaged our own ecosphere to the point where we can't depend on being able to live in it for the long term (meaning: at least the next 1000 years).
No, not really.
99% of the concern is that we might not be able to live in the current numbers and at the current burn rate. A plague that kills 3 billion people would set human progress back by about 50 years. Meanwhile there would be a great flourishing of all the other life taking advantage of all those resources we were no longer consuming.
We complain about pollution, but all anthropic pollution added together harms human health less than long-prevailing childbirth and infant mortality rates (survival to age six).
Bearing a child is still one of the most dangerous things a woman can do. It's the sixth most common cause of death among women age 20 to 34 in the United States.
That's at the current, miraculously improved death rate.
Given all the dangers, how did deaths in childbirth fall to about one-fiftieth of the historic rate?... In the United States today, about 15 women die in pregnancy or childbirth per 100,000 live births. That's way too many, but a century ago it was more than 600 women per 100,000 births. In the 1600s and 1700s, the death rate was twice that: By some estimates, between 1 and 1.5 percent of women giving birth died. Note that the rate is per birth, so the lifetime risk of dying in childbirth was much higher, perhaps 4 percent.
United States in 1900: 850 per 100,000 live births. These are young, healthy women dying, not women aged 55 who inhaled too many fumes of some modern industrial varnish.
Short of tipping the whole planet into nuclear winter, we haven't done any damage to the planetary ecosystem that a great human dying off wouldn't put right in under a few centuries.
So what if the ice caps melt? It's happened before, and life survived just fine. Might be tragic for fancy apes with beach homes. But let's not imagine any whales are going to complain.
Historically when 1/3 or 2/3 of the population dies off suddenly, it's not a happy time for anyone who lives through it. We've have to discard a heap-load of useless modern technology, such as Twitter. But we'd keep the essentials running, such as a circa 2005-level Google search —though maybe with a 2000 ms response time instead of 400 ms (and maybe only 25% of the population would have direct access). It would be tough, but we'd all pull together (those of us who were still living) and we'd pull through.
Even if the entire planet died back to a stable population at the levels of the Roman Empire (circa 100 million people), humans would not loose their cherished conservation status: Least Concern.
Endangered species criteria (one of many): * Population estimated to number fewer than 2,500 mature individuals.
* Total human breeding population of 2,500 individuals (in sufficiently close proximity) around Moan Level 8 (where 9.99 is one bun in the oven away from species-level exit stage left). * Total human breeding population of 100 million individuals (in sufficiently close proximity) around Moan Level 3. (And that might be generous.) * Everything below 3.0 is denominated in millimoans. * Our biggest ongoing tragedies: about 100 millimoans each (the great plastic gyre, a few degrees C global temperature rise, things like that). * A really severe global nuclear winter: maybe 3,000 millimoans. (In my system above, that's a 98.6% global human population loss.)
~100 years of the federal government paying natives under treaty, and it's effectively collapsed their entire culture and society.
Got any additional blanket wisdom for the entire continent of Africa? All those darkies, can't hardly tell 'em apart, at least not until they open the wallet they don't have.
In the modern era, the one where we've discovered distributed representation (machine learning), you might model the plight of the many indigenous groups who have fallen into social decay as a combination of alcoholism, racism, residential schools, and the prevailing economic policy, among many other things an ML algorithm would factor into a 1000-term vector we don't fully understand.
Thus, let's start with some hard numbers and look at the trend-line.
In the federal department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, with data gleaned from federal archives, department spending per registered First Nations person rose to $9,056 per person by 2012 from $922 in 1950 (and the figures are already adjusted for inflation so this is an apple-to-apple comparison).
In comparison, federal program spending on all Canadians (including native Canadians) rose to $7,316 per person in 2012 from $1,504 per capita back in 1950. [alarmist word revised]
Wow, somehow that whopping $1700 increment—as reported by the right-leaning Frasier Institute—leads diverse indigenous populations across the board into economic malaise and social ruin.
And this paltry increment is only a recent figure. Back in 1950 it was a decrement (as reported by the Frasier Institute). I don't think Canada has a track record of any consistent policy on this front, certainly not over 100 years.
We do have closer to a 100-year track record on discrimination, residential schools, and rampant alcoholism (though many progressive native communities, having come to terms with their genetic and cultural propensities, now consume far less alcohol than the Canadian average).
In order to get into a one-on-one situation, you have to first pass through three other criteria.
* you can't shoot what you can't find or can't see * the Americans can keep a fair number in the air at any given time (you might lose on numbers alone) * 90% of all F-35 kills are probably from long range * if any adversaries remain after distance engagement, you might get into a close-combat situation, but even then, the F-35 might have a numerical edge, because of all the initial kills from long range
The test pilot, who has experience flying the F-15E, F-16 and F/A-18F, says the F-35A's manoeuvrability is "substantially inferior to the F-15E" because of its smaller wings, similar weight and reduced afterburner thrust.
"Even with the limited F-16 target configuration, the F-35A remained at a distinct energy disadvantage for every engagement."
In response to the report, the F-35 joint programme office said the aircraft is not necessarily designed to fight in visual dogfighting situations, but at longer ranges.
"There have been numerous occasions where a four-ship of F-35s has engaged a four-ship of F-16s in simulated combat; the F-35s won each of those encounters because of its sensors, weapons and stealth technology," JPO spokesman Joe DellaVedova said in a 1 July statement.
That's not a rousing report card by any stretch, though it remains factually true that anyone spouting close-in combat figure alone is grinding a one-sided axe.
Modern warfare is no longer mano-a-mano. Most modern air combat involves sitting at a desk making desk-like decisions (yes, the desk is very shaky, and comes with an ejector seat that you really, really don't wish to use, but there it is.)
BTW, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (2002) is a geek dreamboat of a fast read. The F-35 procurement program featured no such heroic figure, and it certainly shows in the lousy cost-value assessment.
It's not confusing, it's just that many people don't do the conversion in their heads.
Okay, so you missed the first five minutes of the class where the concept of 'percent' is introduced in your grade six or grade seven math class.
Unintended consequence: dunderhead for life.
Bad five minutes to take two extra puffs after the recess bell rings.
Thereafter, it takes a SPECTACULAR level of blockheaded arrogance (I'm not going to learn, and you can't make me, but I sure can beat the living crap out of this giant 4x4) to sit in school for another five years, or ever read a newspaper, or ever watch a television news program, and never manage to fill in this small conceptual omission.
Ignoring all the purple prose (what's the agenda there?), a thinking person really ought to come up short at the phrase "unlikely benefactor". Hard short.
Perhaps I have a superior education, but I would have filed this under: I'll take extremely obvious things for 500, Alex. Consider: one of the largest nest eggs in human history recently celebrated their golden gooses 65th birthday party. Certainly not dead yet, but unmistakably slowing down. Early-bird dinner discounts. That kind of thing.
Optimistically, the Saudi's have about twenty-year grace period to diversify 75% of their existing economy. This in an economy where perhaps 10% of the Saudi nationals know how to hold down a full time job at Standard Global Capitalism Workaholism Level 3. (Even the French are at level 4.)
If you haven't seen the big Saudi diversification coming, I'd be suing your educational institution. They can't have taught you anything useful, at all, ever.
San Francisco is a peninsula, Key West is an island; neither could expand geographically to accommodate the burgeoning financial enthalpy, and the resulting economic pressure forces out the oddballs that put the place on the map in the first place.
For an exceedingly myopic value of "first".
The earliest archaeological evidence of human habitation of the territory of the city of San Francisco dates to 3000 BCE.
The Yelamu group of the Ohlone people resided in a few small villages when an overland Spanish exploration party, led by Don Gaspar de Portola, arrived on November 2, 1769, the first documented European visit to San Francisco Bay.
Seven years later, on March 28, 1776, the Spanish established the Presidio of San Francisco, followed by a mission, Mission San Francisco de Asis.
Upon independence from Spain in 1821, the area became part of Mexico. Under Mexican rule, the mission system gradually ended, and its lands became privatized.
In 1835, Englishman William Richardson erected the first independent homestead, near a boat anchorage around what is today Portsmouth Square. Together with Alcalde Francisco de Haro, he laid out a street plan for the expanded settlement, and the town, named Yerba Buena, began to attract American settlers.
Commodore John D. Sloat claimed California for the United States on July 7, 1846, during the Mexican–American War, and Captain John B. Montgomery arrived to claim Yerba Buena two days later. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco on 30 January 1847, and Mexico officially ceded the territory to the United States at the end of the war.
The California Gold Rush brought a flood of treasure seekers. With their sourdough bread in tow, prospectors accumulated in San Francisco over rival Benicia, raising the population from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 by December 1849.
California was quickly granted statehood in 1850, and the U.S. military built Fort Point at the Golden Gate and a fort on Alcatraz Island to secure the San Francisco Bay.
Silver discoveries, including the Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, further drove rapid population growth. With hordes of fortune seekers streaming through the city, lawlessness was common, and the Barbary Coast section of town gained notoriety as a haven for criminals, prostitution, and gambling.
Entrepreneurs sought to capitalize on the wealth generated by the Gold Rush. Early winners were the banking industry, with the founding of Wells Fargo in 1852 and the Bank of California in 1864.
That brings up to the early telegraph. What generation of Frisco fortune seekers and entrepreneurs are we presently at? Third? Fourth?
Let's hope Wells Fargo is not a cautionary children's tale about just how far "do no evil" might finally tunnel (possible answer: all the way to China, and out the other side).
And that it can but its proponents failed to do so is exactly why we call bullshit.
You're wrong if you think testing is always that simple.
You basically have to gain consent from the study population that regardless of which blind group they wind up in, their therapist can't change horses in midstream.
That's a lot to ask from a study population where first sign of a cure is suicidal behaviour (not unusual in treating major depressive disorder).
Plus it's damn expensive.
"Failed to do so" is pretty harsh language, though I'd definitely give you a pass if it turns out you have personally offered to foot the bill, and even then the ethics committee turned you down.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the early dark ages—before Microsoft's 30-year war on software quality (the early dark ages weren't great, but this was before the bubonic plague, which sure beat the middle dark ages)—nobody was drinking the Kool-Aid that there were only two options.
If you believe this now, you've been played.
It's funny what you can teach people to take for granted, after a looong trek through the parched Windows desert (not that Microsoft was the only culprit, but they sure blazed the trail).
If only we'd had text back in the day: the CTRL-ALT-DEL shrug emoticon would have flourished like an alien "Roundup" virus on planet Mesoamerica.
Name Check: to mention approvingly by name
I have to say that namecheck, press-ganged into a verb, with the mainsail of semantic drift inflated to a D cup, made me throw up a little bit in my mouth.
Perhaps "blamecheck" could step into the breech, initially sounding twice as hipster refurb, though about 10% as asinine.
If you gave a shit about your own skin mattering, you wouldn't be posting as AC.
Just what everyone needs: advice in race relations from a translucent asshole who squirts through risibly Spartan "condensed" matter, and who moans like an abandoned, one-eyed walrus in the attic on dark, damp nights, because his entire social life consists of roaming the countryside rattling chains, but he doesn't want his last moth-eaten bedsheet to end up smelling of mildew as that might arouse the sleeping scent-hounds of common sense (spoiling his one true joy in life: duping naive, sleep-deprived misanthropes into into bedwetting their flannel jammies over a frantic misapprehension that the call is coming from inside the house) .
Oh, the agony of solitary troll confinement. We feel your pain. And your MO. And your BS. And your BO.
Betteridge bound and gagged in the trunk, but I can still hear him thumping.
Because salmon poo is a great delicacy of human cuisine.
Is this the kind of support that helps to persuade people who can't think straight, or the other kind of support which normally travels without the five-letter valet beginning with the letter "c"?
Not for long.
Not for long.
Not for long.
No doubt, forever and ever.
The products I've looked at usually translate to an implied endurance of 20,000 to 30,000 total drive writes (typically over a 5-year life cycle).
For a typical capacity, this translates to a rough maximum write duty cycle around 2% over the life of the drive.
Basically, you can burst 2 GB/s of sequential write traffic for one minute out of every hour, so long as you have 100% read traffic for the other 59 minutes, and not burn out your warranty before the rated five-year window expires.
For a ZFS ZIL cache (which is write intense), you'd want about 25x more endurance than that, to achieve a sane price/performance ratio. For a ZFS L2ARC cache, the cost is high, and the reduced latency is less of a big deal. Perhaps it would shine in an analytics application where you load the data up once per day, then ad hoc query the hell out of it all day long (and the dataset is big enough that you don't want to pay the DRAM price to keep the whole thing resident).
But for myself, I've yet to pencil in 3D XPoint in the sweet spot for any application I presently care about.
Well, because Slashdotters on the whole aren't very smart, we get asked the softball question: should this be happening?
Winner of the Softball Question of All Time Derby: Should every day be ice cream day?
Note: If you're being asked, it's by a children's book written at a grade-two reading level, intimating a terrible adult truth in a toddler-safe 1/4 teaspoon dose: that 90% of unintended consequences are entirely foreseeable, but for the thick and eternal haze of ice cream psychology.
Hardball question: is there any way to enforce an "optional" crunch time industry-wide workplace policy where your crunch time record doesn't serve as a plausibly deniable tie breaker at your next promotion (and every promotion opportunity thereafter?)
This discussion, as posed, doesn't even have the virtue of the childhood reader, which is at least intimating something dark about the universal will to consume ice cream.
The last whimper of principled conservatism, once a policy incorporates all their official desiderata except naked self-enrichment: "But all our businesses will flee to the other side!"
Which is rich, because the "other side" is a mirror image, all saying exactly the same thing (about the naked self-enrichment gap). And then they complain that government is wasteful, but no sane business would tolerate being raking over the jurisdictional coals by this game-theoretic slam dunk.
So government spends all the money up front to develop a sound policy framework, and then it doesn't get implemented—in favour of something else, far less sound, and far more open to counterproductive manipulation—because of this fatal "what about the other side?" fang.
A global minimum tax on high technology is government attempting to apply the rules of sane business management.
And there's nothing an unprincipled conservative hates more than government intruding upon competence.
Oh, the howls will be unbearable if this proposal so much as inches forward.
One of the reasons I write on social media is that the subconscious mind doesn't convey its knowledge in straight lines.
Maybe some people don't know this, but the five stages of grief model (formally Kübler-Ross) was basically a brilliant conversation starter. Constructive ways to talk about loss, grief, and death are relatively thin on the ground. Its half-century zeitgeist tenure was well deserved.
But the model itself is far from a physical constant of the universe, so I wasn't surprised that I got a memo from my subconscious mind right after pressing submit "you know, most people think this is a five stage model; it could even be that the only response your post gets is correcting four to five, and nobody even notices the central point."
Me to my subconscious: tell me about it.
I'm generally a stickler for precision when there's something to be precise about, but the "five" in five stages of grief functions as what linguists call a "bound lexeme". We've gotten into the habit, like the five senses (which are still the five main exo-senses, even though we've now added things like proprioception as interior senses; the bigger argument with "five" senses ought to involve its total exclusion of the entire category of wufullness—e.g. telepathy, premonition, and private messages from God about your true path in life, transmediated via the as-yet unidentified theochlorians, smack dab in the middle of the colour green, within a spectrum formed from a whole new photonic vibratory node physicists have yet to discover, though there's a flagrant clue in one of the 10^500 string theory universes, if we would just sit down and do the work).
My lexical mind still knows the difference between four/five stages of grief, but my semantic mind departed from this niggle long ago.
Then you see articles in major publications with headlines blaring: "The 12 reasons we should abandon the 5 stages". And suddenly the light dawns: Lego porn: it's a thing.
Oh, how that little number up front tickles our desire to stack conformable plastic bricks.
We used to think that young human males were particular prone to falling down antisocial rabbit holes, such as video gaming.
That was before we discovered social media. Now we know that young women fall down antisocial rabbit holes every bit as easily. As ever, men and women are mirror images, though often with the battery reversed.
In my first post, I pinned Lego porn onto a geek sub-tribe, implicitly male. My bad.
* The Five Love Languages
* 5 Ways Your Relationship Changes After Someone Cheats
etc.
All this appeals to a specific sub-tribe of cultural stereotype 'stress kitten'.
So some publication writes up a study of how psychopathic personality types are discovered to be very good as passing themselves off as thoughtful, introverted wallflowers on eharmony.
And of course this immediately triggers the stress kitten version of the 4.5 stages of grief, covered over by a think foam topping of wankette creme: "oh, but this isn't the boy I'm chatting with, because I don't go into those dark corners (because my desktop computer never runs porous security containers chock to the brim with malignant JavaScript downloaded from hither and yon)".
Yeah, right, sweetie pie. I guess that works for you.
Slashdot: where the four stages of grief are buried under a think coat of foamy, wanker creme.
Despite their reputation, geeks are usually well informed about the world, including worldly matters we learned about at age 19 instead of age 14. Within those parameters, there's also a sub-tribe of geeks who rapidly become unmoored from reality when reality disrupts their innate sense of law and Lego order, who never outgrow the eternal adolescence of plastic bricks.
You'd think his giant position would incentivize him to be less of a dork. Except, Fratbook. Once an ogler, always an ogre.
IBM TS4500 R3 Tape Library Guide
IBM TS1150 tape drives deliver the fastest and largest capacity drive for enterprise archiving and data protection
Woof! The rest of the text would make paint cry.
That makes 230 PB of uncompressed storage.
But there's a more recent TS1170 with 40 TB raw capacity. So we could be looking at a raw 0.92 EB.
But that's assuming the new drive fits into the old frame, and I haven't sacrificed any recently warm chickens to the product matrix oracle on this quick scrape, so who's to say?
Somebody hand these morons a capacitor, a resistor, a battery, and an oscilloscope.
Or even just a common cellphone, already charged to 90%
Apparently, you don't think America is renting machines that print money.
Apparently, you do think America is renting machines that spew giant piles of filth, that all has to be immediately carted off to the nearest landfill, at great expense.
Into which category goes a DVD? If it's a Gladiator DVD, soon enough it does go to the landfill, where it properly belongs (how did that abomination ever win Best Picture?)
However, if it's an instructional DVD titled "Machine Learning for Dummies"—though it might hasten to the landfill twice as fast—usually not until after the person consuming the DVD has absorbed the information and become an elite Machine Learning Ninja Turtle.
Advantage: America.
Moral of the story: Winners and losers in borrowed trade must be decided on a case by case basis. Because enlightened reinvestment is a win-win, any way you slice it.
This level of economic analysis requires 1/8 tablespoon more nuance than running around with your hair on fire chanting "derf derf deficit".
No self-respecting institution sits back and endures fraudulent misrepresentation (on an astroturf scale) if they can do something about it (and they can, because the government has entire agencies with the capabilities and powers to do exactly that).
Submitting false documents to the government is a form of trolling, and in many contexts is illegal. It can also be a form of identity fraud and doxing to slap other's people's personal names and private credentials on top. It can end up denying my legitimate input a proper voice (because my name is also on top of a fraudulent opposite).
Being illegal used to be fair cause to investigate something.
There may be elements of the present government wishing to normalize bullshit to such a degree that you now have to stop and ask "and what else?" before you investigate something merely because it appears to have broken a law.
There's a name for putting law and order in to your rearview mirror. It's called anarchy. I am not a fan.
I, for one, do not welcome our new bullshit overlords.
I copied my misspelling from an AC post I was replying too, who managed not to copy it correctly from a previous post where he had actually already quoted the correct spelling. It's properly Vic Gundotra.
Just what is it about AC that shaves off 30 IQ points, as a general starting point?
In any case, my post was entirely my own. My bad.
Yup, it was Google's real name policy and their policy of neutron bomb non-recourse to any errors on their side that caused me never even to consider learning the first thing about Google+.
And this from a position where I figure Google was already 100% under my personal privacy kimono, so I estimated my exposure to marginal privacy loss at close to zero. (For every other social media service, I either block cookies entirely, or use the service on a thin, sporadic basis at most.) So basically, Google+ was the only social media service I would even have considered seriously, and it was crossed off my list on day zero for exactly the reasons you gave above.
Given Google's outward profile, Vic Gundrota was a bad, bad hire.
He'd have been way better off staying at Microsoft (where he used to work), or being hired by Oracle or Amazon or Apple during one of its many heel turns, or any other outfit that celebrates scorched earth.
No, not really.
99% of the concern is that we might not be able to live in the current numbers and at the current burn rate. A plague that kills 3 billion people would set human progress back by about 50 years. Meanwhile there would be a great flourishing of all the other life taking advantage of all those resources we were no longer consuming.
We complain about pollution, but all anthropic pollution added together harms human health less than long-prevailing childbirth and infant mortality rates (survival to age six).
The Disturbing, Shameful History of Childbirth Deaths — 10 September 2013
That's at the current, miraculously improved death rate.
United States in 1900: 850 per 100,000 live births. These are young, healthy women dying, not women aged 55 who inhaled too many fumes of some modern industrial varnish.
Short of tipping the whole planet into nuclear winter, we haven't done any damage to the planetary ecosystem that a great human dying off wouldn't put right in under a few centuries.
So what if the ice caps melt? It's happened before, and life survived just fine. Might be tragic for fancy apes with beach homes. But let's not imagine any whales are going to complain.
Historically when 1/3 or 2/3 of the population dies off suddenly, it's not a happy time for anyone who lives through it. We've have to discard a heap-load of useless modern technology, such as Twitter. But we'd keep the essentials running, such as a circa 2005-level Google search —though maybe with a 2000 ms response time instead of 400 ms (and maybe only 25% of the population would have direct access). It would be tough, but we'd all pull together (those of us who were still living) and we'd pull through.
Even if the entire planet died back to a stable population at the levels of the Roman Empire (circa 100 million people), humans would not loose their cherished conservation status: Least Concern.
Endangered species criteria (one of many):
* Population estimated to number fewer than 2,500 mature individuals.
* Total human breeding population of 2,500 individuals (in sufficiently close proximity) around Moan Level 8 (where 9.99 is one bun in the oven away from species-level exit stage left).
* Total human breeding population of 100 million individuals (in sufficiently close proximity) around Moan Level 3. (And that might be generous.)
* Everything below 3.0 is denominated in millimoans.
* Our biggest ongoing tragedies: about 100 millimoans each (the great plastic gyre, a few degrees C global temperature rise, things like that).
* A really severe global nuclear winter: maybe 3,000 millimoans. (In my system above, that's a 98.6% global human population loss.)
Perspective. It's a bitch.
Got any additional blanket wisdom for the entire continent of Africa? All those darkies, can't hardly tell 'em apart, at least not until they open the wallet they don't have.
In the modern era, the one where we've discovered distributed representation (machine learning), you might model the plight of the many indigenous groups who have fallen into social decay as a combination of alcoholism, racism, residential schools, and the prevailing economic policy, among many other things an ML algorithm would factor into a 1000-term vector we don't fully understand.
Taxpayers are generous to First Nations — byline date-fucked; inferred as circa 2014
Wow, somehow that whopping $1700 increment—as reported by the right-leaning Frasier Institute—leads diverse indigenous populations across the board into economic malaise and social ruin.
And this paltry increment is only a recent figure. Back in 1950 it was a decrement (as reported by the Frasier Institute). I don't think Canada has a track record of any consistent policy on this front, certainly not over 100 years.
We do have closer to a 100-year track record on discrimination, residential schools, and rampant alcoholism (though many progressive native communities, having come to terms with their genetic and cultural propensities, now consume far less alcohol than the Canadian average).
I ridicule the F-35 procurement boondoggle all the time. But close-in combat is probably number four on the list of design criteria.
* stealth
* operational readiness
* long-range combat
* close-in combat
In order to get into a one-on-one situation, you have to first pass through three other criteria.
* you can't shoot what you can't find or can't see
* the Americans can keep a fair number in the air at any given time (you might lose on numbers alone)
* 90% of all F-35 kills are probably from long range
* if any adversaries remain after distance engagement, you might get into a close-combat situation, but even then, the F-35 might have a numerical edge, because of all the initial kills from long range
F-35 designed for long-range kills, not dog fighting — July 2015
That's not a rousing report card by any stretch, though it remains factually true that anyone spouting close-in combat figure alone is grinding a one-sided axe.
Modern warfare is no longer mano-a-mano. Most modern air combat involves sitting at a desk making desk-like decisions (yes, the desk is very shaky, and comes with an ejector seat that you really, really don't wish to use, but there it is.)
BTW, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (2002) is a geek dreamboat of a fast read. The F-35 procurement program featured no such heroic figure, and it certainly shows in the lousy cost-value assessment.
Okay, so you missed the first five minutes of the class where the concept of 'percent' is introduced in your grade six or grade seven math class.
Unintended consequence: dunderhead for life.
Bad five minutes to take two extra puffs after the recess bell rings.
Thereafter, it takes a SPECTACULAR level of blockheaded arrogance (I'm not going to learn, and you can't make me, but I sure can beat the living crap out of this giant 4x4) to sit in school for another five years, or ever read a newspaper, or ever watch a television news program, and never manage to fill in this small conceptual omission.
Ignoring all the purple prose (what's the agenda there?), a thinking person really ought to come up short at the phrase "unlikely benefactor". Hard short.
Perhaps I have a superior education, but I would have filed this under: I'll take extremely obvious things for 500, Alex. Consider: one of the largest nest eggs in human history recently celebrated their golden gooses 65th birthday party. Certainly not dead yet, but unmistakably slowing down. Early-bird dinner discounts. That kind of thing.
Optimistically, the Saudi's have about twenty-year grace period to diversify 75% of their existing economy. This in an economy where perhaps 10% of the Saudi nationals know how to hold down a full time job at Standard Global Capitalism Workaholism Level 3. (Even the French are at level 4.)
If you haven't seen the big Saudi diversification coming, I'd be suing your educational institution. They can't have taught you anything useful, at all, ever.
For an exceedingly myopic value of "first".
That brings up to the early telegraph. What generation of Frisco fortune seekers and entrepreneurs are we presently at? Third? Fourth?
Let's hope Wells Fargo is not a cautionary children's tale about just how far "do no evil" might finally tunnel (possible answer: all the way to China, and out the other side).
You're wrong if you think testing is always that simple.
You basically have to gain consent from the study population that regardless of which blind group they wind up in, their therapist can't change horses in midstream.
That's a lot to ask from a study population where first sign of a cure is suicidal behaviour (not unusual in treating major depressive disorder).
Plus it's damn expensive.
"Failed to do so" is pretty harsh language, though I'd definitely give you a pass if it turns out you have personally offered to foot the bill, and even then the ethics committee turned you down.
Damn ethicists! Gift horse in the mouth! etc etc
Hmm, had I been awake, I would have described that as cosmology's decimal inch.
10 attoparsecs = 1.01236 feet