There's also the stars in the path of the supermassive black holes as they merge....
Even given supermassive black holes, it will still be like two shot gun blasts crossing paths and seeing if pieces of shot hit each other. Even then, most of the hits that you would see in the shotgun blasts will just be gravitational deflections of stars that will never actually collide. Supermassive black holes and the galactic core might add a piece of buckshot to that shot gun blast. Collisions can't be ruled out, but they will still be unlikely.
Time travel is also, so far as we know, impossible.
Nope. Time travel as far as we know is quite possible, but the extreme conditions needed for it may be impossible. Physics itself has not issue with time travel and could give a rat's ass about causality. One such example is a Tippler Machine ( "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation". Physical Review D 9 (8): 2203–2206. ). Others include solutions for a rotating universe or wormholes. Tachyons are possible but only in a universe that is at a false vacuum. Physics allow for time travel, but the engineering problems associated with such may be beyond any hope of being constructed.
I'd probably say that anybody who is being "demonized" due to their skin color rather than their personal actions or beliefs is probably "unfairly demonized."
Wow and yet it is place I would not want to live since their is no real freedom.
Not true. You are free to do what you want. Even if you want to be totally anti-social, you are free to do so, they will just want to move you to the islands. Even if you do not like the islands, they will allow you to go elsewhere if it is possible to separate you from society as they allowed the poet to move to antarctica. You are not allowed to disrupt society, and you works will not last past your death, but certainly free to do as you want.
there are companies working on it, like Dragon, but they're not there yet
Is Dragon actually still working on it? The original authors who were the true R&D geniuses behind the technology were locked out of improving the product (and pretty much the industry) because of copyright after the botched sale of their company. The recent demonstrations of the software I've seen look like not much has improved since 2000 except computers have gotten faster.
I doubt you have actually been paying attention or use speech recognition. It has gotten so much better in the last fourteen years. Back then, it was basically worthless and now accuracy really isn't any more of an issue than it is with human listener even with various foreign accents speaking English.
Wow. Two weeks of paid vacation. A bit more money for working on Sundays?
That's "generous"?
I shudder to think what non-generous work is, then. Probably "no vacation, ever!" and "overtime compensation? Are you dreaming?"
Non-generous would be Wal-Mart where you get 34 hours a week which makes you temp worker with no vacation, benefits, or overtime. You can't go work for anybody else because they've all been put out of business by Wal-Mart's low prices.
If this was a Dr. Who episode, it would be a crashed spaceship from millions of years ago and everybody who went into the tunnel would come out covered in green slime and turning into a cave man.
Yes, but this is Seattle, so it's going to be a steampunk drilling machine that unleashes toxic zombie causing gas.
Propel vehicles from where to where for what purpose? Why are there humans in space to be kept alive?
Good question. Besides the desire to explore, the most obvious choice would be because there is near limitless energy, or certainly more than we can collect, coming from the sun. With enough energy, we can grow, manufacture, and recycle as much as we need to. Moving that energy down to Earth starts to become unwieldly fairly quickly and it becomes better to just stay up there and use it there.
Some of my favorite stories were set in the world of the shapers and machinists. Stories such as 20 Evocations and ideas like the super brights. Do you plan to write any more stories dealing with that universe?
you do realize the population of the US is only 330 milion currently.
You're talking a very long way off if so.
But when we have robots to do all of the work and everyone is unemployed, we'll all have a lot more time to have sex, so the population will skyrocket.
We'll never have majority unemployment. We'll always require those that get rewards as having to do something to earn those rewards over those that do nothing. If not becoming Jetson style button pushers working four hours a day, we'll have WPA style programs to increase the artists who produce nothing but human culture. Some people may suggest consumption itself might be work given to the unemployed (there are short stories to that effect) but people will always consume. Raising and socializing kids does take work and propagates the society, so eventually having a large family might be the work given to people. Do nothing and have a comfy life, or have a large family and have a well off life.
Your assumptions are also flawed. First, companies own most of the capital not individuals. Secondly you're assuming that you need to combine that capital with HUMAN labor for it to work. What happens when a company can combine their capital with 100% robotic labor.
If I can buy 100 robots and make and sell widgets all by myself what incentive do I have to employ human labor at all?
Yes, robots can be considered capital but it's naive to assume that they can't also be counted on the labor side.
Robots selling widgets is not the important part. We really need to be scared when they start having the robots buying the widgets.
Your company is upgrading to win 8, though, right?
Win 7. Business expects to be on that for another 13 years like XP and paying for updates isn't as expensive as constant OS upgrades. Meanwhile, nobody wants to go to Win 8 for the difficulties that user training will cause.
The manufacturer/specs don't matter nearly as much as the $38 price point. THAT'S the big deal here.
Hardly. being able to do the work and reliability are what's important in the settings you originally described. These things are cheap, and they are going to be cheap in all the bad ways besides price also. There are already tablets out there that are cheaper. Using these rather than something more expensive will cost more money in the time it takes for them to complete work (assuming they can even do the work) than spending the extra time. Breakdowns and replacements are also a consideration in the professional world. I'd be that it would be cheaper all round to give the nurse and 3rd graders in your example all iPads to get work done faster, break less often, and deal with replacements. One of the first things you learn in the professional world is that "cheap is expensive".
If there's no more updates, what's the point of fixing the update mechanism?
There will be more updates. It just means that they won't be free after April. My company has already begun discussions with MS as to how much they will have to pay for those updates as the sheer number of computers and lack of staff means that the upgrade to Win7 will not be done by that time. Figure in all the various departments that have apps that won't run in Win 7 or can't be upgraded till capital budget has the money for the upgrades and that could take years still. I'm sure many other large corps are in the same boat.
This is not the united states of Europe. Nobody wants that in Europe (I mean, as in, the people doesn't want this, at least anymore). There's more and more sovereign movements raising, and they will get even stronger as time passes. So, it has never been, and never will be fair to replace the flags of individual countries (did you notice I didn't use the word state?) by the European flag.
Give it time. That description is very much like the USA pre-civil war when a person's nationality was more often described by their home state rather than as the USA. Then, there will be a crisis that will come along and make or break the EU (many people are looking at the current Euro currency things going on). It could fall the way you want, but then it could fall the other way also.
The WSJ? Really, a bunch of conservatives writing about the demise of a country they perceive as a threat. LOL.
Actually, WSJ is about the most trustworthy source out there and has been for decades. They make money because people read their paper to make money. They can only do that if they actually provide factual information. Unlike Fox, if they put a spin on the economic situation is in China and investors steer clear when they should be investing, then somebody has lost billions because of their false information and will go elsewhere. They may be pro-business, but are probably one of the most factual sources of news out there. This is why they can actually function with a pay wall, because people with money actually find their information worth paying for.
My guess is that many Slashdotters, myself included, feel that the current U.S. convention for the use of punctuation vis-Ã-vis quotation isn't technically accurate enough anyway.
FTFY. It's my understanding that the Brits currently use logical punctuation placement.
(The thread's still doomed.)
Last I heard from a grammar nazi familiar with various style guides is that American usage actually allowed for either.
There are 31 Felony Counts listed in it. He's not going to get much of a plea deal; the police seized his computers, so they already have "all of his submission records."
He'll probably get a plea deal. He'll plead guilty to three of those 31 and save both himself and the state a bunch of trial expenses.
Probably to show that losing weight is more complicated that just "eat less". There are lots of factors into how the body works well beyond total number of calories eaten. Even the number of meals meals eaten in the day affects things. Chances are that if obese people just ate less calories and changed nothing else, their bodies would assume that they are are having issues finding food and otherwise risking starving and lower their metabolism and shift to storing more fat. Weight loss is going to be a factor of many variables including, but not limited to: calories eaten, form they are eaten in, number of meals per day, metabolism, physical activity, and how the changes are introduced. Just saying "eat less" doesn't understand the problem and will probably not work for anybody that believes that's all their is too it and possibly complicate the issue even more. The solution for obesity is more like a life style change on many levels which in some cases may require surgery or drugs to be successful.
The main problem is that for hundreds of thousands of years, the main problem was getting enough to eat. The human body developed many different tactics such as making things like fats and sugars taste good, storing as much food as fat as possible, to probably even how hungry people feel. This has really only changed in the last 50 years so now that their is ample cheap food those hundreds of thousands of years of evolution are coming into play to make us fatter.
Will someone please tell me how the fuck mining titanium or even platinum from 385,000 miles away is even remotely worth it?
Realisitically, it's not, at least until we start needing those things in space. Then, it will probably be much more economical to mine and refine such on the moon and then send them where they need to go instead of lifting that material out of Earth's gravity well. In the meantime, the rights to mining on the moon are going to be the big prize in anticipation of that time.
I was contacted by a recruiter for Amazon, for a job in Seattle, and I live in the Toronto, Canada area. I think MS is a bigger part of the problem than you'd think.
Amazon is known, locally at least, to be a pretty lousy place to work for. I'd wager that is why Amazon has to look far and wide for talent. MS isn't much better though.
Yep. From what I have heard from friends that work there is current average length of employment at Amazon runs about 18 months till you leave or are let go. Makes a nice place to build a resume (if you can put up with it) but not a career.
I am just taking a stab in the dark here as I don't really know, but maybe there are a lot of "MS Stack software" developers in the home of MS. If they got a ton of them already in town why import more?
I think this is part of it but I don't really think that the Seattle job market every really recovered from the.bust era. There were so many unemployed tech people in the early 2000's that hiring managers were literally getting thousands of applicants in just a few days for any job they posted. Things were just about to get better when the 2008 housing crisis put a stop on new hires and cost lots of people their jobs. In the last five years, I've seen people move away because the job market was so saturated that they couldn't get a job because nobody is hiring and everybody is keeping the job they have. Meanwhile, any job that is getting posted is probably just for legal/technical reasons and already has a person slotted for it that already works for the company or is a friend of somebody that does.
I don't really know about Seattle, but I moved from Montreal, Qc to Vancouver, BC about a month ago. I was told winter would be nothing but rain and not so cold temperature (I love the cold). But I've been pretty surprised so far. Not much rain, and for the past week, it's been warmer in Montreal than here.n
Seems to be a recent feature starting about ten years ago. Before that, the winter was a constant drizzle that a light jacket was sufficient enough for. Now we are actually getting rain instead of spit and drizzle with clear skies in between (which, without the overcast to hold in the heat, lets the temperature drop another ten or twenty degrees).
Slashdot Mirror
There's also the stars in the path of the supermassive black holes as they merge....
Even given supermassive black holes, it will still be like two shot gun blasts crossing paths and seeing if pieces of shot hit each other. Even then, most of the hits that you would see in the shotgun blasts will just be gravitational deflections of stars that will never actually collide. Supermassive black holes and the galactic core might add a piece of buckshot to that shot gun blast. Collisions can't be ruled out, but they will still be unlikely.
Time travel is also, so far as we know, impossible.
Nope. Time travel as far as we know is quite possible, but the extreme conditions needed for it may be impossible. Physics itself has not issue with time travel and could give a rat's ass about causality. One such example is a Tippler Machine ( "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation". Physical Review D 9 (8): 2203–2206. ). Others include solutions for a rotating universe or wormholes. Tachyons are possible but only in a universe that is at a false vacuum. Physics allow for time travel, but the engineering problems associated with such may be beyond any hope of being constructed.
"The "white man" is unfairly demonized"
No. It is, in fact, pretty fair.
I'd probably say that anybody who is being "demonized" due to their skin color rather than their personal actions or beliefs is probably "unfairly demonized."
Wow and yet it is place I would not want to live since their is no real freedom.
Not true. You are free to do what you want. Even if you want to be totally anti-social, you are free to do so, they will just want to move you to the islands. Even if you do not like the islands, they will allow you to go elsewhere if it is possible to separate you from society as they allowed the poet to move to antarctica. You are not allowed to disrupt society, and you works will not last past your death, but certainly free to do as you want.
Is Dragon actually still working on it? The original authors who were the true R&D geniuses behind the technology were locked out of improving the product (and pretty much the industry) because of copyright after the botched sale of their company. The recent demonstrations of the software I've seen look like not much has improved since 2000 except computers have gotten faster.
I doubt you have actually been paying attention or use speech recognition. It has gotten so much better in the last fourteen years. Back then, it was basically worthless and now accuracy really isn't any more of an issue than it is with human listener even with various foreign accents speaking English.
Wow. Two weeks of paid vacation. A bit more money for working on Sundays?
That's "generous"?
I shudder to think what non-generous work is, then. Probably "no vacation, ever!" and "overtime compensation? Are you dreaming?"
Non-generous would be Wal-Mart where you get 34 hours a week which makes you temp worker with no vacation, benefits, or overtime. You can't go work for anybody else because they've all been put out of business by Wal-Mart's low prices.
If this was a Dr. Who episode, it would be a crashed spaceship from millions of years ago and everybody who went into the tunnel would come out covered in green slime and turning into a cave man.
Yes, but this is Seattle, so it's going to be a steampunk drilling machine that unleashes toxic zombie causing gas.
Propel vehicles from where to where for what purpose? Why are there humans in space to be kept alive?
Good question. Besides the desire to explore, the most obvious choice would be because there is near limitless energy, or certainly more than we can collect, coming from the sun. With enough energy, we can grow, manufacture, and recycle as much as we need to. Moving that energy down to Earth starts to become unwieldly fairly quickly and it becomes better to just stay up there and use it there.
Some of my favorite stories were set in the world of the shapers and machinists. Stories such as 20 Evocations and ideas like the super brights. Do you plan to write any more stories dealing with that universe?
you do realize the population of the US is only 330 milion currently.
You're talking a very long way off if so.
But when we have robots to do all of the work and everyone is unemployed, we'll all have a lot more time to have sex, so the population will skyrocket.
We'll never have majority unemployment. We'll always require those that get rewards as having to do something to earn those rewards over those that do nothing. If not becoming Jetson style button pushers working four hours a day, we'll have WPA style programs to increase the artists who produce nothing but human culture. Some people may suggest consumption itself might be work given to the unemployed (there are short stories to that effect) but people will always consume. Raising and socializing kids does take work and propagates the society, so eventually having a large family might be the work given to people. Do nothing and have a comfy life, or have a large family and have a well off life.
Your assumptions are also flawed. First, companies own most of the capital not individuals. Secondly you're assuming that you need to combine that capital with HUMAN labor for it to work. What happens when a company can combine their capital with 100% robotic labor. If I can buy 100 robots and make and sell widgets all by myself what incentive do I have to employ human labor at all? Yes, robots can be considered capital but it's naive to assume that they can't also be counted on the labor side.
Robots selling widgets is not the important part. We really need to be scared when they start having the robots buying the widgets.
Your company is upgrading to win 8, though, right?
Win 7. Business expects to be on that for another 13 years like XP and paying for updates isn't as expensive as constant OS upgrades. Meanwhile, nobody wants to go to Win 8 for the difficulties that user training will cause.
The manufacturer/specs don't matter nearly as much as the $38 price point. THAT'S the big deal here.
Hardly. being able to do the work and reliability are what's important in the settings you originally described. These things are cheap, and they are going to be cheap in all the bad ways besides price also. There are already tablets out there that are cheaper. Using these rather than something more expensive will cost more money in the time it takes for them to complete work (assuming they can even do the work) than spending the extra time. Breakdowns and replacements are also a consideration in the professional world. I'd be that it would be cheaper all round to give the nurse and 3rd graders in your example all iPads to get work done faster, break less often, and deal with replacements. One of the first things you learn in the professional world is that "cheap is expensive".
Isn't EOL planned for April, anyways?
If there's no more updates, what's the point of fixing the update mechanism?
There will be more updates. It just means that they won't be free after April. My company has already begun discussions with MS as to how much they will have to pay for those updates as the sheer number of computers and lack of staff means that the upgrade to Win7 will not be done by that time. Figure in all the various departments that have apps that won't run in Win 7 or can't be upgraded till capital budget has the money for the upgrades and that could take years still. I'm sure many other large corps are in the same boat.
This is not the united states of Europe. Nobody wants that in Europe (I mean, as in, the people doesn't want this, at least anymore). There's more and more sovereign movements raising, and they will get even stronger as time passes. So, it has never been, and never will be fair to replace the flags of individual countries (did you notice I didn't use the word state?) by the European flag.
Give it time. That description is very much like the USA pre-civil war when a person's nationality was more often described by their home state rather than as the USA. Then, there will be a crisis that will come along and make or break the EU (many people are looking at the current Euro currency things going on). It could fall the way you want, but then it could fall the other way also.
The WSJ? Really, a bunch of conservatives writing about the demise of a country they perceive as a threat. LOL.
Actually, WSJ is about the most trustworthy source out there and has been for decades. They make money because people read their paper to make money. They can only do that if they actually provide factual information. Unlike Fox, if they put a spin on the economic situation is in China and investors steer clear when they should be investing, then somebody has lost billions because of their false information and will go elsewhere. They may be pro-business, but are probably one of the most factual sources of news out there. This is why they can actually function with a pay wall, because people with money actually find their information worth paying for.
My guess is that many Slashdotters, myself included, feel that the current U.S. convention for the use of punctuation vis-Ã-vis quotation isn't technically accurate enough anyway.
FTFY. It's my understanding that the Brits currently use logical punctuation placement.
(The thread's still doomed.)
Last I heard from a grammar nazi familiar with various style guides is that American usage actually allowed for either.
There are 31 Felony Counts listed in it. He's not going to get much of a plea deal; the police seized his computers, so they already have "all of his submission records."
He'll probably get a plea deal. He'll plead guilty to three of those 31 and save both himself and the state a bunch of trial expenses.
The Brits aren't skinny because they eat shit, they are skinny because given the option of eating British food and starving, they starve.
I thought the British liked curries.
What's the point of mentioning this?
Probably to show that losing weight is more complicated that just "eat less". There are lots of factors into how the body works well beyond total number of calories eaten. Even the number of meals meals eaten in the day affects things. Chances are that if obese people just ate less calories and changed nothing else, their bodies would assume that they are are having issues finding food and otherwise risking starving and lower their metabolism and shift to storing more fat. Weight loss is going to be a factor of many variables including, but not limited to: calories eaten, form they are eaten in, number of meals per day, metabolism, physical activity, and how the changes are introduced. Just saying "eat less" doesn't understand the problem and will probably not work for anybody that believes that's all their is too it and possibly complicate the issue even more. The solution for obesity is more like a life style change on many levels which in some cases may require surgery or drugs to be successful.
The main problem is that for hundreds of thousands of years, the main problem was getting enough to eat. The human body developed many different tactics such as making things like fats and sugars taste good, storing as much food as fat as possible, to probably even how hungry people feel. This has really only changed in the last 50 years so now that their is ample cheap food those hundreds of thousands of years of evolution are coming into play to make us fatter.
I just make due with fortified milk in my lattes every morning.
Will someone please tell me how the fuck mining titanium or even platinum from 385,000 miles away is even remotely worth it?
Realisitically, it's not, at least until we start needing those things in space. Then, it will probably be much more economical to mine and refine such on the moon and then send them where they need to go instead of lifting that material out of Earth's gravity well. In the meantime, the rights to mining on the moon are going to be the big prize in anticipation of that time.
I was contacted by a recruiter for Amazon, for a job in Seattle, and I live in the Toronto, Canada area. I think MS is a bigger part of the problem than you'd think.
Amazon is known, locally at least, to be a pretty lousy place to work for. I'd wager that is why Amazon has to look far and wide for talent. MS isn't much better though.
Yep. From what I have heard from friends that work there is current average length of employment at Amazon runs about 18 months till you leave or are let go. Makes a nice place to build a resume (if you can put up with it) but not a career.
MS Stack software developer
I am just taking a stab in the dark here as I don't really know, but maybe there are a lot of "MS Stack software" developers in the home of MS. If they got a ton of them already in town why import more?
I think this is part of it but I don't really think that the Seattle job market every really recovered from the .bust era. There were so many unemployed tech people in the early 2000's that hiring managers were literally getting thousands of applicants in just a few days for any job they posted. Things were just about to get better when the 2008 housing crisis put a stop on new hires and cost lots of people their jobs. In the last five years, I've seen people move away because the job market was so saturated that they couldn't get a job because nobody is hiring and everybody is keeping the job they have. Meanwhile, any job that is getting posted is probably just for legal/technical reasons and already has a person slotted for it that already works for the company or is a friend of somebody that does.
I don't really know about Seattle, but I moved from Montreal, Qc to Vancouver, BC about a month ago. I was told winter would be nothing but rain and not so cold temperature (I love the cold). But I've been pretty surprised so far. Not much rain, and for the past week, it's been warmer in Montreal than here.n
Seems to be a recent feature starting about ten years ago. Before that, the winter was a constant drizzle that a light jacket was sufficient enough for. Now we are actually getting rain instead of spit and drizzle with clear skies in between (which, without the overcast to hold in the heat, lets the temperature drop another ten or twenty degrees).