Extinction is such a pressing danger only for biological entities. If humans transcend biology, then they can take a much greater battering and expansion into space is no longer an inevitable development for the human race. In his novel Marooned in Realtime, which deals with a technological Singularity, Vernor Vinge muses that a civilization might choose to retreat into a virtual reality buried deep below a planet's surface instead of expanding outward. Sure, then one would have to worry about the death of the sun, engulfing the planet in its red giant phase, but that's billions of years from now. And even if a civilzation wants to expand into space, that's much easier done after transcending biology than as a biological race that has to manage fragile ecosystems.
start valuing coders the way foreign language translators and interpreters are valued: precious assets of high quality that could cost you a lot if they do a poor quality job.
You are joking, right? Translators face an increasingly tough market. Sure, there will always be some documents that need smooth, polished renderings into a foreign language. But the truth is, a lot of more informal texts that used to go through professional translators at decent wages are now just put through Google Translate for free. Machine translation is not perfect, but it's often considered good enough
I struggle with this trend with my own clients, who don't send their texts to me unless they feel they absolutely have to, and are pretty upfront about the fact that they'd rather gamble on some lost sales due to low-quality machine translation than pay the high rates professional translators demand.
You may have to wait a little longer, but people will start buying from Canada or other places without taxes.
Besides the fact that international shipping (even from Canada) is quite expensive, you may have to pay import duty on certain items and/or items over a certain value.
For every Rosa Parks, there are thousands of raped victims that no one ever pays attention to. Without those thousands of victims, Rosa would have been just an uppity old N****r broad, who didn't know her place. BECAUSE OF those victims, Ms Rosa Parks earned her place in history.
Actually, Rosa Parks earned her place in history with the help of a concentrated effort by the NAACP in Montgomery to bust the city's discrimination. American school textbooks tend to present her as a solitary hero because of an institutionalized disapproval of collective civil rights struggles, but in fact she was working in tandem with a number of other activists. Herbert R. Kohl's Should We Burn Babar? , which critiques US elementary school teaching, dedicates an entire chapter to the Rosa Parks myth and reality.
Classical music is a bad example to use in chastising people for filesharing.
The major labels long had to subsidize most of their classical music recordings from the profits they made in popular music, just to maintain a culturally prestigious image. If you paid for recordings, great, but your consumer goodwill alone did not sustain the industry. In the 1990s, that system broke down as labels lost interest even in profitable classical music recordings, preferring to abandon the classical canon for crossover gimmickry. Remember Peter Gelb's comment when he was head of Sony? "I'd rather lose a million on a movie score than make $10,000 on small shit." Deutsche Grammophon, Sony and Warner are pretty much dead now, and it is not filesharing that killed them.
The minor labels that are now going strong while the majors have collapsed are often funded by state arts ministries or, more rarely, corporate foundations, not sales of recordings. Even if sales of recordings are low, the bills are already paid. And being familiar with the internal workings of one European national label, I've been told that filesharing is tacitly tolerated since it can build a following and raise interest levels and concert and festival attendence, therefore keeping the cultural funding rolling in even if the recordings don't sell so much. For certain labels, an attempt to disrupt the free FLAC-trading scene would be problematic for their business.
The fact that the Bosnians were heavily armed actually delayed the international communities' action. Had they not engaged in paramilitary warfare, they would have gained the sympathy of outside parties faster.
With regard to Kosovo, it was the fact the forming of the Kosovo Liberation Army that led Milosevic into military action there. Had the Kosovar Albanians never taken up arms, they would have remained administratively a part of Serbia, but they would not have invited the violent reprisal they got. In any event, the general population of Kosovo was never in existential danger: Albanians are over 90% of the population there, and the Serbs knew that in spite of a few individual skirmishes, they could not just slaughter a whole population outright.
While the statistics may show that the crime rates are relatively low, a simple conversation with a citizen of Poland will tell you otherwise.
Notwithstanding the "the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'" issue, what crime are Poles most likely to complain about? Pickpocketing, perhaps. Fights between drunken youths, a sadly common occurrence. The very rare mugging that will not involve a gun. But certainly not murder or attempted murder of innocent bystanders going about their daily business.
And compared to the US, urban areas in Poland are paradise. In my native US, there are areas of the city where it would be unwise to go at any time of the day, because one can be shot or at least threatened with a gun (and this is backed up by statistics, not my own personal experience). Meanwhile, I can walk around all parts of Warsaw, Lublin, Bialystok or Rzeszow at 3 a.m. with no incident (again, this is backed up by statistics, not my own personal experience, though I only list here the cities that I frequently visit).
For what it's worth, I have relatives in Poland. I've never heard much complaint about crime, so you should hesitate to speak for your whole people. Even if the police were undereporting petty theft, it would be very difficult for them to sweep violent attacks under the rug.
I generally divide my time between Romania and Finland, and urban areas in both countries are, again, enormously safer than in the US (petty theft the only worry). The OP's claim that Europe is safer than the US as a generalization is valid.
things wouldn't have gone any differently for... Milosevic or any other modern tyrannies..
You know nothing about the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. Both the Bosnians and Kosovars were heavily armed. It didn't at all help in convincing the Serbs to stand down without a fight. Instead, lots of people on their side got killed, and they were only able to hold out because international support came.
One of the most unusual concepts of an alien life form I've seen are the Tines in Vinge's novel A Fire upon the Deep, dog or giant rat-like animals that are not individually conscious, but when together in packs form a single sentient organism. In the case of Vinge's novel, neural communication between the individual members of the pack was carried out via ultrasound, not electricity like here, but I wouldn't have imagined that scientists would pursue the same idea at some point.
Agreed. It's wasteful to try to develop all this tech for biological organisms to survive in space, when in a few decades the human race will reach the Singularity and then will be able explore space considerably more easily in machine bodies.
If you move records from an internet-connected computer to this isolated computer via a removable drive, you may still be susceptible to attack. After all, Stuxnet and other viruses have spread this way. Viruses were already a problem for PC users long before network-connected device.
And even if the computer is totally isolated from both networks and USB drives, the data can still be compromised through a TEMPEST attack (assuming you were a target for a state or especially savvy organized crime network).
Talking with peers in the TeX world, I find that few professionals are writing in LaTeX directly anymore. LaTeX's typesetting abilities remain sexy, but it is far between to keep a document in a semantic markup like Docbook XML, transforming it to LaTeX via an XSL stylesheet only when one wants to produce final print output.
Writing a LaTeX document directly might be OK for students who do only one or two papers a year, or someone who needs to quickly get a math notation graphic. But if LaTeX is something you do regularly, far better to setup a workflow where it is just a stage transforming data kept in a more structured format.
While is indeed up to you what to call a place, that doesn't mean that pressure to use the name they desire won't suceed. For example, after Cote d'Ivoire announced that it wants this name used in all English-language contexts (superseding "Ivory Coast"), the new name caught on pretty quickly in the press and among educated speakers with a minimum of "mockery".
Also, one can note how "Torino" has ousted "Turin" except for a few set phrases (e.g. "Shroud of Turin").
So why did Slashdot waste our time by posting this story? Why should it get any coverage at all, ever?
Because Slashdot is a "news for nerds" (with a tongue-in-cheek "stuff that matters" after it) site, and designing a microkernal architecture is a nerdy pastime? I don't know how long you've been around, but Slashdot used to have a lot more posts about quirky little hacking pursuits like this. It wasn't always rehashes of the same issues (mobile phones, patent wars) involving big companies.
Stallman preaches benevolent communism, but he doesn't practice it. He prefers to be the one who talks, while OTHERS do the work. Ill never listen to anyone who chooses their job to be the easy one.
Stallman is an eccentric personality who finds it difficult to relate to people and feels most comfortable around computers. I'd imagine that for him coding would be "the easy job", while taking on the role of public speaker and advocate for Free Software is probably a cross to bear rather than an escape from the hard work.
I think Poor Richard has lived in an ivory tower far too long.
I hate to interrupt your Stallman bashing, but RMS isn't involved in Hurd development. He has been content to use Linux for many years now. Hurd development is driven mainly by other developers who are in it purely as a hobby, a way to play around with microkernel design, and they are not striving to reach a mass market.
This Slashdot submission is about Finland. It's a different country. Different countries have different consitutions. The First Amendment to the US Constitution does not have any legal force in Finland.
Yes, I've seen that in a few places. Luckily, 3G data is getting cheap enough that travellers don't have to always use internet cafes anymore. When I was in Tajikistan, for example, I just got a local SIM card, put 5 or 10 euro on it, and then tethered my mobile phone to my notebook. It worked for about a week of usage before needing a credit top-up.
Computers at internet cafes in third-world countries look as scary and diseased as truck stop hookers. One imagines that whoever set up the computers way back when might have been tech savvy, but the owner paid him for his one-time services, then for the next 5-10 years kept the machines running with no updates or virus scans. The staff hired to work there are just babysitting the machines to make sure no one steals them; they have no greater knowledge of how to fix a problem than restarting the computer.
I use these establishments only to plug my notebook into a ethernet jack, but a non-insignificant amount of times, to ask to use your own computer instead of their infectious, malware-ridden machines evokes suspicion that are you are some kind of hacker terrorist and they want you to leave.
This then suggests a simple fix for global warming - we just need to move Earth into a slightly higher orbit.
Larry Niven already proposed this four decades ago in his novel Ringworld, where the alien race the Puppeteers had moved their planets away from their sun to cool them. This was long before fears of global warming, but Niven felt that technological advancement would inevitably lead to problems with waste heat.
It'll be interesting to see how addictive this technology becomes, especially as many people already can't be separated from their smartphones. One of the more thought-provoking things in Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime (about the pace of technology accelerating towards a singularity) is that human beings from later in the 21st century feel disoriented and sluggish when disconnected from wearable technology that provides them 24/7 with sources of information.
I wonder why oral exams aren't more common in the United States. When I came to do graduate studies in Europe, they really forced me to shape up and learn my stuff. Not only do they make cheating impossible, but when you are judged on how fast you provide the answer, you also internalize it better.
Sure, written exams are the norm for science fields where one must note down specialist notation like mathematics or chemistry, but in the humanities -- and the "political science" of this article -- they seem an excellent way of judging student progress.
Slashdot Mirror
Extinction is such a pressing danger only for biological entities. If humans transcend biology, then they can take a much greater battering and expansion into space is no longer an inevitable development for the human race. In his novel Marooned in Realtime , which deals with a technological Singularity, Vernor Vinge muses that a civilization might choose to retreat into a virtual reality buried deep below a planet's surface instead of expanding outward. Sure, then one would have to worry about the death of the sun, engulfing the planet in its red giant phase, but that's billions of years from now. And even if a civilzation wants to expand into space, that's much easier done after transcending biology than as a biological race that has to manage fragile ecosystems.
You are joking, right? Translators face an increasingly tough market. Sure, there will always be some documents that need smooth, polished renderings into a foreign language. But the truth is, a lot of more informal texts that used to go through professional translators at decent wages are now just put through Google Translate for free. Machine translation is not perfect, but it's often considered good enough
I struggle with this trend with my own clients, who don't send their texts to me unless they feel they absolutely have to, and are pretty upfront about the fact that they'd rather gamble on some lost sales due to low-quality machine translation than pay the high rates professional translators demand.
Nope, whole classes of goods still attract duty when imported from Canada.
Besides the fact that international shipping (even from Canada) is quite expensive, you may have to pay import duty on certain items and/or items over a certain value.
Actually, Rosa Parks earned her place in history with the help of a concentrated effort by the NAACP in Montgomery to bust the city's discrimination. American school textbooks tend to present her as a solitary hero because of an institutionalized disapproval of collective civil rights struggles, but in fact she was working in tandem with a number of other activists. Herbert R. Kohl's Should We Burn Babar? , which critiques US elementary school teaching, dedicates an entire chapter to the Rosa Parks myth and reality.
Classical music is a bad example to use in chastising people for filesharing.
The major labels long had to subsidize most of their classical music recordings from the profits they made in popular music, just to maintain a culturally prestigious image. If you paid for recordings, great, but your consumer goodwill alone did not sustain the industry. In the 1990s, that system broke down as labels lost interest even in profitable classical music recordings, preferring to abandon the classical canon for crossover gimmickry. Remember Peter Gelb's comment when he was head of Sony? "I'd rather lose a million on a movie score than make $10,000 on small shit." Deutsche Grammophon, Sony and Warner are pretty much dead now, and it is not filesharing that killed them.
The minor labels that are now going strong while the majors have collapsed are often funded by state arts ministries or, more rarely, corporate foundations, not sales of recordings. Even if sales of recordings are low, the bills are already paid. And being familiar with the internal workings of one European national label, I've been told that filesharing is tacitly tolerated since it can build a following and raise interest levels and concert and festival attendence, therefore keeping the cultural funding rolling in even if the recordings don't sell so much. For certain labels, an attempt to disrupt the free FLAC-trading scene would be problematic for their business.
The fact that the Bosnians were heavily armed actually delayed the international communities' action. Had they not engaged in paramilitary warfare, they would have gained the sympathy of outside parties faster.
With regard to Kosovo, it was the fact the forming of the Kosovo Liberation Army that led Milosevic into military action there. Had the Kosovar Albanians never taken up arms, they would have remained administratively a part of Serbia, but they would not have invited the violent reprisal they got. In any event, the general population of Kosovo was never in existential danger: Albanians are over 90% of the population there, and the Serbs knew that in spite of a few individual skirmishes, they could not just slaughter a whole population outright.
Notwithstanding the "the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'" issue, what crime are Poles most likely to complain about? Pickpocketing, perhaps. Fights between drunken youths, a sadly common occurrence. The very rare mugging that will not involve a gun. But certainly not murder or attempted murder of innocent bystanders going about their daily business.
And compared to the US, urban areas in Poland are paradise. In my native US, there are areas of the city where it would be unwise to go at any time of the day, because one can be shot or at least threatened with a gun (and this is backed up by statistics, not my own personal experience). Meanwhile, I can walk around all parts of Warsaw, Lublin, Bialystok or Rzeszow at 3 a.m. with no incident (again, this is backed up by statistics, not my own personal experience, though I only list here the cities that I frequently visit).
For what it's worth, I have relatives in Poland. I've never heard much complaint about crime, so you should hesitate to speak for your whole people. Even if the police were undereporting petty theft, it would be very difficult for them to sweep violent attacks under the rug.
I generally divide my time between Romania and Finland, and urban areas in both countries are, again, enormously safer than in the US (petty theft the only worry). The OP's claim that Europe is safer than the US as a generalization is valid.
You know nothing about the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. Both the Bosnians and Kosovars were heavily armed. It didn't at all help in convincing the Serbs to stand down without a fight. Instead, lots of people on their side got killed, and they were only able to hold out because international support came.
[Citation needed]
One of the most unusual concepts of an alien life form I've seen are the Tines in Vinge's novel A Fire upon the Deep , dog or giant rat-like animals that are not individually conscious, but when together in packs form a single sentient organism. In the case of Vinge's novel, neural communication between the individual members of the pack was carried out via ultrasound, not electricity like here, but I wouldn't have imagined that scientists would pursue the same idea at some point.
Agreed. It's wasteful to try to develop all this tech for biological organisms to survive in space, when in a few decades the human race will reach the Singularity and then will be able explore space considerably more easily in machine bodies.
If you move records from an internet-connected computer to this isolated computer via a removable drive, you may still be susceptible to attack. After all, Stuxnet and other viruses have spread this way. Viruses were already a problem for PC users long before network-connected device. And even if the computer is totally isolated from both networks and USB drives, the data can still be compromised through a TEMPEST attack (assuming you were a target for a state or especially savvy organized crime network).
Talking with peers in the TeX world, I find that few professionals are writing in LaTeX directly anymore. LaTeX's typesetting abilities remain sexy, but it is far between to keep a document in a semantic markup like Docbook XML, transforming it to LaTeX via an XSL stylesheet only when one wants to produce final print output.
Writing a LaTeX document directly might be OK for students who do only one or two papers a year, or someone who needs to quickly get a math notation graphic. But if LaTeX is something you do regularly, far better to setup a workflow where it is just a stage transforming data kept in a more structured format.
While is indeed up to you what to call a place, that doesn't mean that pressure to use the name they desire won't suceed. For example, after Cote d'Ivoire announced that it wants this name used in all English-language contexts (superseding "Ivory Coast"), the new name caught on pretty quickly in the press and among educated speakers with a minimum of "mockery". Also, one can note how "Torino" has ousted "Turin" except for a few set phrases (e.g. "Shroud of Turin").
Because Slashdot is a "news for nerds" (with a tongue-in-cheek "stuff that matters" after it) site, and designing a microkernal architecture is a nerdy pastime? I don't know how long you've been around, but Slashdot used to have a lot more posts about quirky little hacking pursuits like this. It wasn't always rehashes of the same issues (mobile phones, patent wars) involving big companies.
Yes. Hobbyists want to offer Debian Hurd in order to make it easy for more hobbyists to contribute to the project.
Stallman is an eccentric personality who finds it difficult to relate to people and feels most comfortable around computers. I'd imagine that for him coding would be "the easy job", while taking on the role of public speaker and advocate for Free Software is probably a cross to bear rather than an escape from the hard work.
I hate to interrupt your Stallman bashing, but RMS isn't involved in Hurd development. He has been content to use Linux for many years now. Hurd development is driven mainly by other developers who are in it purely as a hobby, a way to play around with microkernel design, and they are not striving to reach a mass market.
This Slashdot submission is about Finland. It's a different country. Different countries have different consitutions. The First Amendment to the US Constitution does not have any legal force in Finland.
Yes, I've seen that in a few places. Luckily, 3G data is getting cheap enough that travellers don't have to always use internet cafes anymore. When I was in Tajikistan, for example, I just got a local SIM card, put 5 or 10 euro on it, and then tethered my mobile phone to my notebook. It worked for about a week of usage before needing a credit top-up.
Computers at internet cafes in third-world countries look as scary and diseased as truck stop hookers. One imagines that whoever set up the computers way back when might have been tech savvy, but the owner paid him for his one-time services, then for the next 5-10 years kept the machines running with no updates or virus scans. The staff hired to work there are just babysitting the machines to make sure no one steals them; they have no greater knowledge of how to fix a problem than restarting the computer.
I use these establishments only to plug my notebook into a ethernet jack, but a non-insignificant amount of times, to ask to use your own computer instead of their infectious, malware-ridden machines evokes suspicion that are you are some kind of hacker terrorist and they want you to leave.
Larry Niven already proposed this four decades ago in his novel Ringworld , where the alien race the Puppeteers had moved their planets away from their sun to cool them. This was long before fears of global warming, but Niven felt that technological advancement would inevitably lead to problems with waste heat.
It'll be interesting to see how addictive this technology becomes, especially as many people already can't be separated from their smartphones. One of the more thought-provoking things in Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime (about the pace of technology accelerating towards a singularity) is that human beings from later in the 21st century feel disoriented and sluggish when disconnected from wearable technology that provides them 24/7 with sources of information.
There's your problem right there.
I wonder why oral exams aren't more common in the United States. When I came to do graduate studies in Europe, they really forced me to shape up and learn my stuff. Not only do they make cheating impossible, but when you are judged on how fast you provide the answer, you also internalize it better.
Sure, written exams are the norm for science fields where one must note down specialist notation like mathematics or chemistry, but in the humanities -- and the "political science" of this article -- they seem an excellent way of judging student progress.