The improvements seem reasonable and unless they add excessively to the cost there's no reason to criticize them.
As long as they don't shorten battery life, of course. That is still the Achilles heel of mobile devices, after all, and all those pixels likely increase the amount of processing needed to control them.
While in general I agree with you - you are talking about a group of people here who do their life's work at the junction of the earth and the air. It is true they may be misguided or misinformed. But their opinions were not arrived at through talk radio.
The chances are that they arrived at them through the time-honored "head in bushes" -method: Something will cause me great harm if true. I don't really have any real power over it, nor any way to significantly mitigate the damage through preparation. Therefore, I'll disbelief it to protect myself from stress and worry.
If true, such feeling of disempowerment is a bigger problem to Sweden than climate change. The latter is ultimately a matter of enduring hardship and adapting, which is something the Nordics are quite familiar with; but the former is a spiritual malaise that ultimately leads to dysfunctional society and democracy de facto falling and degenerating to corporacy, as has happened in the US.
The spectrum may be public, but the public does not own the data in the spectrum, (just as roads may be public, but the public don't own the cars on the roads).
No one owns data. Someone might have copyright on it, which may or may not be something other people should care about. I'm inclined to think they shouldn't, because copyright lobby has broken the bargain (limited-time incentive to expand the public domain) and it's actively hindering production of culture in digital era.
If you make soldiers be cops, you get dangerous cops and terrible soldiers.
Which pretty much sums up the problem with SWAT: It's ultimately just an attempt to get an army you can use against your own citizens, with predictable results.
If someone wants to kill themselves, how is it society's concern?
Two reasons.
1) They're usually nuts. Not always, but usually. So not preventing them and sending them to therapy is analogous to passing an accident scene without calling for help.
2) On a more cynical note, when Christianity began to spread, many slaves drew the perfectly logical conclusion that if their current lifes suck, and Heaven waits after death, then goodbye cruel world. The slavemasters needed a way to stop them, thus the "suicide sends you to Hell" -meme was born. And since the world is still not free from those who dream themselves their brother's masters, they still need some way to keep people from opting out.
Put these two together and pretty much everyone has a motive to stop other people from killing themselves, whether it's from altruism or to keep fear of death as an effective tool for the oppressor.
Historical eugenics was based on idiot politicians making pseudo-scientific claims.
Eugenics, historical or modern, are simply another incarnation of the myth of redemptive violence. Politicians proposed them and people accepted them because the idea that evil is located outside yourself and can and must be suppressed violently is so ingrained in our culture it resonates with the public, no matter how stupid or outright insane a particular proposition actually is.
Just think of eugenics as three-strike laws or War on Whatever of old: it's there to let people enjoy their sadism with a clear conscience. Someone is being fought against; some version of Tiamat is being killed; someone is being cast to Hell; someone has been declared bringer of chaos (through their children, in the case of eugenics) and ritually desecrated (sterilized), so all is well with the world. Until the myth requires another victim, anyway.
IQ has demonstrated a majority genetic basis. Hand-waving the evidence based on PC majoritarian dogma is precisely the hypocritically pretentious stupidity behind historical eugenics. Genes work. Breeding works. It's rarely done properly due to politics, whether state or petty/social.
Genetics undoubtedly plays a major part in innate intelligence, since they're what separates humans from blades of grass. That doesn't mean the rest of your statements follow. They assume that your phenotype is a simple function of your genotype, when in reality it's the function of your genotype and personal history and anything but simple. Ask any animal breeder how "easy" it is to introduce even a simple quality into the population without causing problems, even in completely controlled environment.
We got enough idiots shitting litters they can't pay for nor think should have to.
Ah, a Republican. Yeah, I get it's annoying to pay child support. But it's still cheaper than paying for your wars.
What's your problem with private individuals having dating preference involving intelligence instead of standardized cultural bullshit that's too shallow to even qualify as proper sophistry?
An anonymous coward invoking Godwin's law for a dating site? Gee, I wonder what they could possibly be trying to accomplish.
Not that Republicans are anything to write home about, but the idea of "rule by smart people" is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the GOP...
Republicans are all about rule by a smart elite. It's just that the word "smart" has become a tribal identifier for Liberals, so Conservatives prefer to use the euphemism "common sense".
I don't think it's possible to go to politics without either thinking your know what's best or being hopelessly corrupt.
It's only when you accept your own limitations and appreciate the different gifts that everybody has that you realize that no group of people, no matter how intelligent and well meaning, can possibly understand, let alone fulfill, the competing needs and desires of our diverse human family. Lay down some broadly accepted rules and provide a focused and best-in-class set of services, but otherwise, get out of the way.
No one can possibly understand, let alone fulfill, the competing needs and desires of our diverse human family, so they better follow your political philosophy which tells them how to do just that ?-)
Bonus points for proposing a program that's broad enough that every single government ever could be argued to follow it. Even Attila the Hun laid down rules and provided services.
Is there a point to this post, exactly? I mean, I get the capacity variation is both a real concern and a common kind of FUD regarding solar, but this data point isn't about that.
It's about how rapidly a changeover in energy production to sustainable can occur. Germany was one of the world's biggest nuclear energy producers(France being the leader of that pack), and they've gone from that to one of the biggest solar producers in only a year or so.
The point is, German power production isn't sustainable, precisely because of wild capacity variation of solar. They aren't green; in reality, they went from nuclear to coal, which is about as unsustainable as can be.
The point that's being demonstrated is that a power infrastructure changeover can be done without sacrificing being a first world nation along the way.
Sadly, for the reasons mentioned Germany has not demonstrated any such thing. What it has demonstrated is that even a combination of powerful economy, popular support and political will is not sufficient. At current level of technology we simply can't power the grid with renewables, so giving up nuclear means going for fossil fuels.
To be specific, the key technology that's missing is large-scale, dense, long-term energy storage. A "UPS for the grid" capable of absorbing a wildly varying trickle of energy from a variety of sources and releasing it at a steady rate when needed.
You can always change vocations and not want as many things.
You do realize that the luxuries you'd give up with a pay cut increasingly include food and shelter, right? Or do you suggest everyone do what Wal-Mart employees need to: get food stamps since their pay is not enough to live on?
That's how screwed up things are. People who listen to radio and television which is paid for by the wealthy (and I include MSNBC and CNN) are being brainwashed to slit their own throats because -- maybe --- someday-- (including the 59 year old above) they -might- become wealthy.
Of course, the only reason the 59-year old is vulnerable to being tricked into slitting his own throat is that he's willing to slit a throat to go from rich to richer. So the problem goes deeper than just having unrealistic expectations about your financial future.
The people I really can't understand are the ones who do overtime for free - these people are robbing unemployed people of work and aren't even getting paid for it.
"Real nice job you have here. Be a shame if anything happens to it. You don't mind doing this little thing after work, right? Be a team player, don't bother telling accounting."
Strong unions could put a stop to that, but everyone is too busy ensuring Joe Slacker gets no unearned benefit to ensure they get their earned ones. It's classic divide and conquer, helped along with everyone thinking they're not only above average but such special snowlakes they can write their own ticket as soon as someone notices their talents - any day now. Of course the resulting economic collapse is taking the employers with them as well, but it's one thing to release the beast and another to put it back into the cage.
American economy is a self-imposed Hell where the only real goal anyone has is to escape from the looming specter of poverty. That's why get-rich-quick schemes never fail to find victims there. And that's also why it works worse and worse over time, as increasingly desperate people find short-term gambits more and more attractive as long-term plans yield less and less realistic chances of improving your situation or even maintaining it.
It is the length of the meter that is defined based on a combination of this constant, and the international standard of time. So you are correct that if light turned out to travel slower, the length of the meter would be slightly shorter, and the speed of light would still be exactly 299792458 meter per second.
No, because this effect is dependent on presence of gravity, so it's our definition of "free space" that needs to be updated to specify flat spacetime.
Or we could say that meter is defined against a constant of nature - invariant speed - and photons are simply a handy way to measure it to good and possibly, at least in some circumstances, perfect precision.
So, are you going to explain why a hundred drones delivering packages is magically much more dangerous than a truck-load of Amazon packages crashing into a packed school playground?
Because there's one truck per ten thousand or so drones, and also because speed limits forbid driving fast near schools.
China's downfall in production will come when the factory workers start having unions that are too powerful.
Isn't it strange how success is always the accomplishment of awesome management but failure is never the fault of incompetent one?
In any case, you're wrong. The world is running out of hellholes that tolerate slave labour, so those companies that can't turn profit without it have nowhere to go and no future save bankruptcy auction. That should make this the time of great opportunity for every businessman who can actually live up to their own hype; based on the amount of whining we're hearing instead of eager expectation, I guess most of them know the truth about themselves...
Having said that, I grant that it could be used in ways that are likely illegal... like holding the spot for the person who won the auction. Then you might be said to be actually holding it hostage. But that would mean you -- not the winner of the auction -- were breaking the law. And it would be hard to prove.
The only way information received from this application could possibly be useful was precisely if the auctioner held the spot for the winner. Because otherwise it would already be long taken by the time they got around, even if they were just a few city blocks away. Alternatively, San Francisco has an abundance of parking spaces, so what would be the point of this app?
Does it ever make you uncomfortabe how posting this kind of reflexive, unthinking, ideology-based bullshit makes you exactly like the Stalinists of old, just with a different set of keyword triggers? Do you ignore the similarities because clearly, their ideology was wrong and yours is right? Or do you simply lack the self-awareness to notice?
There's a line of reasoning that's somewhat common, it goes: "We should never do anything altruistic ever, because it will create a moral hazard, and the mere potential of moral hazard is always worse than concrete good."
More to the point, some people simply aren't happy if someone doesn't suffer, yet don't have the guts to straight-up admit that. So they infest religion and turn holy texts into torture porn, infest politics and either push for war or harsh sentences, infest media and produce grimdark bullshit, and in general oppose anything that might save someone some pain with ridiculous excuses, such as "moral hazard".
It has nothing to do with reasoning of any kind, it's simply insane, malicious evil hiding behind the mask of rationality.
Theoretically, both ventures had (could of had) a good profit margin and were worth undertaking, and the people who undertook the machine building had machine building skills and most likely more aversion to risk, while the miner had skills more suited to that and more propensity for risk.
Let's not forget the small matter of capital. If you sell machines, and require payment upfront, you can then use that payment to pay for the components. That way you can cash in on the Bitcoin boom without a large amount of initial capital. Sure, you might have made more by owning the machines yourself, but then again it's almost always true that the more money you have, the easier it is to make more.
Buyers should ask themselves why anyone would sell a money printing machine. If it was profitable they're going to use it for themselves, or use it until the bitcoin difficulty gets just to the point where it's marginal and sell it.
The problem is, there's nothing to limit this logic to Bitcoin. So either the logic is faulty, or trade - and, by extension, economy - is inherently bad since it means one party is always getting screwed. Which very well might be the case, but the implications go well beyond Bitcoin.
You must have missed the motherfucking literary reference I linked. Read the fucking book (and hopefully a few more), you fucking retard.
The book you linked to is about cryptography, not incest pornography as you seem to be implying. Neither of these seems relevant to anonymising - as opposed to encrypting - records.
Good luck with treating your Tourette's, BTW. Or hangover. Whichever is relevant here.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as they don't shorten battery life, of course. That is still the Achilles heel of mobile devices, after all, and all those pixels likely increase the amount of processing needed to control them.
The chances are that they arrived at them through the time-honored "head in bushes" -method: Something will cause me great harm if true. I don't really have any real power over it, nor any way to significantly mitigate the damage through preparation. Therefore, I'll disbelief it to protect myself from stress and worry.
If true, such feeling of disempowerment is a bigger problem to Sweden than climate change. The latter is ultimately a matter of enduring hardship and adapting, which is something the Nordics are quite familiar with; but the former is a spiritual malaise that ultimately leads to dysfunctional society and democracy de facto falling and degenerating to corporacy, as has happened in the US.
No one owns data. Someone might have copyright on it, which may or may not be something other people should care about. I'm inclined to think they shouldn't, because copyright lobby has broken the bargain (limited-time incentive to expand the public domain) and it's actively hindering production of culture in digital era.
One person walking across a grassy field is fine. A million people walking across the same field leaves only trampled desolation.
Welcome to real world, where scale matters.
Which pretty much sums up the problem with SWAT: It's ultimately just an attempt to get an army you can use against your own citizens, with predictable results.
Two reasons.
1) They're usually nuts. Not always, but usually. So not preventing them and sending them to therapy is analogous to passing an accident scene without calling for help.
2) On a more cynical note, when Christianity began to spread, many slaves drew the perfectly logical conclusion that if their current lifes suck, and Heaven waits after death, then goodbye cruel world. The slavemasters needed a way to stop them, thus the "suicide sends you to Hell" -meme was born. And since the world is still not free from those who dream themselves their brother's masters, they still need some way to keep people from opting out.
Put these two together and pretty much everyone has a motive to stop other people from killing themselves, whether it's from altruism or to keep fear of death as an effective tool for the oppressor.
A better question is, would it keep the guns in America?
Eugenics, historical or modern, are simply another incarnation of the myth of redemptive violence. Politicians proposed them and people accepted them because the idea that evil is located outside yourself and can and must be suppressed violently is so ingrained in our culture it resonates with the public, no matter how stupid or outright insane a particular proposition actually is.
Just think of eugenics as three-strike laws or War on Whatever of old: it's there to let people enjoy their sadism with a clear conscience. Someone is being fought against; some version of Tiamat is being killed; someone is being cast to Hell; someone has been declared bringer of chaos (through their children, in the case of eugenics) and ritually desecrated (sterilized), so all is well with the world. Until the myth requires another victim, anyway.
Genetics undoubtedly plays a major part in innate intelligence, since they're what separates humans from blades of grass. That doesn't mean the rest of your statements follow. They assume that your phenotype is a simple function of your genotype, when in reality it's the function of your genotype and personal history and anything but simple. Ask any animal breeder how "easy" it is to introduce even a simple quality into the population without causing problems, even in completely controlled environment.
Ah, a Republican. Yeah, I get it's annoying to pay child support. But it's still cheaper than paying for your wars.
An anonymous coward invoking Godwin's law for a dating site? Gee, I wonder what they could possibly be trying to accomplish.
Republicans are all about rule by a smart elite. It's just that the word "smart" has become a tribal identifier for Liberals, so Conservatives prefer to use the euphemism "common sense".
I don't think it's possible to go to politics without either thinking your know what's best or being hopelessly corrupt.
No one can possibly understand, let alone fulfill, the competing needs and desires of our diverse human family, so they better follow your political philosophy which tells them how to do just that ?-)
Bonus points for proposing a program that's broad enough that every single government ever could be argued to follow it. Even Attila the Hun laid down rules and provided services.
It's almost like the IQ tests tested these very things.
And powered by coal. Or do solar panels work at night in your world?
The point is, German power production isn't sustainable, precisely because of wild capacity variation of solar. They aren't green; in reality, they went from nuclear to coal, which is about as unsustainable as can be.
Sadly, for the reasons mentioned Germany has not demonstrated any such thing. What it has demonstrated is that even a combination of powerful economy, popular support and political will is not sufficient. At current level of technology we simply can't power the grid with renewables, so giving up nuclear means going for fossil fuels.
To be specific, the key technology that's missing is large-scale, dense, long-term energy storage. A "UPS for the grid" capable of absorbing a wildly varying trickle of energy from a variety of sources and releasing it at a steady rate when needed.
You do realize that the luxuries you'd give up with a pay cut increasingly include food and shelter, right? Or do you suggest everyone do what Wal-Mart employees need to: get food stamps since their pay is not enough to live on?
Of course, the only reason the 59-year old is vulnerable to being tricked into slitting his own throat is that he's willing to slit a throat to go from rich to richer. So the problem goes deeper than just having unrealistic expectations about your financial future.
What does it matter what he "should" do? He's drowning. If no one saves him, he dies.
Real life isn't heroic fantasy where willpower trumps physical reality, you know.
"Real nice job you have here. Be a shame if anything happens to it. You don't mind doing this little thing after work, right? Be a team player, don't bother telling accounting."
Strong unions could put a stop to that, but everyone is too busy ensuring Joe Slacker gets no unearned benefit to ensure they get their earned ones. It's classic divide and conquer, helped along with everyone thinking they're not only above average but such special snowlakes they can write their own ticket as soon as someone notices their talents - any day now. Of course the resulting economic collapse is taking the employers with them as well, but it's one thing to release the beast and another to put it back into the cage.
American economy is a self-imposed Hell where the only real goal anyone has is to escape from the looming specter of poverty. That's why get-rich-quick schemes never fail to find victims there. And that's also why it works worse and worse over time, as increasingly desperate people find short-term gambits more and more attractive as long-term plans yield less and less realistic chances of improving your situation or even maintaining it.
No, because this effect is dependent on presence of gravity, so it's our definition of "free space" that needs to be updated to specify flat spacetime.
Or we could say that meter is defined against a constant of nature - invariant speed - and photons are simply a handy way to measure it to good and possibly, at least in some circumstances, perfect precision.
Because there's one truck per ten thousand or so drones, and also because speed limits forbid driving fast near schools.
Isn't it strange how success is always the accomplishment of awesome management but failure is never the fault of incompetent one?
In any case, you're wrong. The world is running out of hellholes that tolerate slave labour, so those companies that can't turn profit without it have nowhere to go and no future save bankruptcy auction. That should make this the time of great opportunity for every businessman who can actually live up to their own hype; based on the amount of whining we're hearing instead of eager expectation, I guess most of them know the truth about themselves...
The only way information received from this application could possibly be useful was precisely if the auctioner held the spot for the winner. Because otherwise it would already be long taken by the time they got around, even if they were just a few city blocks away. Alternatively, San Francisco has an abundance of parking spaces, so what would be the point of this app?
Does it ever make you uncomfortabe how posting this kind of reflexive, unthinking, ideology-based bullshit makes you exactly like the Stalinists of old, just with a different set of keyword triggers? Do you ignore the similarities because clearly, their ideology was wrong and yours is right? Or do you simply lack the self-awareness to notice?
More to the point, some people simply aren't happy if someone doesn't suffer, yet don't have the guts to straight-up admit that. So they infest religion and turn holy texts into torture porn, infest politics and either push for war or harsh sentences, infest media and produce grimdark bullshit, and in general oppose anything that might save someone some pain with ridiculous excuses, such as "moral hazard".
It has nothing to do with reasoning of any kind, it's simply insane, malicious evil hiding behind the mask of rationality.
Let's not forget the small matter of capital. If you sell machines, and require payment upfront, you can then use that payment to pay for the components. That way you can cash in on the Bitcoin boom without a large amount of initial capital. Sure, you might have made more by owning the machines yourself, but then again it's almost always true that the more money you have, the easier it is to make more.
The problem is, there's nothing to limit this logic to Bitcoin. So either the logic is faulty, or trade - and, by extension, economy - is inherently bad since it means one party is always getting screwed. Which very well might be the case, but the implications go well beyond Bitcoin.
The book you linked to is about cryptography, not incest pornography as you seem to be implying. Neither of these seems relevant to anonymising - as opposed to encrypting - records.
Good luck with treating your Tourette's, BTW. Or hangover. Whichever is relevant here.
I'm appalled that yours has been modded "Insightful" despite having no content beyond a verbose "you suck".