I just think spending the money on say US heavy lift globalmasters is a much better fit for Canada than F-35's.
Anyone we are likely to get in a tussle with is likely going to have little air power or technological advantage, even using our current equipment. Those that do, i.e. Russia and China etc... well the amount of F-35's we get are likely going to make little difference anyway.
Which unless they are positioned need the Canadian shoreline, near a military base F-35 is not going to be particularly useful, less so in the North, where that is more likely to happen, if anywhere. Besides, seriously, is Canada going to threaten Russian drilling platforms? That is silly.
However to expand on that, lets say for example that is the case, it would be a better case for getting an aircraft carrier than F-35's. Even then, I am not sure how well an aircraft carrier would really function in the north anyway. Maybe this is why Canada is also getting "ice hardened" frigates designed in Norway.
That was my understanding. Particularly when coupled with lack of payload.
Like they shouldn't bother even painting the thing, as if it works as it should, no one will ever actually physically see the things anyway. Radar lock on multiple targets over the horizon. Fire missiles. Go back and reload. Repeat until nothing else is in the air but actual birds.
The enemy situation should basically be "Uh sir, we have a shit ton of missiles coming at us from out of nowhere!".
That said, I still think the F35 is a colossal waste of money that could be much better spent on other things. If you absolutely must spend it on military I can think of better ways, even if you say it has to be in the air force.
I mean WTF does Canada need F-35's for?! Buy some ships, heavy lift capability, multi-purpose helos. Most of what we do are support activities, aid, and rescue. The F-35 does not increase our capabilities in ANY of those things. If it comes to a shooting war with some country that you actually need F-35's for, Canada would be sort of screwed anyway in theater. However any sort of invasion is more less impossible (unless it comes from the US:) given the logistics of location etc... Even then other assets would be more valuable than F-35's. Not to mention the US being an ally likely isn't going to stand around and do nothing either which is more than a little thing. In fact they ONLY reason I can see this happening, is that the Canadian government needs a convenient way to funnel a bunch of money to the US in a gesture of goodwill or something.
To be fair the stuff about "unlicensed" coal mines, is more about corruption than opposing land use models. The same could be said for governments that push through corporate interests regardless of regulation and laws. I have seen both sides of that coin. Usually litigation is involved, which may take some time, however those that get wronged generally get compensated (notice I didn't say those in the wrong get punished). It can take a long time and be costly, which if you are an individual can be difficult.
Then again, to get back on topic, somehow for this particular project, corruption will likely be rampant, laws pretty flexible (waived), and with the kind of money being thrown around, a lot of palms are likely going to get greased.
I think that is what I said. However you are applying hindsight to the idea, allowing for what we know is a "roundish" world... they did not know that back then. Only now can we look back and scoff, what idiots, of course it is round and not flat, we have satellites zooming around it and such taking Google map pictures and the like!
To go into the whole Phil101 again, but rather than talk abouit Truth, talk about "Perspective". From their perspective, in time, and what science was telling them at the time, the world was flat, and thus it was so. Perspective is about what is observable, which is important from a science perspective, as without being able to observe results to confirm ideas, what you have is pretty speculative.
We get that all the time in high physics, where mathematically something might be postulated, but it is of a scale we cannot yet observe to test results. There are plenty of pretty far out "theories" out there, particularly presented on slashdot, where some scientist speculates about black holes, or dark matter, or anti-matter, strings, or any of a number of exotic things which are particularly hard to either observe or test. This is why consortium spend billions of dollars to build things like Colliders, in the hope that it will allow us to actually observe and test things we could previously not perceive and thus not really advance science in any meaningful way.
So I don't think it is all that silly at all, because the principle still affects us in the now, and likely forever will. It is easy to look back and ridicule and say well of course this is this way, that is for granted!
I can confirm that. I just finished a course last year on Oracle 10g (yeah I know, it should have been at least 11, but I didn't write the course). Part of it included Oracle Forms. I had a hell of a time getting it to function and display as it should. It involved installing a legacy version of Java, then swapping out a particular file with one patched that was found on the Internet. Then then it operated rather wonky, seemingly working sometimes, and other times not. Reopening the application, and refreshing the browser a bunch and hoping for the best seemed to be the working method. That said trying to run Oracle 10g on a Windows 7 environment, using current browsers (I had 4 browsers installed, because some would work for somethings and not others)... Anyway it was painful. I've heard they switched to Oracle 11 the next semester... jerks. Anyway it seems a very amateur Jerry rigged method was the only way to get Oracle Forms in 10g to work with current browsers and java. Not something you expect from a large company like Oracle. Though in their defense, 10g had been around long enough that Oracle actually stopped supporting it right at the beginning of the course, which was fscked as our first assignment was to download a version of 10g from Oracle... which they stopped allowing. LOL! Fail.
Sure more people might get the Flu and die, but they would eventually die from what? Dehydration? Suffocation?
It isn't quite the same as getting the "Flesh Eating" disease having your tissue go necrotic and dying from either the above, organ failure or bleeding out due to lack of clotting. It also looks a hell of a lot scarier in the media.
So yeah, while the numbers are not really there, any increase, even small increase compared to others, are taken as more alarming.
You probably have a better chance of dying of getting hit by lighting while winning the lottery, but if the alternative is gruesome enough, it will be a big concern to folks.
As has been pointed out, one of the problems Ebola has with becoming a horribly infectious disease is that it isn't airborne, it isn't likely (or possible) to mutate to become so, and because the death rate is so high (which is one of the scary parts), it is hard to transmit, as people tend to die before they can pass it on to anyone else. It is also only communicable once symptoms are showing, meaning it is more easily identifiable as well.
There will always be something in my experience. I do it all the time, though not part of my primary job description. It is usually because of some wonky legacy system still in production that has been terribly maintained because the organization doesn't have the money to fix properly, and certainly doesn't have the money to replace it. Usually patches are applied, which despite UAT ends up breaking some other unforeseen part of the application because it was apparently originally designed by blind monkeys (in reality it was usually designed for another purpose, or the business area has changed so much, and the current system has be adapted to work), which then require the same sort of treatment you were trying to eliminate. Then on top of that, some manager will change how the buisness works radically corporately that effects all your systems without any thought as to what this will actually do to business, which they expect you to fix immediately, which is impossible, so interim solutions are put into place for the "short term" causing even more problems and more lack of automation, until another fix can be designed, tested, implemented, and deployed, etc... then repeat every year, for say 20 years. Eventually retire. On top of all that if you have shitty management, which everyone probably does at some point, they will force your experienced technical guys to leave, replace them with noobies, who barely have an idea of the basics, have no idea of all the patches, fixes, and weird idiosyncrasies of the system and why it does the things it does, or one of the things that is not automated is not done for an extended amount of time because no one is aware of it except the technical resource that left causing all sorts of data problems etc... There is no documentation, or what little of it there is, is quickly lost... Blah blah blah... Anyway how familiar is this sequence of events to people out there? I am betting a lot. I have been asking for fixes (which I sometimes get) from management, and entire re-designs and replacements from management for well over a decade. Usually it comes down to not having the money. So long as the system keeps limping along, no one cares. Eventually it will likely fail catastrophically, however by that point they will probably be off to their next management job, or will simply blame the previous management or throw IT under the bus.
Now you are talking about Truth. Truth has nothing to do with science, other than it is possibly the unattainable goal. If you want to talk about Truth go to Phil101 class.
So yes, at a certain point in time the earth really was flat, as that was the currently accepted theory that most of the world believed in. It became un-flat if you will when others postulated a theory other than the generally accepted facts, did experimentation to prove it, and then convinced other scientists with their work that their theory had more merit and should be accepted as the new ideal. As you may recall, many were persecuted for their various beliefs mostly because if didn't fit with religious dogma. If you consider that the church was a even larger part of society and government at the time there are certainly analogs where things like Climate Change for example do not fit some political ideology and thus have a harder time gaining traction.
Science is about trying to better describe the world around us using experiments that are repeatable using acceptable standards. Leave "Truth" out of it.
Well two things. First ownership are rights to the land, and there are surface and sub-surface rights. Typically people buy surface rights because that is what they are interested in. In many cases you can also buy the subsurface rights and people do in certain situations sometimes simply to prevent someone from buying the land out from under them. That said, even if I got the subsurface, I can't just turn your house into an open pit mine, there are all sorts of regulations and the like I would have to follow, and most likely the company (unless just testing) would buy the surface rights from the owner at a premium.
Also, just because you "own" land does not make that your kingdom as in Peteoria... You land does exist within a governmental structure of some kind, and that government will have these things called "laws". In an extreme example I can't say murder someone on my land, and then complain that government is pushing me around because the cops show up to enforce on my land... In more likely scenarios I can't say brake environmental law by dumping something into a river that runs through my property, or kill endangered species just because they are on "my" land. That is simply stupid. Though I have seen people try to make this very argument before, even going and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in court despite common sense and losing.
We have had several exchanges with Chinese government officials that do much the same things we do. There are some fundamental differences. No one owns land in China, it is all nationalized. However you are able to get a lease, and things like an 80 year lease is common. Think your current lifetime, just don't think you get to pass your loot onto your kids necessarily, particularly if you abuse the resource. Here a lease is typically about 20 years.
Anyway the mechanics are much the same, it is the implementation and those differences that influence changes. For example, if I am using a piece of land for some purpose say a factory, or a farm, or whatever, and do a crappy job of it, once the lease is up, it probably will not be given to me again, but someone else who might use the resource better. If I own it, I can more less waste that piece of land however I wish. Same goes for control, land might be leased for a specific purpose and no other, where if I own the land I can more less do whatever I want. Which might be in my best interests, but maybe no so much anyone around me. On private land government still tries to exert some control in terms of zoning and the like but it isn't quite the same thing.
In a current example, I saw an "environmental group" whose concern was the loss of prime agricultural farmland in a centralized location to urban areas protest, lobby and win against a mining operation and successfully shut it down. However they did not ask that the land be protected by establishing long term zoning only allowing for agricultural use. The reason being that the group is really a land owners association, where farmers want to sell their land for millions to urban residential developers to create sprawling suburbs, which would more effectively destroy more farmland than any sized mine.
In the Chinese model the government would say FU, no more land for you, only if you plan to farm it! In ours, the farmland will get covered by 3000sq ft houses and forever be unusable. In our model land use and worth is controlled largely by market forces... i.e. close to urban area, worth X as farmland, but worth Y as residential, if up to individual, they will sell it to Y, as they get the most out of it. So China in a sense still has what used to be called a control economy, where land use and value is not wholly (or mostly) determined by market values, but by say a centralized authority that may decided having a quality farmland close to an urban area is worth more to everyone than simply a short term $$$ figure. That is not to say that it is totally without consequence, the same here with municipal governments trying to exert some control. Only that it is very weighed one way here, and another way in China.
No so sure about that. Should you personal insurance then go up as a result of an accident caused by two independently operated machines without your input?
Insurance companies basically manage risk VS revenue, if you take the human out of the equation, what is left to evaluate? Only the car. Then it is one car VS another as far as if one is particularly less risk or not. At which point what does that have to do with the individual other than the initial decision to get one or another?
Seriously, I do not see what the issue is. People using all these "free" services are suddenly astounded about being monitored? You get what you pay for, which when that is zero, equals not much privacy. All of them have EULA's which you don't have to read the 300 pages to know will allow them to rifle though your messages and spy on you (primarily for targeted ad content), etc... If you do not like it, do not use these services. Use something more secure, or as you say encrypt stuff. The probably with encryption has always been it is a two way street. So while you might do it, the jerks that send you stuff may not, and then all that data is up for grabs.
Anyway it is good that criminals are idiots I suppose, but people getting their back up about free services which say (even if buried in 300 pages of legal gobbledygook) up front that they are going to effectively spy on you is a bit much.
And yet, even while on RAILS, how many train accidents are there? Also Unions? BS. First of all if they were able to fully automate trains, then the Unions wouldn't have much leverage would they...
Insurance companies is an interesting notion. Provided they are not the first to go during the economic purges of the 2020's, assigning risk and fault to autonomous driving could be complicated. Just throwing it out there, but it may eventually follow a system whereby the car is insured itself by the Company and not by the individual... Can you see the court case? I personally have zero control over the actions of the car, how can I be held responsible for what it does? Ford (or whoever) are the ones who designed the logic that decides the actions of the car, and therefor is ultimately responsible for what it does... That is of course assuming the autonomous control can't be turned off or tampered with.
Applying for a job that has a larger programming component than I am used to...
When I went to school I learned on, Pascal, C, COBOL, Assembly, VB... Position will likely want someone with Java. While I have dabbled in some Javascript using Google Maps API, I'm not exactly current on it.
On the other hand DB is what I do, and SQL is probably the scripting I use the most these days.
Anyway I have done some training on Python, but most of my languages are pretty antiquated by today's standards which I am wondering if it will diminish my chances. Here is hoping more emphasis is placed on analysis and not on initial coding.
It has come up before when people compare technology to today's standards. This thing was launched 10 years ago, and designed years before that, and even then they are not going to use cutting edge stuff but rather time tested stuff that will not fail, because it won't actually be used for 10+ years. Try designing for that. Sure your iPhone might have a 10MP camera in it, but it only came out recently, and I don't know about you, but mine stopped working after 3 months.
Could you imagine spending the amount of money that they do, waiting 10+ years, and then finding out the camera doesn't work? Bummer.
Probably one of the better examples. A movie, not a TV series. Involve the use of children using mechs to fight in a war against aliens in distant space. Interestingly enough, the movie isn't really about this, but rather the long distance relationship between a girl that gets recruited, and a boy who does not. Presumably they use children because of reflexes, or size, or more likely the length of time involved.
What makes this story most interesting is that all the communication is done VIA texting. Yes Space texting, presumably though some technological magic communication device which seems compatible with modern cellphones. Anyway that plot device aside, the real interest is that one is traveling at greater than relativistic speeds, and probably also some space lag if you will. This means while the boy ages though his life, having a family etc... the girl pretty much stays the same age...
It is very much a retelling of Joe Haldeman's "Forever War", about love spanning space and time, though with a much sadder conclusion.
I apparently fall into this category myself. I think if I could get Lasik I would have by now. A number of years ago I went in to get an assessment. I was told due to my prescription which is about -11.5 and -12 that I do not have enough coronal material for Lasik and that PKR would be the way to go. However PKR was three times the cost at over 6000$, and has a much longer healing time, several days of useless, followed by weeks of gradual change. At the time I didn't have anyone to take care of me basically for a few days or even drive me to the city that has the clinic and back. Oddly enough I got my eyes tested again recently by the same guy, and now he recommends getting lenses implanted in the eye (forget the procedure name) which is done by a cataract surgeon. Their draw back is not only do they have a extended healing time, cost about the same as PKR, but you also loose your near vision, so would then require reading glasses... Apparently it is free (Canada) if you have cataracts (My Mom recently had it done), so I guess I have to hope my eyes degenerate more...
Anyway I have done nothing other than buy more expensive glasses, but maybe someday...
Earth 2110 A mutated smallpox pandemic is sweeping the world. Researchers desperately need an original sample from which to make an vaccine. Man foolishly destroyed all samples back in the dark years of 2014. Now a ragtag group of adventurers attempt to find the last remaining sample, the world depends on it!
Table top gaming made its way early into the Internet and computing. Things like MUD, and NetHack (Mines of Moria, etc), Dwarf Fortress. In fact I remember some of my first video games being Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Pools of Radiance, which were both officially licenced AD&D products. Later things like Neverwinter nights, etc... even Skyrim.
Not to mention all the writing (some good, others no so much), such as Forgotten Realms, etc... Much of it had an birth with D&D.
Hell I was at a pub last week and was able to answer a crazy trivia question about an evil fiery demons in Islamic mythology being called Djinn because I remember them from the Monsters Compendium.
As someone pointed out in the first thread of this tragedy, this is not the first time something like this has happened.
Obama may be being diplomatic so as to not call the kettle black so to speak. The US accidentally did the same to Iran years ago, except they were in Iran air space, the weapons were fired from a warship, by professional soldiers. Consequently rebels accidentally (and I have no doubt they did) shooting down an airliner, using stolen unfamiliar technology with little or no training by militia in the middle of a civil war seems rather less bad.
Also it dredges up the result which was all dead, and the USA not admitting any blame or fault, and instead writing a check for a few million to throw at the hundreds of victims families.
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I just think spending the money on say US heavy lift globalmasters is a much better fit for Canada than F-35's.
Anyone we are likely to get in a tussle with is likely going to have little air power or technological advantage, even using our current equipment. Those that do, i.e. Russia and China etc... well the amount of F-35's we get are likely going to make little difference anyway.
Which unless they are positioned need the Canadian shoreline, near a military base F-35 is not going to be particularly useful, less so in the North, where that is more likely to happen, if anywhere. Besides, seriously, is Canada going to threaten Russian drilling platforms? That is silly.
However to expand on that, lets say for example that is the case, it would be a better case for getting an aircraft carrier than F-35's. Even then, I am not sure how well an aircraft carrier would really function in the north anyway. Maybe this is why Canada is also getting "ice hardened" frigates designed in Norway.
That was my understanding. Particularly when coupled with lack of payload.
Like they shouldn't bother even painting the thing, as if it works as it should, no one will ever actually physically see the things anyway. Radar lock on multiple targets over the horizon. Fire missiles. Go back and reload. Repeat until nothing else is in the air but actual birds.
The enemy situation should basically be "Uh sir, we have a shit ton of missiles coming at us from out of nowhere!".
That said, I still think the F35 is a colossal waste of money that could be much better spent on other things. If you absolutely must spend it on military I can think of better ways, even if you say it has to be in the air force.
I mean WTF does Canada need F-35's for?! Buy some ships, heavy lift capability, multi-purpose helos. Most of what we do are support activities, aid, and rescue. The F-35 does not increase our capabilities in ANY of those things. If it comes to a shooting war with some country that you actually need F-35's for, Canada would be sort of screwed anyway in theater. However any sort of invasion is more less impossible (unless it comes from the US :) given the logistics of location etc... Even then other assets would be more valuable than F-35's. Not to mention the US being an ally likely isn't going to stand around and do nothing either which is more than a little thing. In fact they ONLY reason I can see this happening, is that the Canadian government needs a convenient way to funnel a bunch of money to the US in a gesture of goodwill or something.
To be fair the stuff about "unlicensed" coal mines, is more about corruption than opposing land use models. The same could be said for governments that push through corporate interests regardless of regulation and laws. I have seen both sides of that coin. Usually litigation is involved, which may take some time, however those that get wronged generally get compensated (notice I didn't say those in the wrong get punished). It can take a long time and be costly, which if you are an individual can be difficult.
Then again, to get back on topic, somehow for this particular project, corruption will likely be rampant, laws pretty flexible (waived), and with the kind of money being thrown around, a lot of palms are likely going to get greased.
I think that is what I said. However you are applying hindsight to the idea, allowing for what we know is a "roundish" world... they did not know that back then. Only now can we look back and scoff, what idiots, of course it is round and not flat, we have satellites zooming around it and such taking Google map pictures and the like!
To go into the whole Phil101 again, but rather than talk abouit Truth, talk about "Perspective". From their perspective, in time, and what science was telling them at the time, the world was flat, and thus it was so. Perspective is about what is observable, which is important from a science perspective, as without being able to observe results to confirm ideas, what you have is pretty speculative.
We get that all the time in high physics, where mathematically something might be postulated, but it is of a scale we cannot yet observe to test results. There are plenty of pretty far out "theories" out there, particularly presented on slashdot, where some scientist speculates about black holes, or dark matter, or anti-matter, strings, or any of a number of exotic things which are particularly hard to either observe or test. This is why consortium spend billions of dollars to build things like Colliders, in the hope that it will allow us to actually observe and test things we could previously not perceive and thus not really advance science in any meaningful way.
So I don't think it is all that silly at all, because the principle still affects us in the now, and likely forever will. It is easy to look back and ridicule and say well of course this is this way, that is for granted!
I can confirm that. I just finished a course last year on Oracle 10g (yeah I know, it should have been at least 11, but I didn't write the course). Part of it included Oracle Forms. I had a hell of a time getting it to function and display as it should. It involved installing a legacy version of Java, then swapping out a particular file with one patched that was found on the Internet. Then then it operated rather wonky, seemingly working sometimes, and other times not. Reopening the application, and refreshing the browser a bunch and hoping for the best seemed to be the working method. That said trying to run Oracle 10g on a Windows 7 environment, using current browsers (I had 4 browsers installed, because some would work for somethings and not others)... Anyway it was painful. I've heard they switched to Oracle 11 the next semester... jerks. Anyway it seems a very amateur Jerry rigged method was the only way to get Oracle Forms in 10g to work with current browsers and java. Not something you expect from a large company like Oracle. Though in their defense, 10g had been around long enough that Oracle actually stopped supporting it right at the beginning of the course, which was fscked as our first assignment was to download a version of 10g from Oracle... which they stopped allowing. LOL! Fail.
Sure more people might get the Flu and die, but they would eventually die from what? Dehydration? Suffocation?
It isn't quite the same as getting the "Flesh Eating" disease having your tissue go necrotic and dying from either the above, organ failure or bleeding out due to lack of clotting. It also looks a hell of a lot scarier in the media.
So yeah, while the numbers are not really there, any increase, even small increase compared to others, are taken as more alarming.
You probably have a better chance of dying of getting hit by lighting while winning the lottery, but if the alternative is gruesome enough, it will be a big concern to folks.
As has been pointed out, one of the problems Ebola has with becoming a horribly infectious disease is that it isn't airborne, it isn't likely (or possible) to mutate to become so, and because the death rate is so high (which is one of the scary parts), it is hard to transmit, as people tend to die before they can pass it on to anyone else. It is also only communicable once symptoms are showing, meaning it is more easily identifiable as well.
There will always be something in my experience. I do it all the time, though not part of my primary job description. It is usually because of some wonky legacy system still in production that has been terribly maintained because the organization doesn't have the money to fix properly, and certainly doesn't have the money to replace it. Usually patches are applied, which despite UAT ends up breaking some other unforeseen part of the application because it was apparently originally designed by blind monkeys (in reality it was usually designed for another purpose, or the business area has changed so much, and the current system has be adapted to work), which then require the same sort of treatment you were trying to eliminate. Then on top of that, some manager will change how the buisness works radically corporately that effects all your systems without any thought as to what this will actually do to business, which they expect you to fix immediately, which is impossible, so interim solutions are put into place for the "short term" causing even more problems and more lack of automation, until another fix can be designed, tested, implemented, and deployed, etc... then repeat every year, for say 20 years. Eventually retire. On top of all that if you have shitty management, which everyone probably does at some point, they will force your experienced technical guys to leave, replace them with noobies, who barely have an idea of the basics, have no idea of all the patches, fixes, and weird idiosyncrasies of the system and why it does the things it does, or one of the things that is not automated is not done for an extended amount of time because no one is aware of it except the technical resource that left causing all sorts of data problems etc... There is no documentation, or what little of it there is, is quickly lost... Blah blah blah... Anyway how familiar is this sequence of events to people out there? I am betting a lot. I have been asking for fixes (which I sometimes get) from management, and entire re-designs and replacements from management for well over a decade. Usually it comes down to not having the money. So long as the system keeps limping along, no one cares. Eventually it will likely fail catastrophically, however by that point they will probably be off to their next management job, or will simply blame the previous management or throw IT under the bus.
Now you are talking about Truth. Truth has nothing to do with science, other than it is possibly the unattainable goal. If you want to talk about Truth go to Phil101 class.
So yes, at a certain point in time the earth really was flat, as that was the currently accepted theory that most of the world believed in. It became un-flat if you will when others postulated a theory other than the generally accepted facts, did experimentation to prove it, and then convinced other scientists with their work that their theory had more merit and should be accepted as the new ideal. As you may recall, many were persecuted for their various beliefs mostly because if didn't fit with religious dogma. If you consider that the church was a even larger part of society and government at the time there are certainly analogs where things like Climate Change for example do not fit some political ideology and thus have a harder time gaining traction.
Science is about trying to better describe the world around us using experiments that are repeatable using acceptable standards. Leave "Truth" out of it.
Well two things. First ownership are rights to the land, and there are surface and sub-surface rights. Typically people buy surface rights because that is what they are interested in. In many cases you can also buy the subsurface rights and people do in certain situations sometimes simply to prevent someone from buying the land out from under them. That said, even if I got the subsurface, I can't just turn your house into an open pit mine, there are all sorts of regulations and the like I would have to follow, and most likely the company (unless just testing) would buy the surface rights from the owner at a premium.
Also, just because you "own" land does not make that your kingdom as in Peteoria... You land does exist within a governmental structure of some kind, and that government will have these things called "laws". In an extreme example I can't say murder someone on my land, and then complain that government is pushing me around because the cops show up to enforce on my land... In more likely scenarios I can't say brake environmental law by dumping something into a river that runs through my property, or kill endangered species just because they are on "my" land. That is simply stupid. Though I have seen people try to make this very argument before, even going and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in court despite common sense and losing.
You say that, but for every 44 TV's that is a full TV they have stolen from you!
We have had several exchanges with Chinese government officials that do much the same things we do. There are some fundamental differences. No one owns land in China, it is all nationalized. However you are able to get a lease, and things like an 80 year lease is common. Think your current lifetime, just don't think you get to pass your loot onto your kids necessarily, particularly if you abuse the resource. Here a lease is typically about 20 years.
Anyway the mechanics are much the same, it is the implementation and those differences that influence changes. For example, if I am using a piece of land for some purpose say a factory, or a farm, or whatever, and do a crappy job of it, once the lease is up, it probably will not be given to me again, but someone else who might use the resource better. If I own it, I can more less waste that piece of land however I wish. Same goes for control, land might be leased for a specific purpose and no other, where if I own the land I can more less do whatever I want. Which might be in my best interests, but maybe no so much anyone around me. On private land government still tries to exert some control in terms of zoning and the like but it isn't quite the same thing.
In a current example, I saw an "environmental group" whose concern was the loss of prime agricultural farmland in a centralized location to urban areas protest, lobby and win against a mining operation and successfully shut it down. However they did not ask that the land be protected by establishing long term zoning only allowing for agricultural use. The reason being that the group is really a land owners association, where farmers want to sell their land for millions to urban residential developers to create sprawling suburbs, which would more effectively destroy more farmland than any sized mine.
In the Chinese model the government would say FU, no more land for you, only if you plan to farm it! In ours, the farmland will get covered by 3000sq ft houses and forever be unusable. In our model land use and worth is controlled largely by market forces... i.e. close to urban area, worth X as farmland, but worth Y as residential, if up to individual, they will sell it to Y, as they get the most out of it. So China in a sense still has what used to be called a control economy, where land use and value is not wholly (or mostly) determined by market values, but by say a centralized authority that may decided having a quality farmland close to an urban area is worth more to everyone than simply a short term $$$ figure. That is not to say that it is totally without consequence, the same here with municipal governments trying to exert some control. Only that it is very weighed one way here, and another way in China.
No so sure about that. Should you personal insurance then go up as a result of an accident caused by two independently operated machines without your input?
Insurance companies basically manage risk VS revenue, if you take the human out of the equation, what is left to evaluate? Only the car. Then it is one car VS another as far as if one is particularly less risk or not. At which point what does that have to do with the individual other than the initial decision to get one or another?
Seriously, I do not see what the issue is. People using all these "free" services are suddenly astounded about being monitored? You get what you pay for, which when that is zero, equals not much privacy. All of them have EULA's which you don't have to read the 300 pages to know will allow them to rifle though your messages and spy on you (primarily for targeted ad content), etc... If you do not like it, do not use these services. Use something more secure, or as you say encrypt stuff. The probably with encryption has always been it is a two way street. So while you might do it, the jerks that send you stuff may not, and then all that data is up for grabs.
Anyway it is good that criminals are idiots I suppose, but people getting their back up about free services which say (even if buried in 300 pages of legal gobbledygook) up front that they are going to effectively spy on you is a bit much.
And yet, even while on RAILS, how many train accidents are there? Also Unions? BS. First of all if they were able to fully automate trains, then the Unions wouldn't have much leverage would they...
Insurance companies is an interesting notion. Provided they are not the first to go during the economic purges of the 2020's, assigning risk and fault to autonomous driving could be complicated. Just throwing it out there, but it may eventually follow a system whereby the car is insured itself by the Company and not by the individual... Can you see the court case? I personally have zero control over the actions of the car, how can I be held responsible for what it does? Ford (or whoever) are the ones who designed the logic that decides the actions of the car, and therefor is ultimately responsible for what it does... That is of course assuming the autonomous control can't be turned off or tampered with.
Certainly sounds like there is plenty of Algae there, which certainly isn't dead...
A more accurate description might be "Algae Zone" perhaps.
Applying for a job that has a larger programming component than I am used to...
When I went to school I learned on, Pascal, C, COBOL, Assembly, VB...
Position will likely want someone with Java. While I have dabbled in some Javascript using Google Maps API, I'm not exactly current on it.
On the other hand DB is what I do, and SQL is probably the scripting I use the most these days.
Anyway I have done some training on Python, but most of my languages are pretty antiquated by today's standards which I am wondering if it will diminish my chances. Here is hoping more emphasis is placed on analysis and not on initial coding.
It has come up before when people compare technology to today's standards. This thing was launched 10 years ago, and designed years before that, and even then they are not going to use cutting edge stuff but rather time tested stuff that will not fail, because it won't actually be used for 10+ years. Try designing for that. Sure your iPhone might have a 10MP camera in it, but it only came out recently, and I don't know about you, but mine stopped working after 3 months.
Could you imagine spending the amount of money that they do, waiting 10+ years, and then finding out the camera doesn't work? Bummer.
Probably one of the better examples. A movie, not a TV series. Involve the use of children using mechs to fight in a war against aliens in distant space. Interestingly enough, the movie isn't really about this, but rather the long distance relationship between a girl that gets recruited, and a boy who does not. Presumably they use children because of reflexes, or size, or more likely the length of time involved.
What makes this story most interesting is that all the communication is done VIA texting. Yes Space texting, presumably though some technological magic communication device which seems compatible with modern cellphones. Anyway that plot device aside, the real interest is that one is traveling at greater than relativistic speeds, and probably also some space lag if you will. This means while the boy ages though his life, having a family etc... the girl pretty much stays the same age...
It is very much a retelling of Joe Haldeman's "Forever War", about love spanning space and time, though with a much sadder conclusion.
You Sir have just encapsulated the entire purpose of the Internet.
I apparently fall into this category myself. I think if I could get Lasik I would have by now. A number of years ago I went in to get an assessment. I was told due to my prescription which is about -11.5 and -12 that I do not have enough coronal material for Lasik and that PKR would be the way to go. However PKR was three times the cost at over 6000$, and has a much longer healing time, several days of useless, followed by weeks of gradual change. At the time I didn't have anyone to take care of me basically for a few days or even drive me to the city that has the clinic and back. Oddly enough I got my eyes tested again recently by the same guy, and now he recommends getting lenses implanted in the eye (forget the procedure name) which is done by a cataract surgeon. Their draw back is not only do they have a extended healing time, cost about the same as PKR, but you also loose your near vision, so would then require reading glasses... Apparently it is free (Canada) if you have cataracts (My Mom recently had it done), so I guess I have to hope my eyes degenerate more...
Anyway I have done nothing other than buy more expensive glasses, but maybe someday...
Sounds like a script from a movie...
Earth 2110 A mutated smallpox pandemic is sweeping the world.
Researchers desperately need an original sample from which to make an vaccine.
Man foolishly destroyed all samples back in the dark years of 2014.
Now a ragtag group of adventurers attempt to find the last remaining sample, the world depends on it!
Table top gaming made its way early into the Internet and computing. Things like MUD, and NetHack (Mines of Moria, etc), Dwarf Fortress. In fact I remember some of my first video games being Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Pools of Radiance, which were both officially licenced AD&D products. Later things like Neverwinter nights, etc... even Skyrim.
Not to mention all the writing (some good, others no so much), such as Forgotten Realms, etc... Much of it had an birth with D&D.
Hell I was at a pub last week and was able to answer a crazy trivia question about an evil fiery demons in Islamic mythology being called Djinn because I remember them from the Monsters Compendium.
As someone pointed out in the first thread of this tragedy, this is not the first time something like this has happened.
Obama may be being diplomatic so as to not call the kettle black so to speak. The US accidentally did the same to Iran years ago, except they were in Iran air space, the weapons were fired from a warship, by professional soldiers. Consequently rebels accidentally (and I have no doubt they did) shooting down an airliner, using stolen unfamiliar technology with little or no training by militia in the middle of a civil war seems rather less bad.
Also it dredges up the result which was all dead, and the USA not admitting any blame or fault, and instead writing a check for a few million to throw at the hundreds of victims families.
Now if they can only design a seat for my computer at work...