"Hearing certainly doesn't imply cognition to me. " Well, it does to me. Hearing is first and foremost a SENSATION. A sensation generated by a clump of neurons. These plants react to sound, but it's not hearing. There is no brain to produce a sensation.
We should invent a new word for this because the mechanism for how the information from the air pressure is processed by these organism is just completely different from how animals do it.
I mean, you wouldn't say that plants are able to walk because they manage to spread their seeds to other parts of the earth. Same with sound.
"The media have been in a continuous uproar since the 2016 Presidential election and the Brexit vote, because the "wrong side" won, and Facebook is a very convenient target for part of the blame."
This is not it. The real problem is that the facebook transduced fake news manipulation has become extremely political at around that time. Facebook (well, other platforms as well) is used by various actors to manipulate public thought. And facebook likes it. I think this is the problem with facebook. They are willing to let whole countries become politically unstable if it makes them profit. Disruptive, but not in a healthy way.
Holy crap are you dim.. In this capitalist world, if we didn't have government putting down some rules we'd all be raped by profit-hungry enterprises. Tell me, (just as an example) how many deaths are you willing to put up with because companies replace nutrients with cheaper carcinogenics?
Businesses will act immoraly if there is nothing stopping them. And you want them to have free reign. What kind of idiot are you? No really. Have you thought this over?
You want to pay companies your hard earned money so they can screw you out of even more money.
No innovation when rules apply, you say? Now i KNOW you're an idiot. Ever heared the expression "necessity is the mother of all invention"? Innovation, true innovation, is fueled by limitations. Always has. In a rule-less economy the only motivation to innovate is to make more money. That's it. So the only innovation is going to be to head off the competition, sell you less and make you pay more.
With rules in place you will make them innovate along lines so that society at least gets a little better. This is why this system works. This is why you americans are still alive and not contracted into slavery. The rules protect you from an otherwise massive rapeage by entities much larger and much more powerfull than anything you can hope to bring into the game. Good luck with no rules.
"You have every right to vote with your pocket book. " Won't help you much if you die because you got cancer because some company thought that spraying some shit on your food will make them more money overall. And without rules they won't give a shit about you or your life, or the life of anyone you hold dear.
I mean, if you want a rule-less society that bad, i actually think you should try it. See how long you can stay alive against a company (any company) that has billions in funds set aside especially for the purpose of screwing you over.
" The original point is that if something is viable, it doesn't need help." Except that this is not how the economy works at scale. Big established ways of operating will always win out against small new enterprises in the same market. The old guys are entrenched and their operations are developed and optimized. They have been pouring money for years (in this cace you could argue hundreds of years) into their operation. Even if the new stuff would be more efficient when operated on the same scale there is no chance for it to get a grip on the market. Subsidies basically acknowlege this monopoly-esque market pressures and makes life easier for new tech to survive in the market.
How do you mean there's no need for compression? All videos you get to see at home is compressed in some way. Most videos people get to see will have several compression schemes applied to them.
An 8k video at 24fps and 8 bits per pixel takes up more than 6Gb/s of bandwidth. And that already has chroma subsampling compression applied. If you have more bits per pixel then it gets bigger of course. 16 bit per channel RGB would take the video up to 38Gb/s.
That would be pretty much unworkable in a typical home setting.
Compression is pretty much a necessity for content distribution.
Orangutans don't flaunt their silvery hair, now do they?:) And besides, i wasn't talking about what he does. I was talking about which people are attracted to his image. Turns out he's loved by the right-wing religious conservative folk. His Strong Leader characteristics have so much effect on these people they are willing to look away when he acts completely against their beliefs. It is incredible, but above all outright scary, to see the manipulation taking place in front of your eyes and see how the followers just mop it up, squeeze it in a beer bottle and drink that shit right up.
"The left rejects this view. The left believes that people are not capable of being responsible for themselves and will always be victimized by something, unless the white knight of government rides in to help. This is an echo of the belief in the divine ordination of kings, the feudal system, and slavery. It's probably hardwired in everybody. "
May i remind you that it's the right that voted for a populist gorilla to lead their country. Everything you blame on the left is being executed by the right as we speak. They are the people that are the most in search of a Strong Leader that tells them sweet little lies and 'secures' the 'turf'.
I'm not sure how you can be so blind as to actually ascribe this primitive behaviour to the left.
I don't think you understand what he's saying. I don't think he thinks no humans will ever set foot on mars. He's reacting to all the overly optimistic sounds you hear about going to mars. People start to have unrealistic expectations of buying a ranch with some land on mars in the near future.
He's just being realistic about how good a place it is for a human to live. Mars is a harsh place. For instance, you get bombarded with ionized radiation because there is no magnetic field to write home about. There is not much atmosphere either. Almostr no surface water. Terraforming will take thousands of years, if even that fast. It will not be Earth 2.0 any time soon. I think that is his message.
"you can't ask a vendor to sell you a one time license and then keep everything up to date forever."
Looking at it realistically, they are still fixing the first release of windows 10. Microsoft never delivered a finished product in the first place. The necessity for updates is 95% their own doing.
Imagine you buy a new car. It turns out there are many flaws with it. Would you accept it if the manufacturer would charge you for fixing these flaws?
No you wouldn't, you would tell them that they sell broken cars and that it's their responsibility to fix them.
That's not the main thing. The main thing is that they're luring their customers into a walled-garden store where competition does not exist and they can pull the plug at any time.
"Please recall what the "A" in USA stands for. You see any other countries with that word in the name of their country? Were you confused at all about what someone is saying when they say "American"? No you were not so take your trolling elsewhere."
That doesn't change the fact that the A in USA stands for the continent America, you genius you...
"the divorce rate in Maine correlates to the per capita consumption of margarine with an R^2 of 0.99...but there is no reasonable mechanism by which one could influence the other. "
Interpreting statistics 101: Correlation is not evidence of causation. You don't need A to influence B to have a correlation. Both can be influenced by C.
When a car moves there is a very very very strong correlation between the movement of the back seat and the movement of the front mirror. And yet neither is directly influencing the movement of the other. Correlation is not causation. And you wouldn't say that this correlation is based on coincidence, right?
So you can't conclude that the correlation from TFA must be a coincidence, tho you can't rule out coincidence.
"So at what point is the device not economical i.e. it actually is less expensive and more efficient to just haul some water in on a truck?"
Well, if the device is powered with, say, sunlight, then it will be economical pretty quickly.
Water is a heavy thing to transport and almost all transport uses fuel. This fuel needs refining and transporting all of its own before it can be used as fuel. And its a recurring cost.
Now let's take a sparsely populated area. How much will that add to the transportation of the water?
So all in all there is a lot to win by a self contained, self sustaining device that produces water.
The fact that you propose to just ship some Evian means you neither understand this challenge nor the solution.
Please read through the constraints of the challenge again and come back with how dropping some Evian is a viable solution.
What??
Capitalism IS bad in and of itself. That is EXACTLY why we need the regulations.
If you can't control it it will consume everything. The problem is with its unsatiable drive to make profit over everything else. Even to the point of becoming irational.
[q]I would say the idea that there were more exciting developments 30 years ago is ludicrous.[/q] I don't think it's ludicrous. I have seen the development of many a things become incremental, evolutionary instead of revolutionary.
" In the last few years we have virtually the whole of human knowledge at our fingertips, " That has been around since the 90's and it's called the internet.
"we have rockets that can land themselves (!)" This is not a big engineering problem. It is a finacial problem and Musk just threw a shedload of money against it. It's not in any way special unless you plan on making a business out of regular space flights.
"self-driving cars" That kill people.
"electronic communications becoming ubiquitous" What century do you live in? Even the radical change with smartphone happened over a decade ago.
"cheap single board computers that even a child can use (e.g. Raspberry-Pi)," More evolutionary developments (basically a repackaged smartphone which has been around for more than a decade.
"electric vehicles becoming mainstream" Slooowly. And the idea has been around for sooo long.
"actually useful brain-machine interface (for example deep-brain stimulation for epilepsy)" Transcranial stimulation has been around for over a decate too. Nothing exciting technology-wise. There is more research tho, so it can be applied more successfully.
My personal theory is that we are in an age where technology has already covered the bulk of our human needs. It used to be that, for instance, computers would double up on everything every two years and people could actually use all that processing power and that transformed the world big times. These days, even your raspberry pi can run most of the software that people want to use in daily life. There is an increasing lack of interest in more technology. In fact, i think there is a growing movement of people looking away from technology. It becomes more of a tool and less of a measure of progress. Which is exactly the point i think. What you see now, in for instance music, is t hat people go back to old information carriers. Just today i've read on/. that cd's and vinyl outsells online offerings. Compact cassettes are making a comback, big time. People are reverting to a less technological state. They have enough tech already, they want less of it as it starts to complicate things more than it's worth to an average person.
Moreover, tech is increasingly used against the average person. People have an increasingly stronger argument against tech, what with the facebooks and the tracking and the fake news and whatnot.
"I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s and was deeply passionate about technology. I was excited about the Amiga, Unix, and C++."
But you fail to acknowlege the big steps that were taken in those days. Going from a comodore 64 to an amiga was an incredible step up in technology and took less than a decade. And it didn't end there. Not many years later there were computers on the market that made the amiga look like a can opener. And that made them more usefull! It was a revolutionary time. And in my experience it started turning into an evolutionary time somewhere in the 00's. It's the difference between having an internet or not against having a slightly slower of faster internet. And even internet speed stagnated due to a lack of a need. I remember seing the whole development from my trusty 36k6 modem (well, i actually started with a 300/300 baud modem, but i digress) to 4Mbit DSL. It was freaking unbelievable. I think that development took less than 5 years. But after that, as my requirements didn't grow much further, the wow-factor also diminished. I now have 250Mbit at home and for me it's mostly way too much for what i'm doing with it. Meanwhile, the telco's try to convince me to get a fatter pipe. What for?
Same with my computers. There are genuinely very few applications that require more processing power. The u
Slashdot Mirror
"Really? Where?"
https://www.merriam-webster.co...
"Yes, and?"
And that makes this tree thing different from hearing.
"Why does it have to imply cognition?"
Because that is how it's defined.
The mechanism by which sound is processed is just completely different.
Hearing is a distinctly neural activity.
But, you know, people are prone to anthropomorphize things that look similar to them.
"Hearing certainly doesn't imply cognition to me. "
Well, it does to me. Hearing is first and foremost a SENSATION.
A sensation generated by a clump of neurons.
These plants react to sound, but it's not hearing. There is no brain to produce a sensation.
We should invent a new word for this because the mechanism for how the information from the air pressure is processed by these organism is just completely different from how animals do it.
I mean, you wouldn't say that plants are able to walk because they manage to spread their seeds to other parts of the earth. Same with sound.
"to download the ROMS and emulate the NES/Super systems in software."
I know... Let's do THAT thing!
"The media have been in a continuous uproar since the 2016 Presidential election and the Brexit vote, because the "wrong side" won, and Facebook is a very convenient target for part of the blame."
This is not it.
The real problem is that the facebook transduced fake news manipulation has become extremely political at around that time.
Facebook (well, other platforms as well) is used by various actors to manipulate public thought.
And facebook likes it.
I think this is the problem with facebook. They are willing to let whole countries become politically unstable if it makes them profit. Disruptive, but not in a healthy way.
Holy crap are you dim..
In this capitalist world, if we didn't have government putting down some rules we'd all be raped by profit-hungry enterprises.
Tell me, (just as an example) how many deaths are you willing to put up with because companies replace nutrients with cheaper carcinogenics?
Businesses will act immoraly if there is nothing stopping them.
And you want them to have free reign.
What kind of idiot are you? No really. Have you thought this over?
You want to pay companies your hard earned money so they can screw you out of even more money.
No innovation when rules apply, you say? Now i KNOW you're an idiot.
Ever heared the expression "necessity is the mother of all invention"?
Innovation, true innovation, is fueled by limitations. Always has.
In a rule-less economy the only motivation to innovate is to make more money. That's it. So the only innovation is going to be to head off the competition, sell you less and make you pay more.
With rules in place you will make them innovate along lines so that society at least gets a little better.
This is why this system works. This is why you americans are still alive and not contracted into slavery.
The rules protect you from an otherwise massive rapeage by entities much larger and much more powerfull than anything you can hope to bring into the game.
Good luck with no rules.
"You have every right to vote with your pocket book. "
Won't help you much if you die because you got cancer because some company thought that spraying some shit on your food will make them more money overall.
And without rules they won't give a shit about you or your life, or the life of anyone you hold dear.
I mean, if you want a rule-less society that bad, i actually think you should try it. See how long you can stay alive against a company (any company) that has billions in funds set aside especially for the purpose of screwing you over.
Their model won't sustain 12.5% and developers will leave them. They are screwed.
" The original point is that if something is viable, it doesn't need help."
Except that this is not how the economy works at scale.
Big established ways of operating will always win out against small new enterprises in the same market. The old guys are entrenched and their operations are developed and optimized. They have been pouring money for years (in this cace you could argue hundreds of years) into their operation.
Even if the new stuff would be more efficient when operated on the same scale there is no chance for it to get a grip on the market.
Subsidies basically acknowlege this monopoly-esque market pressures and makes life easier for new tech to survive in the market.
Valve. They are screwed. Finally.
How do you mean there's no need for compression?
All videos you get to see at home is compressed in some way. Most videos people get to see will have several compression schemes applied to them.
An 8k video at 24fps and 8 bits per pixel takes up more than 6Gb/s of bandwidth.
And that already has chroma subsampling compression applied.
If you have more bits per pixel then it gets bigger of course.
16 bit per channel RGB would take the video up to 38Gb/s.
That would be pretty much unworkable in a typical home setting.
Compression is pretty much a necessity for content distribution.
Orangutans don't flaunt their silvery hair, now do they? :)
And besides, i wasn't talking about what he does.
I was talking about which people are attracted to his image. Turns out he's loved by the right-wing religious conservative folk.
His Strong Leader characteristics have so much effect on these people they are willing to look away when he acts completely against their beliefs.
It is incredible, but above all outright scary, to see the manipulation taking place in front of your eyes and see how the followers just mop it up, squeeze it in a beer bottle and drink that shit right up.
"The left rejects this view. The left believes that people are not capable of being responsible for themselves and will always be victimized by something, unless the white knight of government rides in to help. This is an echo of the belief in the divine ordination of kings, the feudal system, and slavery. It's probably hardwired in everybody. "
May i remind you that it's the right that voted for a populist gorilla to lead their country.
Everything you blame on the left is being executed by the right as we speak. They are the people that are the most in search of a Strong Leader that tells them sweet little lies and 'secures' the 'turf'.
I'm not sure how you can be so blind as to actually ascribe this primitive behaviour to the left.
I don't think you understand what he's saying.
I don't think he thinks no humans will ever set foot on mars.
He's reacting to all the overly optimistic sounds you hear about going to mars. People start to have unrealistic expectations of buying a ranch with some land on mars in the near future.
He's just being realistic about how good a place it is for a human to live.
Mars is a harsh place. For instance, you get bombarded with ionized radiation because there is no magnetic field to write home about. There is not much atmosphere either. Almostr no surface water. Terraforming will take thousands of years, if even that fast.
It will not be Earth 2.0 any time soon.
I think that is his message.
"you can't ask a vendor to sell you a one time license and then keep everything up to date forever."
Looking at it realistically, they are still fixing the first release of windows 10. Microsoft never delivered a finished product in the first place. The necessity for updates is 95% their own doing.
Imagine you buy a new car. It turns out there are many flaws with it.
Would you accept it if the manufacturer would charge you for fixing these flaws?
No you wouldn't, you would tell them that they sell broken cars and that it's their responsibility to fix them.
That's an assumption.
That's not the main thing.
The main thing is that they're luring their customers into a walled-garden store where competition does not exist and they can pull the plug at any time.
The wet dream of monopoly markets.
"Please recall what the "A" in USA stands for. You see any other countries with that word in the name of their country? Were you confused at all about what someone is saying when they say "American"? No you were not so take your trolling elsewhere."
That doesn't change the fact that the A in USA stands for the continent America, you genius you...
"the divorce rate in Maine correlates to the per capita consumption of margarine with an R^2 of 0.99...but there is no reasonable mechanism by which one could influence the other. "
Interpreting statistics 101: Correlation is not evidence of causation.
You don't need A to influence B to have a correlation. Both can be influenced by C.
When a car moves there is a very very very strong correlation between the movement of the back seat and the movement of the front mirror. And yet neither is directly influencing the movement of the other. Correlation is not causation. And you wouldn't say that this correlation is based on coincidence, right?
So you can't conclude that the correlation from TFA must be a coincidence, tho you can't rule out coincidence.
"So at what point is the device not economical i.e. it actually is less expensive and more efficient to just haul some water in on a truck?" Well, if the device is powered with, say, sunlight, then it will be economical pretty quickly. Water is a heavy thing to transport and almost all transport uses fuel. This fuel needs refining and transporting all of its own before it can be used as fuel. And its a recurring cost. Now let's take a sparsely populated area. How much will that add to the transportation of the water? So all in all there is a lot to win by a self contained, self sustaining device that produces water.
The fact that you propose to just ship some Evian means you neither understand this challenge nor the solution. Please read through the constraints of the challenge again and come back with how dropping some Evian is a viable solution.
Because private owners have even less incentive to not harm the people they sell products to than governments.
Just look in any law and see against how much crap from 'private owners' we need protection against.
And most of these laws came into existance exactly because pivate parties so often didn't care about people that it became a serious problem.
So capitalism can only work if the private parties are kept in check. On it's own this system would have turned sour a long time ago.
What?? Capitalism IS bad in and of itself. That is EXACTLY why we need the regulations. If you can't control it it will consume everything. The problem is with its unsatiable drive to make profit over everything else. Even to the point of becoming irational.
What could go wrong?
Trump got elected because of that other thing politics is about: Lies.
[q]I would say the idea that there were more exciting developments 30 years ago is ludicrous.[/q]
I don't think it's ludicrous. I have seen the development of many a things become incremental, evolutionary instead of revolutionary.
" In the last few years we have virtually the whole of human knowledge at our fingertips, "
That has been around since the 90's and it's called the internet.
"we have rockets that can land themselves (!)"
This is not a big engineering problem. It is a finacial problem and Musk just threw a shedload of money against it. It's not in any way special unless you plan on making a business out of regular space flights.
"self-driving cars"
That kill people.
"electronic communications becoming ubiquitous"
What century do you live in?
Even the radical change with smartphone happened over a decade ago.
"cheap single board computers that even a child can use (e.g. Raspberry-Pi),"
More evolutionary developments (basically a repackaged smartphone which has been around for more than a decade.
"electric vehicles becoming mainstream"
Slooowly. And the idea has been around for sooo long.
"actually useful brain-machine interface (for example deep-brain stimulation for epilepsy)"
Transcranial stimulation has been around for over a decate too. Nothing exciting technology-wise. There is more research tho, so it can be applied more successfully.
My personal theory is that we are in an age where technology has already covered the bulk of our human needs. /. that cd's and vinyl outsells online offerings. Compact cassettes are making a comback, big time. People are reverting to a less technological state. They have enough tech already, they want less of it as it starts to complicate things more than it's worth to an average person.
It used to be that, for instance, computers would double up on everything every two years and people could actually use all that processing power and that transformed the world big times. These days, even your raspberry pi can run most of the software that people want to use in daily life. There is an increasing lack of interest in more technology. In fact, i think there is a growing movement of people looking away from technology. It becomes more of a tool and less of a measure of progress. Which is exactly the point i think.
What you see now, in for instance music, is t hat people go back to old information carriers. Just today i've read on
Moreover, tech is increasingly used against the average person. People have an increasingly stronger argument against tech, what with the facebooks and the tracking and the fake news and whatnot.
"I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s and was deeply passionate about technology. I was excited about the Amiga, Unix, and C++."
But you fail to acknowlege the big steps that were taken in those days. Going from a comodore 64 to an amiga was an incredible step up in technology and took less than a decade. And it didn't end there. Not many years later there were computers on the market that made the amiga look like a can opener. And that made them more usefull!
It was a revolutionary time. And in my experience it started turning into an evolutionary time somewhere in the 00's. It's the difference between having an internet or not against having a slightly slower of faster internet.
And even internet speed stagnated due to a lack of a need.
I remember seing the whole development from my trusty 36k6 modem (well, i actually started with a 300/300 baud modem, but i digress) to 4Mbit DSL. It was freaking unbelievable. I think that development took less than 5 years. But after that, as my requirements didn't grow much further, the wow-factor also diminished. I now have 250Mbit at home and for me it's mostly way too much for what i'm doing with it. Meanwhile, the telco's try to convince me to get a fatter pipe. What for?
Same with my computers. There are genuinely very few applications that require more processing power. The u