Use the TARDIS to travel back to the first broadcast, capture it on a VCR, and be done with it?
It has been suggested...
"Certainly better than television and a great deal easier to use than a video recorder. If I miss a programme I just pop back in time and watch it. I'm hopeless fiddling with all those buttons..."
Douglas Adams: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (...but would probably have been in Doctor Who: Shada were it not for a strike at the BBC).
So basically, it would be exactly like the passage to the New World was, only a) without gravity, b) with far better entertainment and medical options, and c) you can actually phone home.
Except that when you got to the New World you could step off your ship - without simultaneously asphyxiating, freezing, getting fried by radiation and being covered in rather unpleasant dust - shoot a few buffalo for food and start planting your crops in the fertile soil. Even Antarctica or the top of Everest are pretty cosy compared to Mars. Plus, the great thing about sailing ships is that they didn't rely on your destination having fuel refineries to get back.
Trouble is, a lot of us grew up with the image of Mars as, at worst, somewhere you could get by with a fur coat and an oxygen mask or, at best, Barsoom. That meme takes a lot of shaking.
That said, when did "because its there" cease to be a good reason for doing something? Only, this time, please send some bone-fide scientists along with the jet jockeys.
Other countries don't have party-political candidates for school crossing attendants and second assistant dog catchers and hence have nice simple ballots where you have to write one X in one of half-a-dozen boxes or - at worst (where they use the alternatively-unfair-vote system) - write numbers in a few of them.
In that case, bits of paper with Xs on and human counters are a nice, scalable solution given that its only needed every couple of years.
Oh and other countries, if they really don't like the result, have a civil war. The US prefers to have lawsuits which (while obviously better from a humanitarian point of view) are more demanding when it comes to audit trails.
You called the article "dumb" because of your lack of knowledge? Interesting concept...
Not a difficult concept. Articles are supposed to transfer knowledge from people who know it to people who don't, and summary articles, in particular, are supposed to let everybody quickly decide whether they are interested enough to read on. If everybody knew everything we wouldn't need articles. Things that don't do what they are designed to do are dumb.
The "Version 1.25 of Qxwrple launched" pathology is common on Slashdot and really should be something high on editors and article submitters checklist. (At least in this case you only need to read as far as the second paragraph in TFA to get a clue as to what Plex does).
Of course, some judgement is required - this is a tech website after all - but there's a distinction between expecting the audience to know technical terms and expecting them to recognise every tech product name.
For £15 you can get a sim with 20GB of data to use in a month in the US
This is probably the solution... if you live in the UK and visit the US for short periods. Yes, any voice calls to/from US phones count as "international" but if you call home it just counts as normal minutes. Yes, even if you have the 'unlimited data' plan, you only get 25GB when you're in the US - but that's probably still better than the locals are getting.
However it only makes sense if you live in the UK and use Three as your regular network. ISTR you need to have been subscribed for a month before they'll enable roaming. I assume that you can't sign up without a UK address - even if you can it's not going to make sense. So its not going to be a solution for our Scandinavian OP.
Unless some Scandinavian networks are offering a similar deal....
The more niche your research topic, the longer the title has to be to describe it,
Indeed - see A meta-analysis of synergies between urso-sylvanian scatology, denominational alignment of the Holy See and the role of constipation in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. by Capt O. B. Vios (2001).
It took me less than 10 minutes to type apt-get install and receive the packages.
I opened the internet and typed Apt - get and I just got a Google page with a lot of nonsense on it.
Try typing it in the terminal, you say? Er, it says something about a lock file... What's that you say? Pseudo? Suedo? Er, what's my password...? Look, on my Windows machine I just typed "Skype" into the internet and it gave me a thing to download and run...
Seriously, although I agree that TFA smells seriously fishy, and I've known non-techy people who were quite happy with a well-set-up Linux system, people who say "you just type apt-get" and such are completely, utterly out of touch with the abilities of typical users.
There's such huge inertia behind Windows that MS can get away with debacles like Vista, Win 8 and the Office ribbon. Linux doesn't have that advantage - it needs to be twice as easy to use as Windows to win.
Just like the oval clocks that were popular when I was a kid needed to have hands that changed length as they went around.
Who mentioned the hands changing length? Were the ticks for 5 through 7 o-clock sliced off? Was a major selling point of those clocks that you could download new faces? Did the face have limited resolution? Was it the most expensive part of the clock and did the unused space contribute to running the spring down? Was the oval face a nuisance when you read email or viewed maps on these clocks... oh wait, you couldn't.
Some things are not the same as other things.
Plus, what idiot buys a clock with an oval face, when you could have one in the shape of an owl with eyes that moved left and right as the pendulum swung?
and all that's cut off is some of the dashes marking minutes; the hand itself is still on-screen, but I expect that at 1:30 proper a few pixels for the edge of that hand might be cut off.
So... in what way is that preferable to having a face that fills the entire screen without bits missing?
Is anybody saying your watch is completely useless and you should saw your hand off at the wrist rather than look at the hideous "flat tire" face? No (well, this is the internet so maybe). Would it be better to have a completely circular face? Yes.
To achieve this goal, Amazon said that it would introduce a new internal reporting system called EmpathyTrack, which will enable employees to secretly report on their colleagues’ lack of humanity.
Brilliant. I suggest hooking employees up to a steampunk polygraph machine and asking them what they'd do if they found a turtle lying on its back. Just don't ask them about their mother...
Most of what you want to display on a smart watch is naturally rectangular (text, photos, album art, digital time etc. and, of course, any app designed for a rectangular smartwatch) so it would be much easier to use all the space on a rectangular display.
The one, big plus to a circular display is to allow for a large, clear circular clock dial display that fills the entire face of the watch - because some people really like way of visualising the time. You could also base other aspects of your UI around a clock-face metaphor. Having a 'bite' out of the bottom of the display means the face has to be reduced in size and off-center (introducing a lot of other dead space around it).
but is not in the newest 10.11 El Capitan beta – suggesting that Apple developers were aware of the issue and are testing a fix.
10.11 has a new SELinux-like 'rootless' security model that should mitigate against any privilege escalation attack like this. Odds are it was naturally immune..
It doesn't make a lot of sense, though. The price ($85) is not worth it, it's just easier to wait 30 minutes for a supercharge.
I suspect that quite a few Telsa owners bill their time at $170 an hour, catch plains, drive to important meetings, have sudden emergency overnight drives (before the evening charge) etc. and would appreciate an occasional fallback solution for when all the superchargers at a station were in use or the power socket that your hotel had assured you would be there was broken.
Only the trolls are objecting to that idea per se. Ignore them.
The real argument is that it is the Unicode Consortium's job to define the encoding of existing symbols and not to try and invent new ones in a field where they have no expertise. As others have pointed out, Unicode defines codes for abstract descriptions of symbols - they have no control over the rendering. If you're going to have international allergy symbols its fairly critical that (a) they're based on sound medical judgement, (b) their actual appearance is standardised and (c) there's a publicity campaign to get them recognised, ideally tied in with regional laws such as food hygiene training and workplace posters.
Once the symbols are known then, yes, it would be a jolly good idea for Unicode to assign them codes.
And there's another wrinkle that didn't make it into the film: In the book, most humans follow a contrived religion, Mercerism, that is all about reverence for animals, fatalism, and "empathy". The supposed indication of the replicants' inhumanity is that they lack empathy and can't participate in Mercerism. The V-K test, with its questions about torturing tortoises and eating monkey brains might be somewhat unpleasant, is basically about good a Mercerist you are rather than anything objective.
The point of the book is not the "is Deckard a replicant" controversy from the film - Deckard is human. His memories are his own, but by the end of the book so much that he values has been shown to be sham and artifice that those memories might as well have been implanted.
Read on: its a bit ambiguous but they are biological, more like vat-grown clones based on genetically improved humans than machines built from scratch. I think its reasonable to argue that artificially growing a biological brain isn't what is generally meant by AI.
Those are all contributing factors, but a city council that seems openly hostile to automobiles can't be discounted.
No, those "contributing factors" are precisely why the city council is openly hostile to automobiles.
Policies like the 4 way red significantly slow down traffic and contribute to the gridlock problem.
They make it much nicer for the pedestrians who have, sensibly, left their cars at home, though.
Trouble is, attracting more cars would also contribute to the gridlock problem. Cities like London just don't have the space for everybody to bring their car.
One must note: The question of "does it make more sense" is mildly hilarious when one is discussing mass transportation on a lifeless world.
I dunno - if you could get a government grant and tax breaks, turn the debts into complex derivatives and sell them on, do an IPO then dump your stock at the peak of the market it could be profitable. Plus, unlike transport systems on earth, you wouldn't have those pesky paying customers turning up and forcing you to incur all sorts of ongoing fuel and maintenance costs.
It's almost impossible to drive across London though. New York City traffic is not great, but you at least get where you need to go.
I don't think that's because of the traffic lights. I think that's because of road layouts dictated by stone-age goat-tracks, mediaeval land disputes, rivers that aren't there any more and WWII ending before the Germans had time to build enough V2s. And London's nothing compared to some other European cities.
OTOH, central London's small enough to walk across.
As a wise fictional character once said, "May have [picked] the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one." Not sure that applies to the Zune, though, although it was brown...
Presumably "Crystal Pepsi" wasn't brown (and, hopefully, wasn't so pure that it had a slight blue tint...)
Every inch a Golf, works in New England. Charger by Bosch installed in your house for mere hundreds. What's not to like?
Well, in the UK e-Golf prices start at about £26k (after deducting the £5k gov subsidy) and regular Golf prices start from about £16k.
One of these cars you can jump in to and drive the length of the country without worrying about how you are going to refuel. For an extra £10k you get a car that turns into a brick after a maximum of 100 miles, and less if you have to use the heater etc.
Translation: the £16k car would be the only vehicle you need. The £30k car is a commuting machine that would leave you needing a second car (or a rental) every time you needed to make a long trip.
Slashdot Mirror
Use the TARDIS to travel back to the first broadcast, capture it on a VCR, and be done with it?
It has been suggested...
"Certainly better than television and a great deal easier to use than a video recorder. If I miss a programme I just pop back in time and watch it. I'm hopeless fiddling with all those buttons..."
Douglas Adams: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (...but would probably have been in Doctor Who: Shada were it not for a strike at the BBC).
So basically, it would be exactly like the passage to the New World was, only a) without gravity, b) with far better entertainment and medical options, and c) you can actually phone home.
Except that when you got to the New World you could step off your ship - without simultaneously asphyxiating, freezing, getting fried by radiation and being covered in rather unpleasant dust - shoot a few buffalo for food and start planting your crops in the fertile soil. Even Antarctica or the top of Everest are pretty cosy compared to Mars. Plus, the great thing about sailing ships is that they didn't rely on your destination having fuel refineries to get back.
Trouble is, a lot of us grew up with the image of Mars as, at worst, somewhere you could get by with a fur coat and an oxygen mask or, at best, Barsoom. That meme takes a lot of shaking.
That said, when did "because its there" cease to be a good reason for doing something? Only, this time, please send some bone-fide scientists along with the jet jockeys.
when they pry it from my cold, dead hands...
Any sexual experience not based on a mutual relationship is bad, apparently - so they'll be taking your hands, too.
Other countries don't have party-political candidates for school crossing attendants and second assistant dog catchers and hence have nice simple ballots where you have to write one X in one of half-a-dozen boxes or - at worst (where they use the alternatively-unfair-vote system) - write numbers in a few of them.
In that case, bits of paper with Xs on and human counters are a nice, scalable solution given that its only needed every couple of years.
Oh and other countries, if they really don't like the result, have a civil war. The US prefers to have lawsuits which (while obviously better from a humanitarian point of view) are more demanding when it comes to audit trails.
You called the article "dumb" because of your lack of knowledge? Interesting concept...
Not a difficult concept. Articles are supposed to transfer knowledge from people who know it to people who don't, and summary articles, in particular, are supposed to let everybody quickly decide whether they are interested enough to read on. If everybody knew everything we wouldn't need articles. Things that don't do what they are designed to do are dumb.
The "Version 1.25 of Qxwrple launched" pathology is common on Slashdot and really should be something high on editors and article submitters checklist. (At least in this case you only need to read as far as the second paragraph in TFA to get a clue as to what Plex does).
Of course, some judgement is required - this is a tech website after all - but there's a distinction between expecting the audience to know technical terms and expecting them to recognise every tech product name.
For £15 you can get a sim with 20GB of data to use in a month in the US
This is probably the solution... if you live in the UK and visit the US for short periods. Yes, any voice calls to/from US phones count as "international" but if you call home it just counts as normal minutes. Yes, even if you have the 'unlimited data' plan, you only get 25GB when you're in the US - but that's probably still better than the locals are getting.
However it only makes sense if you live in the UK and use Three as your regular network. ISTR you need to have been subscribed for a month before they'll enable roaming. I assume that you can't sign up without a UK address - even if you can it's not going to make sense. So its not going to be a solution for our Scandinavian OP.
Unless some Scandinavian networks are offering a similar deal....
The more niche your research topic, the longer the title has to be to describe it,
Indeed - see A meta-analysis of synergies between urso-sylvanian scatology, denominational alignment of the Holy See and the role of constipation in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. by Capt O. B. Vios (2001).
It took me less than 10 minutes to type apt-get install and receive the packages.
I opened the internet and typed Apt - get and I just got a Google page with a lot of nonsense on it.
Try typing it in the terminal, you say? Er, it says something about a lock file... What's that you say? Pseudo? Suedo? Er, what's my password...? Look, on my Windows machine I just typed "Skype" into the internet and it gave me a thing to download and run...
Seriously, although I agree that TFA smells seriously fishy, and I've known non-techy people who were quite happy with a well-set-up Linux system, people who say "you just type apt-get" and such are completely, utterly out of touch with the abilities of typical users.
There's such huge inertia behind Windows that MS can get away with debacles like Vista, Win 8 and the Office ribbon. Linux doesn't have that advantage - it needs to be twice as easy to use as Windows to win.
Anyone else get the feeling that life is imitating art here? Who would have thought that The Secret of NIMH was prophetic....
I think most mice have switched to Lithium Ion now.
Just like the oval clocks that were popular when I was a kid needed to have hands that changed length as they went around.
Who mentioned the hands changing length? Were the ticks for 5 through 7 o-clock sliced off? Was a major selling point of those clocks that you could download new faces? Did the face have limited resolution? Was it the most expensive part of the clock and did the unused space contribute to running the spring down? Was the oval face a nuisance when you read email or viewed maps on these clocks... oh wait, you couldn't.
Some things are not the same as other things.
Plus, what idiot buys a clock with an oval face, when you could have one in the shape of an owl with eyes that moved left and right as the pendulum swung?
and all that's cut off is some of the dashes marking minutes; the hand itself is still on-screen, but I expect that at 1:30 proper a few pixels for the edge of that hand might be cut off.
So... in what way is that preferable to having a face that fills the entire screen without bits missing?
Is anybody saying your watch is completely useless and you should saw your hand off at the wrist rather than look at the hideous "flat tire" face? No (well, this is the internet so maybe). Would it be better to have a completely circular face? Yes.
To achieve this goal, Amazon said that it would introduce a new internal reporting system called EmpathyTrack, which will enable employees to secretly report on their colleagues’ lack of humanity.
Brilliant. I suggest hooking employees up to a steampunk polygraph machine and asking them what they'd do if they found a turtle lying on its back. Just don't ask them about their mother...
Why is this a bad thing?
Because screen real estate.
Most of what you want to display on a smart watch is naturally rectangular (text, photos, album art, digital time etc. and, of course, any app designed for a rectangular smartwatch) so it would be much easier to use all the space on a rectangular display.
The one, big plus to a circular display is to allow for a large, clear circular clock dial display that fills the entire face of the watch - because some people really like way of visualising the time. You could also base other aspects of your UI around a clock-face metaphor. Having a 'bite' out of the bottom of the display means the face has to be reduced in size and off-center (introducing a lot of other dead space around it).
but is not in the newest 10.11 El Capitan beta – suggesting that Apple developers were aware of the issue and are testing a fix.
10.11 has a new SELinux-like 'rootless' security model that should mitigate against any privilege escalation attack like this. Odds are it was naturally immune..
It doesn't make a lot of sense, though. The price ($85) is not worth it, it's just easier to wait 30 minutes for a supercharge.
I suspect that quite a few Telsa owners bill their time at $170 an hour, catch plains, drive to important meetings, have sudden emergency overnight drives (before the evening charge) etc. and would appreciate an occasional fallback solution for when all the superchargers at a station were in use or the power socket that your hotel had assured you would be there was broken.
You need Superchargers only on highways, otherwise you charge at home or at work. You do not need them particularly in cities.
Unless, of course, you are visiting a city and need a recharge to get back home.
I like the idea of standard labels and icons.
Only the trolls are objecting to that idea per se. Ignore them.
The real argument is that it is the Unicode Consortium's job to define the encoding of existing symbols and not to try and invent new ones in a field where they have no expertise. As others have pointed out, Unicode defines codes for abstract descriptions of symbols - they have no control over the rendering. If you're going to have international allergy symbols its fairly critical that (a) they're based on sound medical judgement, (b) their actual appearance is standardised and (c) there's a publicity campaign to get them recognised, ideally tied in with regional laws such as food hygiene training and workplace posters.
Once the symbols are known then, yes, it would be a jolly good idea for Unicode to assign them codes.
Replicants are sentient beings.
And there's another wrinkle that didn't make it into the film: In the book, most humans follow a contrived religion, Mercerism, that is all about reverence for animals, fatalism, and "empathy". The supposed indication of the replicants' inhumanity is that they lack empathy and can't participate in Mercerism. The V-K test, with its questions about torturing tortoises and eating monkey brains might be somewhat unpleasant, is basically about good a Mercerist you are rather than anything objective.
The point of the book is not the "is Deckard a replicant" controversy from the film - Deckard is human. His memories are his own, but by the end of the book so much that he values has been shown to be sham and artifice that those memories might as well have been implanted.
A replicant is a fictional bioengineered or biorobotic android in the film Blade Runner (1982).
Read on: its a bit ambiguous but they are biological, more like vat-grown clones based on genetically improved humans than machines built from scratch. I think its reasonable to argue that artificially growing a biological brain isn't what is generally meant by AI.
Those are all contributing factors, but a city council that seems openly hostile to automobiles can't be discounted.
No, those "contributing factors" are precisely why the city council is openly hostile to automobiles.
Policies like the 4 way red significantly slow down traffic and contribute to the gridlock problem.
They make it much nicer for the pedestrians who have, sensibly, left their cars at home, though.
Trouble is, attracting more cars would also contribute to the gridlock problem. Cities like London just don't have the space for everybody to bring their car.
One must note: The question of "does it make more sense" is mildly hilarious when one is discussing mass transportation on a lifeless world.
I dunno - if you could get a government grant and tax breaks, turn the debts into complex derivatives and sell them on, do an IPO then dump your stock at the peak of the market it could be profitable. Plus, unlike transport systems on earth, you wouldn't have those pesky paying customers turning up and forcing you to incur all sorts of ongoing fuel and maintenance costs.
Where do I send my money?
All intersections could be replaced with roundabouts.
Which are fine up to a certain traffic volume and then lock solid. In the UK, more and more major roundabouts are being fitted with traffic lights.
How did the Dutch do it in Amsterdam would be the question to ponder next, I reckon.
Simple: most of the locals ride bikes, most of the tourists go by boat, plus they have something called "public transport".
In the Netherlands, some of the cycle tracks have car lanes.
It's almost impossible to drive across London though. New York City traffic is not great, but you at least get where you need to go.
I don't think that's because of the traffic lights. I think that's because of road layouts dictated by stone-age goat-tracks, mediaeval land disputes, rivers that aren't there any more and WWII ending before the Germans had time to build enough V2s. And London's nothing compared to some other European cities.
OTOH, central London's small enough to walk across.
I thought we just called those people Browncoats.
As a wise fictional character once said, "May have [picked] the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one." Not sure that applies to the Zune, though, although it was brown...
Presumably "Crystal Pepsi" wasn't brown (and, hopefully, wasn't so pure that it had a slight blue tint...)
Every inch a Golf, works in New England. Charger by Bosch installed in your house for mere hundreds. What's not to like?
Well, in the UK e-Golf prices start at about £26k (after deducting the £5k gov subsidy) and regular Golf prices start from about £16k.
One of these cars you can jump in to and drive the length of the country without worrying about how you are going to refuel. For an extra £10k you get a car that turns into a brick after a maximum of 100 miles, and less if you have to use the heater etc.
Translation: the £16k car would be the only vehicle you need. The £30k car is a commuting machine that would leave you needing a second car (or a rental) every time you needed to make a long trip.