The myth that appliances, tools, or cars lasted longer in the past is mostly false nostalgia.
That's not been my experience. I've been through quite a few "modern" refrigerators in my life (I'm 58.) My most recent purchase, a standup freezer, only lasted about a month past the 1-year warranty, and the compressor went nipples north. Cost a fair bit to have that compressor replaced -- even though it's a sealed, lightweight POS. My frig is about three years old, and we're already thinking of replacing it, as the amenities have failed -- icemaker, waterspout, filter system. Modern consumer level refrigerators and freezers just have not done well for me. Flimsy plastic shelves and fittings, ice makers that quit working in no time, filter systems that fail, the very cheapest possible compressors... meh.
There have been many days when I wish I'd thought to collect my mother's refrigerator / freezer. It's still at the old house, cranking along. It's been there since before I was born -- well over 60 years. Never broke down. Never needed repair. Never needed coolant / oil. Dead quiet. Looks pretty dated, all rounded edges and the like (it'd look right at home in a 1940's dwelling) but damn, for the money I've spent, I could have easily lived with it. At this point, it'd sure be a bitch to drag it from Pennsylvania to Montana, though.:)
Surprisingly, growing your own food DOES save money.
It's not surprising -- it just isn't worth it for most people. To do it well, you variously need land; upkeep time; knowledge (pests you don't need, creatures you do, plant nutrition, how to harvest without doing damage, control of wastage, fertilizer issues, varietal information, home-cooking skills, canning skills); seed sources; patience; storage, fencing to control animal forage, sometimes a permit...
Or you can just go to the supermarket, buy a bag of salad and a can of beans, come home and cook dinner. Or hit a restaurant.
It's pretty easy to see why most people choose to exchange the labor they do via the obvious proxy (money.). It really depends where you want to put your effort. The money you save -- whatever that is in a particular case -- has to be of at least the same value as your time, otherwise, you're working against yourself.
We have a tower garden here. It was a gift, so the initial cost (to us) was nothing. Even so, the costs for the nutrients and starters and the small amount of electricity the nutrient pump takes adds up to be non-trivial, and the amount of produce isn't fabulous overall, all things considered. The quality of what it produces is, though. Buying it... I wouldn't even think of it. It's expensive. It's also kind of pretty when it's all growing like a little vertical jungle, but that's pretty minor in the larger picture.
Dateline: Millions of light years (even faster parsecs than the Kessel run)
Lede: Scientists in the Dark; Does it Matter?
Today scientists announced that they can't see anything happening with stuff they can't see, but think is there, because otherwise the math is no good. After receiving directions to his laboratory on the phone, I went to see an authority on dark matter. During the interview, Dr. Seemore Lichspittle told this Any Paper, Any Time reporter that the thing about dark matter that one has to understand is that "it goes to eleven." When confronted with the observation that the sensing instruments only had scales from 0-10, he responded "Yes, yes, that's exactly it. The numbers... the numbers only work out in the dark. When the instruments are off. Matter of fact, it's all dark, really." At that point the interview was cut short as two lab assistants in white coats hustled Dr. Lichspittle into his own custom white lab jacket. Late for an important meeting, no doubt. As he left, nodding, he called back "it's really quite dark." Food for thought! Leaving Arkham, I was struck by the picturesque beauty of the stonework, and very appreciative of the tight security. We can rest easy, knowing that national treasures like Dr. Lichspittle work in such a safe enviroment.
And this is why closed source combined with black-box development is so much safer than open source. Sigh.
I really don't mind -- actually, I think I'd be kind of of flattered -- if people were able to look at my code, go "hey, I can use that" and then proceed to use it. And in fact, I've written a fair bit of code I think would fall into that vein. I think I could write something book-length in the line of "cool coding stuff" and quite a few programmers would find it quite useful. I've been doing this since the early 70's. I write signal processing, and image processing (but I repeat myself, sorta) and AI code, with a strong background in embedded and special-purpose systems, a bunch more.
But because a lawyer might look at my code, and use it to screw me, and through me, my family and employees quite harshly?
Bang. Closed source. The opposite of furthering progress by virtue of passing along what I've learned. I give away some of my work product such as this, but you will never see my source code because of the legal environment.
As far as I'm concerned, if I wrote it without referring to "other" source code, then no one else has any claim on my work. I don't have any idea how to fix copyright and patent and still retain the supposed commercial motivation to create, but fact is, as it stands, it's completely fucktarded.
Fast; efficient; not bloated; not buggy; respectful of the user's privacy; hardened with regard to hacking if that's relevant; not encumbered by dependencies; adequately featured; well supported; well documented for the end user.
As far as I'm concerned, if you can't hit those 00001000 or 00001001 targets, you should be looking for different line of work.
Of course it is lovely if it's easily read code, well commented, well structured -- but if the former list is covered, I'll give the 00000011 latter a pass.
Adding weight to the airplane reduces its range and/or capacity for carrying paying passengers so it would be an ongoing cost.
Who says it has to add weight? Use modern materials for the partition; carbon fiber structures can be ultra tough and very light weight, for example. And probably not used in any near-current design as aircraft take a very long time from paperwork to production. A door in the fuselage weighs about the same as the fuselage; thicker in the middle, thinner at the edges. It might even reduce weight by creating more open space in the cockpit. You can argue that it would reduce passenger capacity, but inasmuch as US passenger aircraft are typically not fully loaded, it doesn't add cost in most cases either. No matter what, it wouldn't cost as much as the TSA does, between the actual money spent and the huge amount of people's time they subtract from pursuits that would actually benefit the economy. Not to mention the level of irritation and the follow-on effects on productivity and civility...
Always wondered why they didn't design the passenger seating to be removable and collapsible and just pull all the empty seats out as a pre-takeoff action after the aircraft is fully loaded. Be a heck of a weight savings. Plus they could probably leverage it to reduce the anti-passenger effect of the seat designs created by the one-armed, one-legged engineer that all the airlines seem to hire.
None of those even comes close to two heads of state declaring that sovereign Ukrainian land belongs to Russia.
No one needs to. They've already taken what they wanted. Fait accompli.
You're really letting this stuff fly right over your head. Odd. Russia -- and the US -- are the 800 lb (~363 kg for you victims of the metric system) gorilla of international "we did it, you can suck it" politics. Approval from others is not something that changes the course of much in particular, although it's typical when some kind of externally facing benefit is desired from them.
Germany, on the other hand, was a small, massively industrial country between the size of the 4th and 5th largest US states (Montana and New Mexico) and smaller than Severo-Kavkazsky federalny okrug, the second smallest of the nine federal districts of Russia. Germany was very busy trying to consolidate a starting foothold for a major, vicious, multi-country land grab. The remainder of Europe as a whole was terrified. Initially, they did what they thought they had to do, true enough, but in the end it was nothing but deterrent-free conciliation, just as many actions aimed at Russia today are. The specifics of the act mean very little; it's the nature of it that guides future action.
The point I was making rather explicitly, which went right over your head, is that 7k is a good return for a short bit of work. 47k is excellent. The complaint about 7k of income as made in the GP is only valid if the development takes a long time. If it takes a week to put together an app, a not unreasonable amount of time for something of moderate complexity (assuming, again, that one is competent, and continuing not being the least bit concerned about those who are not), 7k is a thousand bucks a day, assuming you work all seven days.
Another thing is that if a dev spends a whole lot of time on a poor idea, then perhaps the message isn't so much that "this work produces a poor return" as it is "you suck at this work and/or you suck at figuring out what people will buy", and in either (or both) cases, this is simply the market's way of telling you to consider a more remunerative line of effort.
I highly recommend that you talk to HR about your compensation.
Retired, my home is what amounts to a small castle (ex-church), multiple vehicles, 200" home theater, no mortgage, no loans, investments a-plenty, two wholly owned, profitable businesses that run themselves, and the software that put me here now available for free to anyone...
Yeah, sorry, no time for your HR person. What was it they wanted from you? Ten years experience in rehabilitating sentient AI bartenders, a no-compete / no-disclosure / no harassment / must-wear-panties contract, daily drug tests and cavity searches, you provide your own insurance, move to India and obtain Indian citizenship, be paid in rupees+curry, and no pets in the office?
I'm sorry, I'm just a bit cranky today. Was thinking one lousy assumption deserved another, albeit with a little humor thrown in.:)
Solution would have been armored cockpits rejiggered to include food service, bunks and restroom sufficient for cockpit crew, separate, external door (doesn't open to the passenger section) into the aircraft for the pilots. An expensive 1-time cost. Instead of half-assed conversions and the open-ended expense, inconvenience, and dignity trampling of the TSA and associated rules and strangulations.
The current situation is a band-aid, and a pretty poor one at that. It does no good; it offers great potential for harm. As we have seen here.
And inasmuch as it is extremely unlikely that any load of passengers will ever again let a terrorist take control of an aircraft, knowing that doing so could lead straight to their death without passing go, so action is now always the better choice -- and terrorists know it -- the whole thing is basically wrongheaded from start to finish.
The most serious problem was commercial aircraft being used as guided kinetic weapons. That will likely never happen again unless the aircraft is transporting several terrorists and no one else but a load of first-year brownies. Perhaps not even then.
You should keep this in mind -- Russians embraced dash cams well before the US did, and in considerably greater numbers (mine is still the only one I've seen in my smallish town of 3000 people to this very day.) There were motivating insurance / liability / responsibility issues -- even some fairly widespread scamming. This inevitably means that more accidents have been and are being recorded, and of course, to make the video, the most sensationally fucktarded ones are chosen. Don't you believe for a moment that US drivers don't do similarly crazy things. On a drive back from Billings, Montana to my home, about 300 miles, on a snowy, icy day, we counted over fifty cars in the median, one- and two-car accidents, plus one really serious multiple-vehicle one involving a semi. There were actually more people in the median, having slid there, than there were on the road with us (I drive a 3/4 ton 4WD drive pickup, and you'd better believe I was in 4WD and going s...l...o...w... Horrific accidents make the news fairly often too, here and elsewhere -- but no dash cams. I have yet to "run into" dash cam footage for a US accident on the news though there must be some out there somewhere.
Face it. If Russians were as crazy as that video makes them seem, there wouldn't be very many Russians left.
You think so? consider this, for instance.And this too.And this. No appeasement? Hardly. You just don't see it in the news. You'll read more about it in the histories when this behavior is revealed as part of the present diplomatic pattern, and what it led to is in the rear view mirror. Just as we did with Nazi Germany.
It's a shell game. Nothing is quite what it seems, and sure as little green apple seeds make little green apples, no one is eager to tell the public what is actually going on.
Lede: RSA conference shutters undertakings after attendance at most recent gathering only attracted gay males with business suit fetishes.
An RSA conference official is quoted as saying "We don't have anything at all against gays, and we know they need security products too, but they only make up a relatively small proportion of the population. We just couldn't pay our bills." Executives at the company were insulated by their golden parachutes, but the rank and file workers were let go with only 4 days official notice and no termination pay. "I knew something was going on when I saw my boss carrying out his golf clubs", one unnamed source told this reporter. Another ex-employee told me she had early warning when by a week before the conference, they only had 21 advance signups, and all of them were from San Francisco. "I'm going to go to work as a stripper" she said. "I can make more and make people happy that way, too. Customer service was a nightmare of unhappiness and depression. I'm glad to be out of there, though I didn't plan it this way."
Vegas Adult Conferences see Record Attendance
Lede: In Las Vegas, the libido rules as adult conferences draw larger and larger crowds.
Sex sells, as any experiencing marketing exec will tell you; and looks matter, as Hollywood demonstrates every day of the year. Beautiful, scantily clad women populate the kiosks at all the adult conferences, and men flock en masse to the show floors in order to get a closer look and take snapshots with them; all the while being well exposed to the products and services being marketed their way. Women, too, crowd the convention room floor as they take careful note of the latest trends in sexuality and sex toys, making sure they maintain their "leg up" over the Birkenstock-wearing, makeup-free adherents of the now critically derailed feminist movement. A great time is clearly had by all. I asked a paired couple of showgoers if they had kids; "Yes, we do" was the answer. I asked where the kids were right them, and got this response: "Since the government deported all the immigrants, we've been hiring ex-programmers and ex-engineers as babysitters. Off-shoring and the H1B visa programs have made picking up a desperate tech person very easy. And they're so much better at caring for the kids. You should see the LEGO creation we came home to yesterday!"
the Christian Science Monitor asks if social media will control the future of news
The Internet -- not so much social media, but that somewhat too -- already control the news, and I expect this to continue without break.
Unless you are willing to term "news" the vapid, nipple-slip and corporate-fellatio pap that FOX, CNN, MSNBC, the NYT and their other editorially constipated brethren feed us.
The consumers of those sources get immensely slanted and dumbed down takes on nothing but things carefully picked to feed their preconceptions as the oligarchy has served them up, or meaningless filler.
I am not saying that the "list of ten amazing... whatever" posts are worthy, nor popular dullard watering holes like Drudge; they're as bad as or worse than anything the media ever put in front of us, but the Internet is much more that that; there's just no way the news can compete with the many people who are truly interested in a subject and go to lengths to specifically cover it -- not on level of detail, not on level of accuracy, and not on interactivity. Even those media sites with open comment sections (and no, that doesn't include the ones with facebook-driven forums) fail to measure up, because it's all commenters talking to commenters -- there's very rarely any engagement at all from the author of the story, explaining the whys and wherefores due to having generated the story as fast as possible, every thought about it completely abandoned in favor of the next story.
Compounding their problem, traditional media is embracing the very worst habit of lowest common denominator clickbait sites, short videos that are difficult to comment on, much more difficult to quote, and generally of massively less worth than an actual written report or opinion.
There's another factor -- I've found that the very best reporting seems to consistently come from sources that lean towards the least commercial approach. The presence of ads seems to be an incredibly consistent flag that the content will be lower quality. The more ads, the more that seems to be the case. Stories-as-ads are a serious red flag, content-wise. You can still find worthy content in comments, but the stories from the source... they really deserve a healthy dose of skepticism.
Yes, I'm very negative about the media. That's the result of being exposed to it for fifty years. BENGAZI! DRUGZEZ! TERRORMISTS! PERVERTAGE! and of course there's that old standby: publish something relatively sane, then give equal time to a fucktarded, worthless, rationale- and evidence-free counter view. That's always helpful. Not.
So even if you charge $1 for it and assuming you're working by yourself, you're looking at anywhere between $7,000 to $47,000 (minus hardware and licensing fees). If you had anyone else helping (which is probably the case), then yeah... you're looking at poverty level wages.
There's a questionable assumption buried in that: The assumption it takes a year to put out an app. It certainly should not. Unless the developer really, really sucks. And in which case, perhaps that should be considered with regard to remuneration.
A good dev can put a working skeleton of an iOS app or a full blown mac app up in a matter of hours. I can do it in minutes. Filling it with whatever one wants it to do doesn't generally take all that long, certainly not a year, unless you're building something as extended and construct/art heavy as Angry Birds, and in that case... you're likely to make more than 50k.
Now, as for those who are filling the app store (Android too, I'm not discriminating) with 50mb apps that hardly do anything at all... well, there you go. Given the level of what they've produced, perhaps it does take them a year. But I can't say I'm terribly worried about them, either.:/
He sure isn't. My lady has an iPhone 5; I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 4. Guess what she's about to buy? Hint... not another iPhone... We both also have recent iPads. Quite familiar with iOS.
All kinds of noise was made about Hitler's early moves, it's just that other than noise, everyone sat. Which is just what everyone is doing now. Not saying there's much to conclude from that, but it's certainly a similar thing thus far.
This. I would go further -- I bet the components are ready to plug together. And they already have ballistic capable launch platforms. And they've had nuclear reactors for years, not to mention some of the smartest, well educated, motivated individuals on the face of the earth and huge industrial powerhouses very well acquainted with keeping tight security.
Although I should admit that it doesn't worry me even a little bit, nor do any of the known nukes around the globe. They're just really big bombs. Sucks just as much to be blown up by a grenade, or shot with a 50 caliber bullet. Being taken out by a bayonet or other bladed weapon is no party either. I truly think it's just beyond awesome that politicians are finally on the front lines -- if we get nuked, they are finally the first to go, as they should have been for every war they declared, frankly. And I don't think for even a second that the actual leaders of Muslim countries are taken in by that 72 virgins BS, any more than most US presidents are seriously religious (except for poor old drugged out Bush, but that's our own fault...) Religion is a tool of control. Smart people quietly ignore it, or go through the motions as needed. Religion is not there for people smart and cunning enough to get to positions of national leadership. It's there for everyone else.
These are alterations of the magnetic fields from sources outside the cranium and outside the myelin sheath which impact the neural processing. Would this not be indicative of quantum influences in neural processing?
They are indicative of EM interference. Quantum interference and effects are something else entirely, and outside of the laboratory, have only been found to occur on very tiny scales associated with atomic structure, as in photosynthesis. Quantum modulation -- that is, a quantum effect that changes the output of a cell based upon evaluation of the inputs -- is possible, but only speculative at this time. Quantum interference, that is, changing the output of a cell based upon external quantum events, is wholly speculative; we're unaware at this time of any such event occurring in nature and I personally, at least, am unaware of a natural means for it to occur.
Given that these effects are sourced outside the cranium, it would seem plausible then that the current generated as a signal propegates[sic] down the axon of neuron A would have an impact on parallel neuron B firing due to the magnetic field generated from A's firing. These generated magnetic fields are strong enough to be detected outside the cranium and are the basis of some FMRI techniques.
FMRI - at least as far as I know - works by intentionally orienting the magnetic impulses of hydrogen atoms, and then uses the newly resulting magnetic field to indicate brain activity by proxy of blood oxygenation. Hemoglobin is diamagnetic when oxygenated but paramagnetic when deoxygenated. This difference in magnetic properties leads to small differences in the MR signal of blood depending on the degree of oxygenation. Since blood oxygenation varies according to the levels of neural activity these differences can be used to detect brain activity. But this is not a magnetic field generated by the brain, it is an externally stimulated one (using extremely powerful external fields) and even so, it does not show any signs of affecting brain function, which in turn argues, again, for the lack of effect of magnetic fields at the level of the neurons.
Here's my thinking on the kind of thing you are talking about, admittedly somewhat off the cuff: Magnetic fields that are generated by current along a conductor are proportional to the inductive impedance of the conductor. Similarly, the amount of current induced in a nearby conductor is proportional to the initial signal size, but reduces by distance (square law) and to the lack of or presence of an impedance match between the two. The poorer the impedance match of the receiving element, the less signal will be impressed upon it by the field, which carries very little power. We must consider that the signals are low and so therefore are the initial field intensities. Because of this, the interior signal condition of the receiving element is extremely likely to drown out -- subsume -- any neighboring interference. And that's actually what FMRI, again the kind I am aware of, indicates. You can boost the magnetic fields within the brain quite a bit and there's no detectable difference in brain function; certainly the brain still works and so I think this tells us pretty clearly that the brain is not very sensitive to this sort of thing. One caveat: magnetic fields generally induce voltages when they are changing, not when they are static, so frequency could easily be an issue here. But now we go back to the experience of high field exposure in the pursuit of various radiative undertakings, again at every frequency from sub-hertz to gigahertz, and this has shown us that the brain continues to operate without any particular notable reaction at all.
Can you give me a pointer to the FMRI techniques you were thinking of?
There are actual articles on inter-neuronal communication via electromagnetic waves:
That's all definitely interesting speculation, but the point remains: As far as quantum effects go, it is all speculation. Nothing like what you suggest has been discovered; further, no effect has been detected that cannot be attributed to one or more of the chemical, electrical or topological mechanisms we're already aware of.
As to lowish resistance, stray capacitance and inherent inductance providing for signal coupling, that's conceivable but has not been found. We know that the many layers of a lipoprotein called myelin (the myelin sheaths) provide a very effective form of EM isolation along the nerves themselves, and then at the edge of the skull, there are several layers (skin, lipoids, the skull, the dura, the CSF-carrying arachnoid, and the pia) that do an extraordinary job of keeping brain signals in and external signals out, which is part of why we are extremely confident that the mind operates inside the skull and nowhere else, and that the various related superstitious speculations that claim otherwise are invalid.
Radio operators have been exposed extensively to RF at about any frequency from "DC to daylight" as the saying goes, at just about any power level you can imagine, as well as all manner of static EM fields, and from this we know that it takes an enormous amount of non-nerve-signal, non-directly coupled interference to have any detectable effect upon any portion of the mind at all. Further, we know that if we go in, in an invasive manner, surgically implanting electrodes and directly stimulating the nerves, once the myelin has been bypassed, only a tiny signal is required to destabilize / change what was going on prior. This in turn implies that the myelin is doing a really stand-up job of keeping signal integrity, and therefore against much credence for internally generated interference along the actual nerves. Within the cell, one could -- should -- think that what is going on is integral to the stability of the cell itself, and again, we know only of chemical, electrical and topological elements that operate as modulators at this time.
There's one more thing. Poor myelin sheathing is a known causative factor underlying many really serious disease processes. That's not ultimately definitive, but then again, it certainly doesn't argue in any way for interference being a good thing.
This, all taken together, strongly indicates that whatever is going on in there, it's very stable with regard to decoupled interference / cross-talk of any kind, local or otherwise.
Tomorrow, these conclusions may all be different due to new data. But as of right now, those three -- the "big three", I sometimes call them -- show every sign of being all there is.
The iWatch is a fragile thing that won't last very long without specialized maintenance, replacement parts, et cetera.
That hasn't stopped us from making them, though, has it? That hasn't stopped it from being created by us for a specific purpose, has it? That hasn't made nature produce one on its own, has it? Remember, the claim was: "If grey goo replicators were possible, evolution would have already created them." Clearly the IWatch is possible; yet nature didn't create it. Therefore, it is a flat-out given that "If grey goo replicators were possible, evolution would have already created them." is invalid logic. The fact is, special purpose devices can, and have been, made by us, that evolution has not even come close to, which fact destroys the above assertion completely.
Grey goo replicators have to get energy from somewhere. Where?
Well, let's see. There's light; heat; motion; all in the environment, available for harvesting. That oughta do for a start. Then there's magnetic induction from a central source, and also the electrical component of RF emissions. Then there's chemical energy, atomic energy... for all we know at this point there's energy in vacuum -- a lot of theory points that way. So, presuming we can make disassemblers in the first place (not a given) odds are good that we can power them, or get them to power themselves. Or both. They may work in a bath of energy supplying chemicals, they may work by harvesting available energy, we may be the supplier of that, or nature may -- the possible and potential variations on the theme are quite extensive.
The organisms which can break down anything are readily out-competed by a variety of organisms which between them can break down anything. And that's why grey goo is not a credible threat.
Nope. Grey goo is not an organism. It won't be evolved, and it won't be competing. It'll be working. Like an iWatch. The potential to create such has nothing at all to do with what organisms are in the environment. You see anything in the biosphere "out-competing" an atomic weapon? No. That's because it's a purpose-designed machine. It does what it does, regardless of who made it; but we made it and nature didn't, and biological evolutionary competition and selection are not in the least relevant to the mechanism of the bomb, no more than they would be to the mechanism of a nanite of any stripe. Or an iWatch.:)
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That's not been my experience. I've been through quite a few "modern" refrigerators in my life (I'm 58.) My most recent purchase, a standup freezer, only lasted about a month past the 1-year warranty, and the compressor went nipples north. Cost a fair bit to have that compressor replaced -- even though it's a sealed, lightweight POS. My frig is about three years old, and we're already thinking of replacing it, as the amenities have failed -- icemaker, waterspout, filter system. Modern consumer level refrigerators and freezers just have not done well for me. Flimsy plastic shelves and fittings, ice makers that quit working in no time, filter systems that fail, the very cheapest possible compressors... meh.
There have been many days when I wish I'd thought to collect my mother's refrigerator / freezer. It's still at the old house, cranking along. It's been there since before I was born -- well over 60 years. Never broke down. Never needed repair. Never needed coolant / oil. Dead quiet. Looks pretty dated, all rounded edges and the like (it'd look right at home in a 1940's dwelling) but damn, for the money I've spent, I could have easily lived with it. At this point, it'd sure be a bitch to drag it from Pennsylvania to Montana, though. :)
It's not surprising -- it just isn't worth it for most people. To do it well, you variously need land; upkeep time; knowledge (pests you don't need, creatures you do, plant nutrition, how to harvest without doing damage, control of wastage, fertilizer issues, varietal information, home-cooking skills, canning skills); seed sources; patience; storage, fencing to control animal forage, sometimes a permit...
Or you can just go to the supermarket, buy a bag of salad and a can of beans, come home and cook dinner. Or hit a restaurant.
It's pretty easy to see why most people choose to exchange the labor they do via the obvious proxy (money.). It really depends where you want to put your effort. The money you save -- whatever that is in a particular case -- has to be of at least the same value as your time, otherwise, you're working against yourself.
We have a tower garden here. It was a gift, so the initial cost (to us) was nothing. Even so, the costs for the nutrients and starters and the small amount of electricity the nutrient pump takes adds up to be non-trivial, and the amount of produce isn't fabulous overall, all things considered. The quality of what it produces is, though. Buying it... I wouldn't even think of it. It's expensive. It's also kind of pretty when it's all growing like a little vertical jungle, but that's pretty minor in the larger picture.
Dateline: Millions of light years (even faster parsecs than the Kessel run)
Lede: Scientists in the Dark; Does it Matter?
Today scientists announced that they can't see anything happening with stuff they can't see, but think is there, because otherwise the math is no good. After receiving directions to his laboratory on the phone, I went to see an authority on dark matter. During the interview, Dr. Seemore Lichspittle told this Any Paper, Any Time reporter that the thing about dark matter that one has to understand is that "it goes to eleven." When confronted with the observation that the sensing instruments only had scales from 0-10, he responded "Yes, yes, that's exactly it. The numbers... the numbers only work out in the dark. When the instruments are off. Matter of fact, it's all dark, really." At that point the interview was cut short as two lab assistants in white coats hustled Dr. Lichspittle into his own custom white lab jacket. Late for an important meeting, no doubt. As he left, nodding, he called back "it's really quite dark." Food for thought! Leaving Arkham, I was struck by the picturesque beauty of the stonework, and very appreciative of the tight security. We can rest easy, knowing that national treasures like Dr. Lichspittle work in such a safe enviroment.
And this is why closed source combined with black-box development is so much safer than open source. Sigh.
I really don't mind -- actually, I think I'd be kind of of flattered -- if people were able to look at my code, go "hey, I can use that" and then proceed to use it. And in fact, I've written a fair bit of code I think would fall into that vein. I think I could write something book-length in the line of "cool coding stuff" and quite a few programmers would find it quite useful. I've been doing this since the early 70's. I write signal processing, and image processing (but I repeat myself, sorta) and AI code, with a strong background in embedded and special-purpose systems, a bunch more.
But because a lawyer might look at my code, and use it to screw me, and through me, my family and employees quite harshly?
Bang. Closed source. The opposite of furthering progress by virtue of passing along what I've learned. I give away some of my work product such as this, but you will never see my source code because of the legal environment.
As far as I'm concerned, if I wrote it without referring to "other" source code, then no one else has any claim on my work. I don't have any idea how to fix copyright and patent and still retain the supposed commercial motivation to create, but fact is, as it stands, it's completely fucktarded.
Pisses me off, it does. :/
Fast; efficient; not bloated; not buggy; respectful of the user's privacy; hardened with regard to hacking if that's relevant; not encumbered by dependencies; adequately featured; well supported; well documented for the end user.
As far as I'm concerned, if you can't hit those 00001000 or 00001001 targets, you should be looking for different line of work.
Of course it is lovely if it's easily read code, well commented, well structured -- but if the former list is covered, I'll give the 00000011 latter a pass.
Who says it has to add weight? Use modern materials for the partition; carbon fiber structures can be ultra tough and very light weight, for example. And probably not used in any near-current design as aircraft take a very long time from paperwork to production. A door in the fuselage weighs about the same as the fuselage; thicker in the middle, thinner at the edges. It might even reduce weight by creating more open space in the cockpit. You can argue that it would reduce passenger capacity, but inasmuch as US passenger aircraft are typically not fully loaded, it doesn't add cost in most cases either. No matter what, it wouldn't cost as much as the TSA does, between the actual money spent and the huge amount of people's time they subtract from pursuits that would actually benefit the economy. Not to mention the level of irritation and the follow-on effects on productivity and civility...
Always wondered why they didn't design the passenger seating to be removable and collapsible and just pull all the empty seats out as a pre-takeoff action after the aircraft is fully loaded. Be a heck of a weight savings. Plus they could probably leverage it to reduce the anti-passenger effect of the seat designs created by the one-armed, one-legged engineer that all the airlines seem to hire.
No one needs to. They've already taken what they wanted. Fait accompli.
You're really letting this stuff fly right over your head. Odd. Russia -- and the US -- are the 800 lb (~363 kg for you victims of the metric system) gorilla of international "we did it, you can suck it" politics. Approval from others is not something that changes the course of much in particular, although it's typical when some kind of externally facing benefit is desired from them.
Germany, on the other hand, was a small, massively industrial country between the size of the 4th and 5th largest US states (Montana and New Mexico) and smaller than Severo-Kavkazsky federalny okrug, the second smallest of the nine federal districts of Russia. Germany was very busy trying to consolidate a starting foothold for a major, vicious, multi-country land grab. The remainder of Europe as a whole was terrified. Initially, they did what they thought they had to do, true enough, but in the end it was nothing but deterrent-free conciliation, just as many actions aimed at Russia today are. The specifics of the act mean very little; it's the nature of it that guides future action.
The point I was making rather explicitly, which went right over your head, is that 7k is a good return for a short bit of work. 47k is excellent. The complaint about 7k of income as made in the GP is only valid if the development takes a long time. If it takes a week to put together an app, a not unreasonable amount of time for something of moderate complexity (assuming, again, that one is competent, and continuing not being the least bit concerned about those who are not), 7k is a thousand bucks a day, assuming you work all seven days.
Another thing is that if a dev spends a whole lot of time on a poor idea, then perhaps the message isn't so much that "this work produces a poor return" as it is "you suck at this work and/or you suck at figuring out what people will buy", and in either (or both) cases, this is simply the market's way of telling you to consider a more remunerative line of effort.
Retired, my home is what amounts to a small castle (ex-church), multiple vehicles, 200" home theater, no mortgage, no loans, investments a-plenty, two wholly owned, profitable businesses that run themselves, and the software that put me here now available for free to anyone...
Yeah, sorry, no time for your HR person. What was it they wanted from you? Ten years experience in rehabilitating sentient AI bartenders, a no-compete / no-disclosure / no harassment / must-wear-panties contract, daily drug tests and cavity searches, you provide your own insurance, move to India and obtain Indian citizenship, be paid in rupees+curry, and no pets in the office?
I'm sorry, I'm just a bit cranky today. Was thinking one lousy assumption deserved another, albeit with a little humor thrown in. :)
And the US has plenty of those, as well as accidents with less dire consequences.
Yeah, actually it is 9/11 stupidity.
Solution would have been armored cockpits rejiggered to include food service, bunks and restroom sufficient for cockpit crew, separate, external door (doesn't open to the passenger section) into the aircraft for the pilots. An expensive 1-time cost. Instead of half-assed conversions and the open-ended expense, inconvenience, and dignity trampling of the TSA and associated rules and strangulations.
The current situation is a band-aid, and a pretty poor one at that. It does no good; it offers great potential for harm. As we have seen here.
And inasmuch as it is extremely unlikely that any load of passengers will ever again let a terrorist take control of an aircraft, knowing that doing so could lead straight to their death without passing go, so action is now always the better choice -- and terrorists know it -- the whole thing is basically wrongheaded from start to finish.
The most serious problem was commercial aircraft being used as guided kinetic weapons. That will likely never happen again unless the aircraft is transporting several terrorists and no one else but a load of first-year brownies. Perhaps not even then.
You should keep this in mind -- Russians embraced dash cams well before the US did, and in considerably greater numbers (mine is still the only one I've seen in my smallish town of 3000 people to this very day.) There were motivating insurance / liability / responsibility issues -- even some fairly widespread scamming. This inevitably means that more accidents have been and are being recorded, and of course, to make the video, the most sensationally fucktarded ones are chosen. Don't you believe for a moment that US drivers don't do similarly crazy things. On a drive back from Billings, Montana to my home, about 300 miles, on a snowy, icy day, we counted over fifty cars in the median, one- and two-car accidents, plus one really serious multiple-vehicle one involving a semi. There were actually more people in the median, having slid there, than there were on the road with us (I drive a 3/4 ton 4WD drive pickup, and you'd better believe I was in 4WD and going s...l...o...w... Horrific accidents make the news fairly often too, here and elsewhere -- but no dash cams. I have yet to "run into" dash cam footage for a US accident on the news though there must be some out there somewhere.
Face it. If Russians were as crazy as that video makes them seem, there wouldn't be very many Russians left.
You think so? consider this, for instance. And this too. And this. No appeasement? Hardly. You just don't see it in the news. You'll read more about it in the histories when this behavior is revealed as part of the present diplomatic pattern, and what it led to is in the rear view mirror. Just as we did with Nazi Germany.
It's a shell game. Nothing is quite what it seems, and sure as little green apple seeds make little green apples, no one is eager to tell the public what is actually going on.
Convention News
RSA Conference Fades Away
Lede: RSA conference shutters undertakings after attendance at most recent gathering only attracted gay males with business suit fetishes.
An RSA conference official is quoted as saying "We don't have anything at all against gays, and we know they need security products too, but they only make up a relatively small proportion of the population. We just couldn't pay our bills." Executives at the company were insulated by their golden parachutes, but the rank and file workers were let go with only 4 days official notice and no termination pay. "I knew something was going on when I saw my boss carrying out his golf clubs", one unnamed source told this reporter. Another ex-employee told me she had early warning when by a week before the conference, they only had 21 advance signups, and all of them were from San Francisco. "I'm going to go to work as a stripper" she said. "I can make more and make people happy that way, too. Customer service was a nightmare of unhappiness and depression. I'm glad to be out of there, though I didn't plan it this way."
Vegas Adult Conferences see Record Attendance
Lede: In Las Vegas, the libido rules as adult conferences draw larger and larger crowds.
Sex sells, as any experiencing marketing exec will tell you; and looks matter, as Hollywood demonstrates every day of the year. Beautiful, scantily clad women populate the kiosks at all the adult conferences, and men flock en masse to the show floors in order to get a closer look and take snapshots with them; all the while being well exposed to the products and services being marketed their way. Women, too, crowd the convention room floor as they take careful note of the latest trends in sexuality and sex toys, making sure they maintain their "leg up" over the Birkenstock-wearing, makeup-free adherents of the now critically derailed feminist movement. A great time is clearly had by all. I asked a paired couple of showgoers if they had kids; "Yes, we do" was the answer. I asked where the kids were right them, and got this response: "Since the government deported all the immigrants, we've been hiring ex-programmers and ex-engineers as babysitters. Off-shoring and the H1B visa programs have made picking up a desperate tech person very easy. And they're so much better at caring for the kids. You should see the LEGO creation we came home to yesterday!"
The Internet -- not so much social media, but that somewhat too -- already control the news, and I expect this to continue without break.
Unless you are willing to term "news" the vapid, nipple-slip and corporate-fellatio pap that FOX, CNN, MSNBC, the NYT and their other editorially constipated brethren feed us.
The consumers of those sources get immensely slanted and dumbed down takes on nothing but things carefully picked to feed their preconceptions as the oligarchy has served them up, or meaningless filler.
I am not saying that the "list of ten amazing... whatever" posts are worthy, nor popular dullard watering holes like Drudge; they're as bad as or worse than anything the media ever put in front of us, but the Internet is much more that that; there's just no way the news can compete with the many people who are truly interested in a subject and go to lengths to specifically cover it -- not on level of detail, not on level of accuracy, and not on interactivity. Even those media sites with open comment sections (and no, that doesn't include the ones with facebook-driven forums) fail to measure up, because it's all commenters talking to commenters -- there's very rarely any engagement at all from the author of the story, explaining the whys and wherefores due to having generated the story as fast as possible, every thought about it completely abandoned in favor of the next story.
Compounding their problem, traditional media is embracing the very worst habit of lowest common denominator clickbait sites, short videos that are difficult to comment on, much more difficult to quote, and generally of massively less worth than an actual written report or opinion.
There's another factor -- I've found that the very best reporting seems to consistently come from sources that lean towards the least commercial approach. The presence of ads seems to be an incredibly consistent flag that the content will be lower quality. The more ads, the more that seems to be the case. Stories-as-ads are a serious red flag, content-wise. You can still find worthy content in comments, but the stories from the source... they really deserve a healthy dose of skepticism.
Yes, I'm very negative about the media. That's the result of being exposed to it for fifty years. BENGAZI! DRUGZEZ! TERRORMISTS! PERVERTAGE! and of course there's that old standby: publish something relatively sane, then give equal time to a fucktarded, worthless, rationale- and evidence-free counter view. That's always helpful. Not.
No foreign power needs to, either. It's a meaningless political nothing.
There's a questionable assumption buried in that: The assumption it takes a year to put out an app. It certainly should not. Unless the developer really, really sucks. And in which case, perhaps that should be considered with regard to remuneration.
A good dev can put a working skeleton of an iOS app or a full blown mac app up in a matter of hours. I can do it in minutes. Filling it with whatever one wants it to do doesn't generally take all that long, certainly not a year, unless you're building something as extended and construct/art heavy as Angry Birds, and in that case... you're likely to make more than 50k.
Now, as for those who are filling the app store (Android too, I'm not discriminating) with 50mb apps that hardly do anything at all... well, there you go. Given the level of what they've produced, perhaps it does take them a year. But I can't say I'm terribly worried about them, either. :/
He sure isn't. My lady has an iPhone 5; I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 4. Guess what she's about to buy? Hint... not another iPhone... We both also have recent iPads. Quite familiar with iOS.
You see anyone not sitting on the sidelines here?
All kinds of noise was made about Hitler's early moves, it's just that other than noise, everyone sat. Which is just what everyone is doing now. Not saying there's much to conclude from that, but it's certainly a similar thing thus far.
This. I would go further -- I bet the components are ready to plug together. And they already have ballistic capable launch platforms. And they've had nuclear reactors for years, not to mention some of the smartest, well educated, motivated individuals on the face of the earth and huge industrial powerhouses very well acquainted with keeping tight security.
Although I should admit that it doesn't worry me even a little bit, nor do any of the known nukes around the globe. They're just really big bombs. Sucks just as much to be blown up by a grenade, or shot with a 50 caliber bullet. Being taken out by a bayonet or other bladed weapon is no party either. I truly think it's just beyond awesome that politicians are finally on the front lines -- if we get nuked, they are finally the first to go, as they should have been for every war they declared, frankly. And I don't think for even a second that the actual leaders of Muslim countries are taken in by that 72 virgins BS, any more than most US presidents are seriously religious (except for poor old drugged out Bush, but that's our own fault...) Religion is a tool of control. Smart people quietly ignore it, or go through the motions as needed. Religion is not there for people smart and cunning enough to get to positions of national leadership. It's there for everyone else.
You might want to keep an eye on India and Pakistan...
I don't use my thumbs with my smartphone, you insensitive clods!
Hold in left hand, poke and stroke with right index finger. No, no, the smartphone, still talking about the smartphone.
LOL
They are indicative of EM interference. Quantum interference and effects are something else entirely, and outside of the laboratory, have only been found to occur on very tiny scales associated with atomic structure, as in photosynthesis. Quantum modulation -- that is, a quantum effect that changes the output of a cell based upon evaluation of the inputs -- is possible, but only speculative at this time. Quantum interference, that is, changing the output of a cell based upon external quantum events, is wholly speculative; we're unaware at this time of any such event occurring in nature and I personally, at least, am unaware of a natural means for it to occur.
FMRI - at least as far as I know - works by intentionally orienting the magnetic impulses of hydrogen atoms, and then uses the newly resulting magnetic field to indicate brain activity by proxy of blood oxygenation. Hemoglobin is diamagnetic when oxygenated but paramagnetic when deoxygenated. This difference in magnetic properties leads to small differences in the MR signal of blood depending on the degree of oxygenation. Since blood oxygenation varies according to the levels of neural activity these differences can be used to detect brain activity. But this is not a magnetic field generated by the brain, it is an externally stimulated one (using extremely powerful external fields) and even so, it does not show any signs of affecting brain function, which in turn argues, again, for the lack of effect of magnetic fields at the level of the neurons.
Here's my thinking on the kind of thing you are talking about, admittedly somewhat off the cuff: Magnetic fields that are generated by current along a conductor are proportional to the inductive impedance of the conductor. Similarly, the amount of current induced in a nearby conductor is proportional to the initial signal size, but reduces by distance (square law) and to the lack of or presence of an impedance match between the two. The poorer the impedance match of the receiving element, the less signal will be impressed upon it by the field, which carries very little power. We must consider that the signals are low and so therefore are the initial field intensities. Because of this, the interior signal condition of the receiving element is extremely likely to drown out -- subsume -- any neighboring interference. And that's actually what FMRI, again the kind I am aware of, indicates. You can boost the magnetic fields within the brain quite a bit and there's no detectable difference in brain function; certainly the brain still works and so I think this tells us pretty clearly that the brain is not very sensitive to this sort of thing. One caveat: magnetic fields generally induce voltages when they are changing, not when they are static, so frequency could easily be an issue here. But now we go back to the experience of high field exposure in the pursuit of various radiative undertakings, again at every frequency from sub-hertz to gigahertz, and this has shown us that the brain continues to operate without any particular notable reaction at all.
Can you give me a pointer to the FMRI techniques you were thinking of?
That's all definitely interesting speculation, but the point remains: As far as quantum effects go, it is all speculation. Nothing like what you suggest has been discovered; further, no effect has been detected that cannot be attributed to one or more of the chemical, electrical or topological mechanisms we're already aware of.
As to lowish resistance, stray capacitance and inherent inductance providing for signal coupling, that's conceivable but has not been found. We know that the many layers of a lipoprotein called myelin (the myelin sheaths) provide a very effective form of EM isolation along the nerves themselves, and then at the edge of the skull, there are several layers (skin, lipoids, the skull, the dura, the CSF-carrying arachnoid, and the pia) that do an extraordinary job of keeping brain signals in and external signals out, which is part of why we are extremely confident that the mind operates inside the skull and nowhere else, and that the various related superstitious speculations that claim otherwise are invalid.
Radio operators have been exposed extensively to RF at about any frequency from "DC to daylight" as the saying goes, at just about any power level you can imagine, as well as all manner of static EM fields, and from this we know that it takes an enormous amount of non-nerve-signal, non-directly coupled interference to have any detectable effect upon any portion of the mind at all. Further, we know that if we go in, in an invasive manner, surgically implanting electrodes and directly stimulating the nerves, once the myelin has been bypassed, only a tiny signal is required to destabilize / change what was going on prior. This in turn implies that the myelin is doing a really stand-up job of keeping signal integrity, and therefore against much credence for internally generated interference along the actual nerves. Within the cell, one could -- should -- think that what is going on is integral to the stability of the cell itself, and again, we know only of chemical, electrical and topological elements that operate as modulators at this time.
There's one more thing. Poor myelin sheathing is a known causative factor underlying many really serious disease processes. That's not ultimately definitive, but then again, it certainly doesn't argue in any way for interference being a good thing.
This, all taken together, strongly indicates that whatever is going on in there, it's very stable with regard to decoupled interference / cross-talk of any kind, local or otherwise.
Tomorrow, these conclusions may all be different due to new data. But as of right now, those three -- the "big three", I sometimes call them -- show every sign of being all there is.
That hasn't stopped us from making them, though, has it? That hasn't stopped it from being created by us for a specific purpose, has it? That hasn't made nature produce one on its own, has it? Remember, the claim was: "If grey goo replicators were possible, evolution would have already created them." Clearly the IWatch is possible; yet nature didn't create it. Therefore, it is a flat-out given that "If grey goo replicators were possible, evolution would have already created them." is invalid logic. The fact is, special purpose devices can, and have been, made by us, that evolution has not even come close to, which fact destroys the above assertion completely.
Well, let's see. There's light; heat; motion; all in the environment, available for harvesting. That oughta do for a start. Then there's magnetic induction from a central source, and also the electrical component of RF emissions. Then there's chemical energy, atomic energy... for all we know at this point there's energy in vacuum -- a lot of theory points that way. So, presuming we can make disassemblers in the first place (not a given) odds are good that we can power them, or get them to power themselves. Or both. They may work in a bath of energy supplying chemicals, they may work by harvesting available energy, we may be the supplier of that, or nature may -- the possible and potential variations on the theme are quite extensive.
Nope. Grey goo is not an organism. It won't be evolved, and it won't be competing. It'll be working. Like an iWatch. The potential to create such has nothing at all to do with what organisms are in the environment. You see anything in the biosphere "out-competing" an atomic weapon? No. That's because it's a purpose-designed machine. It does what it does, regardless of who made it; but we made it and nature didn't, and biological evolutionary competition and selection are not in the least relevant to the mechanism of the bomb, no more than they would be to the mechanism of a nanite of any stripe. Or an iWatch. :)