The reason is tax-breaks, no tolls, free parking, no import/purchase tax, no road tax, driving in bus lanes. Saving the environment isn't one of those reasons. The fastest selling EV there is the Jaguar iPace. Clearly it is rich people taking advantage of a government program to make their lives easier while commuting.
I'm not sure what point you're making.
Also a question... what is the reason behind the various regulations/breaks you listed? My guess is they were put there by legislators in order to save the environment. And the legislators aimed for this goal because they thought their electors would like all the end results (easier lives while commuting, and saving the environment). And that people did indeed vote with both things in mind.
That would be an entirely typical case of the reasonable and rational attitude "I will vote for burdens that are the right thing to do so long as the burdens are shared fairly by all of society rather than just by me; but of course I like everyone else will act locally to my own best advantage."
The judge went on to write things that seemed questionable to me...
Would Stardock suffer financial harm from a DMCA notice by Ford+Reiche? The judge said this claim "depends upon the unsupported assumption that GOG and Valve will remove Origins upon receipt of a DMCA notice". But it's a very well supported assumption, that did indeed turn out true, and the judge earlier had indeed explained that GOG and Valve would have to take it down because that's how the DMCA works.
The judge also says that economic harm doesn't count as harm because it can be remedied by a damage claim. But there's no provision in DMCA for damages, and no precedent I'm aware of for damages awarded upon DMCA takedowns. I guess the framers thought there wouldn't be any need for damages, since folks can always file counter-notification in response to DMCA takedowns and these counter-notifications are enough to have the material restored to Valve and GOG. Indeed Stardock say they have already filed counter-notifications. But Valve and GOG haven't responded, and overall the industry seems extremely slow to act on counter-notifications but extremely fast to act on takedown-notifications. As the judge in this case noted, the notice+takedown protocol is a carefully considered protocol to balance various competing interests, but it's up to Congress to recalibrate the balance as needed. My impression is that the counter-notification mechanism should be handled quicker by the media hosting industry. I guess we'll see in the coming days whether Valve+GOG respect the counter-notifications.
If Ford and Reiche didn't have IP rights they could not have open sourced it.
I think your post uses the phrase "IP rights" too vaguely, given that a crisp characterization is the CRUX of the disagreement between the parties. What IP rights are there?...
* Copyright in the source code and artwork and music of SC1, SC2 * Copyright in the source code and artwork of SC3, excepting those bits already copyrighted in SC1/SC2 * Trademark in the name "Source Control" * Any other ad-hoc license agreements
Copyright prevents other people from publishing copies or derivative works of your copyrighted materials. Trademark prevents other people from using your mark in a way that would confuse potential customers.
First was the 2002 open source version of SC2 called The Urquan Masters which was initially released by Ford and Reiche and not opposed by Atari.
The likeliest explanation here is that Ford+Reiche owned copyright in SC2 bit didn't own the trademark "Star Control".
Second was the 2011 inclusion of Star Control 1 and 2 on the GOG store. As soon as it went on sale, Ford and Reiche objected and contacted Atari who worked out a new licensing agreement with Ford and Reiche.
This is entirely down to the details of the licensing agreement between FordReiche and Accolade. I've found it impossible to know what this was. It doesn't give us information to know who owns copyright, nor who owns trademark.
And BTW the need to teach students how to communicate clearly has been present for a couple hundred years. it's hardly a NewThing in education
I thought it was the opposite -- in the industrial revolution, and in a manufacturing economy with a slower pace of development, then there was vastly less need for people to develop (1) critical thinking and independent creativity+originality, (2) communication skills. Think of how vastly many more people worked in farming. Or of jobs in factories, or say doing bank ledgers. I think the recent move to service economies, coupled with the rapid pace of development, means that communication and creativity are vastly more important in the workplace now than they were 100 years ago.
How is this "AI"? What "complex data"? The sensors are simple. The program would look like if (concentration_of_gas1 > threshold_a && concentration_of_gas2 > threshold_b) {you_stink=true;}
I think you've answered your own question. The program won't look like that, because the cost and effort to tune all the "if" statements and thresholds correctly, and the likelihood of developers getting them good enough, is vanishingly small.
Instead the program will look like "take 1000 inputs which are kind of fuzzy because we haven't bothered to classify which precise input corresponds to which precise gas and indeed we don't have to. Feed it into a neural network which was previously trained on a set of training data and is characterized by about 1000 parameters. Read off the output."
In the computer industry we now call the second approach "AI" because (1) no developer sat down and wrote an algorithm or design procedure that even remotely resembles what you described, (2) no one on the team really has a clue what the weights represent in the neural network or why they're good ones or how it works; they just treat it as a black box and accept the output, (3) its weights/connections were developed through training data. "AI" is a pretty good descriptive term because (2) and (3) also apply to the human brain and human intelligence.
I swear, I've never seen such a longrunning and ineffective damage control campaign for a losing candidate. Is this a sign they really are going to run her again in 2020?
Your attitude (of thinking it's all just partisan bickering) is a seriously dangerous attitude.
History lesson. The US won the cold war because it turned into an economic war. It was an asymmetric economic war because capitalist US could vastly outspend socialist USSR on military. The Soviet Union just couldn't compete.
What we're seeing now are just the tiny opening salvos of a new war, a war of disinformation and manipulation. It is an asymmetric war because totalitarian Russia and China can and do easily control what information is spread in their societies, but open democratic US and other nations are mostly powerless to stop it. These are the opening salvos, proofs of concept, and they're going to get much bigger. In 20 years we'll find that a 1% vote sway is cheaper and more effective than an air-craft carrier fleet or 2000 ICBMs.
If we don't figure out how to defend ourselves in the coming disinformation warfare, then the US will lose. We urgently need to look at what's happening and figure out strategies that don't involve sacrificing our open democracies. The question of Hilary vs Trump is trivial and insignificant next to that. Please look at the big picture.
Russia tried to influence a US election. So what? This is standard stuff. Every country tries to protect its interests, and part of this is trying to influence other countries and their governments. News at 11:00.
It's not standard stuff, and attitudes like yours will be dangerous if they spread.
The US defeated the Soviet Union in the cold war by demonstrating it could vastly outspend on military, thanks to its capitalist system. It was economic warfare between capitalism and socialism -- asymmetric warfare because of capitalism's huge advantages in economics, so the US won.
Russia is now flexing its muscles in a new war, a war of disinformation and influence. It is information warfare between totalitarianism and democracy -- asymmetric warfare because democracies have a huge disadvantage in moderating the spread of disinformation. We're seeing tiny opening salvos in the war, but China and Russia will win unless we figure out how to counter.
Forget about Hillary vs Trump. That's trivial and irrelevant to the important questions. We (collectively as democratic nations) need to figure out how to wage this new information warfare without losing our open democratic societies.
911 will already transfer callers to suicide intervention, plus they can handle all of the related emergencies that require additional immediate support: for instance "I've just eaten a bunch of random pills" Every mental health professional in the US already has "If this is an emergency hang up and dial 911" on their voicemail.
The only thing I know about this area is from donating money to https://www.crisisconnections.... and attending their charity dinner and listening to their expert speakers, plus my housemate is one of their volunteers who answers their phonelines once a week. Crisis Connections handles about 350 crisis hotline calls per day, which if I remember right is about 90% of all calls made in Washington State. They are reachable on the number 2-1-1.
I got the impression that most calls are NOT emergencies. And that callers are put off by 911 because it's been drummed into them to only call 911 in case of emergencies. The people are calling 211 for support -- moments of crisis, domestic violence, uncertainty or loneliness. Where do I get food and shelter? My utilities have been turned off and I don't know what to do? I can't make rent and I'm being kicked out and I don't know whom to turn to? I'm lonely and don't have anyone and am worried I'll slide back into drugs? Not all of them (I believe only few of them) are right at the point of a suicide emergency intervention. Imagine if you call 911 and they ask you if you want police, fire service or ambulance, and you tell them you just need someone to talk to because you've run out of money and can't make rent and despair of what to do for your kids over Christmas. I don't think that would go down well with an impatient 911 operator who needs to quickly handle urgent emergencies.
The other thing that struck me is how Crisis Connections believes it urgently needs to invest more in texting -- a modern generation has grown up where a phone call is too big an obstacle (so imagine how they'd feel with 911!). Crisis Connections wants to meet them where they're at, i.e. over text messages.
If we ever discover life off the earth, there's going to have to be a ridiculous amount theological retrofitting and reinterpretation that goes on.
Given that the Vatican has its own observatory and hosts astronomy scientific researchers, you can be pretty sure that the Catholic Church has already worked through the implications of extraterrestrial life: https://www.vofoundation.org/f...
I'm not an audiophile. My music is already in highly compressed mp3 format. But I prefer wired headphones because
* I like my Etymotics brand canalphones that stick far into my ear canal. They block out background noise really well, better than my wife's Bose noise-cancelling headphones. They passed the "sit next to a screaming baby on an airplane and not even realize that it's screaming because you can't hear it" test perfectly. I've not yet seen such "canally" canalphones in Bluetooth.
* The same headphones can either plug into my phone, or plug into the airplane's headphone jack so I can listen to music
This idea is hilarious. Tax text messages to pay for phones for the poor, who will then use it to send text messages! This is the government equivalent of a perpetual motion machine... It will hit the people it is trying to serve much harder than "the rich".
It's only like a perpetual motion machine if the exact same people receive benefits who are being taxed. But if (as in the plan) more people get taxed and fewer get the benefits, then it's just bog-standard redistributive taxation and unrelated to perpetual motion.
If it hits one group of people harder than another, that's another way of saying that it's like a perpetual motion machine.
The only way it can hit the people it's serving harder than "the rich" is if the benefits that people get (subsidized phones) have a value less than the surcharge they pay on their bill. That seems vanishingly unlikely.
I think it's much more likely to hurt most the people just slightly better off than those it's trying to serve.
This is a silly article. what the hell do you want me to do with this information besides forget about it because I don't know what the hell you want me to do with it. It's not relevant to anything I need to do
PLEASE DON'T WATCH ANY NATURE DOCUMENTARIES. Nor any international news. Definitely don't read any articles about cosmology in Scientific American. Nor go to the opera. And steer clear of learning any information about the Second World War. And if anyone offers you a "Joy of Knowledge Encyclopedia", please laugh in their face because it's an oxymoron.
Geez....you work for MONEY, and if you are bitching about not having any, then that should make your first priority coming out of school.
I think we can safely assume that amongst those millenials who come out of school and don't have enough money and bitch about it, there are almost no software developers...
Startups are great, but they should have a real product, not just the latest fad app. Advice: learn a trade first, whether it's engineering, medicine, law, plumbing, electricity, or science. Then use your experience to start your own company.
Are you basing your advice on the way you think the world should work, or the way it actually seems to have been working? My impression is that the startups which produce useless terrible apps are the ones that do well in their funding rounds. I don't like it. It's just my impression.
So you're telling me a nation that has a well documented history of being possible one of the, if not the biggest, abuser of human rights is going to tell us about the 'ethics risk' of video game. China; a nation that to this day is known to execute political prisoners and religious minorities and sell their organs on the black market is unironically going to talk about ethics?
I think there's a huge gulf in word use. In China, I get the impression they're concerned about harmonious social development - what they do to prisoners and ethnic/religious minorities is to that end, and what they want for video games is about that end. I suspect the very word "ethics" itself in this context should be translated as "how people and behavior should regulate themselves and be regulated to further harmonious social development". In that sense there's no contradiction.
I am actually designing a house to build in California Desert. Good design and energy efficiency dictates sloping roof inclines in a northern direction. So how is this new requirement to place solar panels on a roof going to effect building design?
I'd love to know what are those good design and efficiency principles that dictate a north-facing roof. I spent ten minutes on google, but the only principle I found was traditional Vasthu from India. I'd love if you could point to something, please?
I'm struck that in hot climates, buildings have typically had flat roofs. I don't know why.
The roof/architecture style I'm familiar with for hot climates was to have huge overhangs on the roof, so the entirety of all walls are shaded during almost all the day. If you have a north-facing roof then presumably you're not shading your south-facing wall at all?
Having fixed issues with deleting user data, excessive CPU and disk I/O during updates,... [snip], I'm glad they're finally able to spend development time on making prettier icons
I'm not sure if you're arguing that a company shouldn't employ designers until after the code fundamentals are all of a uniformly high quality, or that anyone trained as a designer should stop their work on their specialty and retool as an engineer/tester, or...?
You must be pretty damn sanctimonious to have never used "fuck" or any other language someone else might find objectionable in a professional setting.
That's quite a shifted goalpost. "Fuck or any other language someone else might find objectionable".
For what it's worth, I've never used "fuck" in 7 post-grad years in academia nor my 14 years in the software industry, and nor have I heard the word used in a way that was directed at a current or former colleague, nor at their work. I've worked with plenty people smarter than me and less smart, and plenty people more industrious than me and less industrious.
(per the terms of your shifted goalpost, there have been in that time lots of words that someone else might find objectionable, but that's such a watered-down goalpost that it's meaningless).
If someone needs to stay away from something, I normally say something like "Jones, I don't want you to work on this" or "Jones, don't work on this". The word fuck isn't needed to make my instruction stronger, and indeed wouldn't make it stronger.
If someone has made a mess of things in the past, I've said stuff like "the architecture for this model wasn't suited to the use-cases, and it'll require a ground-up rewrite, otherwise we'll face risks XYZ". Phrasing it as you suggested "fucked up and made a real fucking mess of things" isn't as actionable, wouldn't be as respected by management, and I'm having a hard time believing it would deliver results as well.
I'd rather not sit through some milquetoast discussion
None of what I've said is milquetoast. It's more directed and actionable that your suggested fuck phrasing, and it's effective at getting results.
My estimates based on a nice, large 70" TV at a normal 10 foot viewing distance for a random set of people... Now, in special cases, with huge, huge screens and sitting close, 8K might have some tiny value. But as it is, quality 1080P content, upscaled to a modern 4K TV is "good enough" for nearly everyone
I think your post amounts to "I conjecture that my experience and that of my friends is typical, and we don't benefit from higher resolutions, so likely most other people won't."
As for me, I and my friends game on 120"+ projection screens at 6-8' distance, where the pixels of 1080p are indeed very noticeable. I sit along with 15% of the audience in the front five rows of an IMAX theater (for me it's because having the screen fill my peripheral vision makes it feel more immersive), and again the pixels are noticeable.
I agree that HDR would be great. For me HDR ranks slightly above higher resolutions.
I think the question is different... as a private US individual just doing my own stuff unrelated to national security, I'd prefer to be spied upon by the Chinese rather than the US government, simply because they won't care about most of the things I do.
Counterexample: every country that joined the EU gave up the supremacy of its own high court, have up the ability to determine numerous regulations, indeed have up the final say on its national budget as we see with Italy today.
No reward in it for you apart from the taste, baw hah hah. Don't you live in a little fantasy world. I can assure you if you are drinking fully decaffeinated coffee, it is the caffeine that has you hooked, regardless of whether you accept it or not. To test yourself, simply drop all caffeine consumption for 24 hours and see how you feel. You might not consciously notice the continuous dribble of caffeine but your brain will and its physiological state will alter when caffeine no longer enters for an extended period of time.
Challenge accepted. I drink one or two decaf lattes a day. I make it myself on the coffee machine at work, so I pull the espresso only for the first 10 seconds or so while it's still dark and thick. This produces about 10 drops, about 1tsp worth, not quite enough to cover the bottom of the cup. I add about 2tbl of frothed milk.
I don't consume any other caffeine products (I have a pretty basic diet - salads for lunch and dinner, with grains and steamed vegetables and no dessert, and water to drink but no alcohol or soft drinks).
When I drop all caffeine consumption, I notice no difference in my mental state, nor do people around me. I don't have a coffee machine at home so I routinely have no coffee at the weekends. There are several days where in retrospect I realize I've been so busy that I didn't end up having any coffee, and it all feels fine.
(There are times when they bring in decaf beans that I assume have a higher caffeine level than I'm used to, and I notice it within the first half sip, and reject the coffee. About a quarter of the time at restaurants when they bring decaf coffee I don't drink it because I presume the caffeine level is too high. When my wife makes decaf coffee in her drip machine, the caffeine level there is too high for my preferences almost all the time).
Seems like the sole purpose of the UN is letting 192 nations vote on how much money the United States should pay each of them.
How do you get that from this story? I don't see any aspect of it being about the US paying other nations. (indeed, it looks like it's other nations telling a US charity not to spend its money on something that might arguably help those other nations, i.e. the exact opposite of your characterization).
Slashdot Mirror
The reason is tax-breaks, no tolls, free parking, no import/purchase tax, no road tax, driving in bus lanes. Saving the environment isn't one of those reasons. The fastest selling EV there is the Jaguar iPace. Clearly it is rich people taking advantage of a government program to make their lives easier while commuting.
I'm not sure what point you're making.
Also a question... what is the reason behind the various regulations/breaks you listed? My guess is they were put there by legislators in order to save the environment. And the legislators aimed for this goal because they thought their electors would like all the end results (easier lives while commuting, and saving the environment). And that people did indeed vote with both things in mind.
That would be an entirely typical case of the reasonable and rational attitude "I will vote for burdens that are the right thing to do so long as the burdens are shared fairly by all of society rather than just by me; but of course I like everyone else will act locally to my own best advantage."
in the judges own words:
The judge went on to write things that seemed questionable to me...
Would Stardock suffer financial harm from a DMCA notice by Ford+Reiche? The judge said this claim "depends upon the unsupported assumption that GOG and Valve will remove Origins upon receipt of a DMCA notice". But it's a very well supported assumption, that did indeed turn out true, and the judge earlier had indeed explained that GOG and Valve would have to take it down because that's how the DMCA works.
The judge also says that economic harm doesn't count as harm because it can be remedied by a damage claim. But there's no provision in DMCA for damages, and no precedent I'm aware of for damages awarded upon DMCA takedowns. I guess the framers thought there wouldn't be any need for damages, since folks can always file counter-notification in response to DMCA takedowns and these counter-notifications are enough to have the material restored to Valve and GOG. Indeed Stardock say they have already filed counter-notifications. But Valve and GOG haven't responded, and overall the industry seems extremely slow to act on counter-notifications but extremely fast to act on takedown-notifications. As the judge in this case noted, the notice+takedown protocol is a carefully considered protocol to balance various competing interests, but it's up to Congress to recalibrate the balance as needed. My impression is that the counter-notification mechanism should be handled quicker by the media hosting industry. I guess we'll see in the coming days whether Valve+GOG respect the counter-notifications.
If Ford and Reiche didn't have IP rights they could not have open sourced it.
I think your post uses the phrase "IP rights" too vaguely, given that a crisp characterization is the CRUX of the disagreement between the parties. What IP rights are there? ...
* Copyright in the source code and artwork and music of SC1, SC2
* Copyright in the source code and artwork of SC3, excepting those bits already copyrighted in SC1/SC2
* Trademark in the name "Source Control"
* Any other ad-hoc license agreements
Copyright prevents other people from publishing copies or derivative works of your copyrighted materials. Trademark prevents other people from using your mark in a way that would confuse potential customers.
First was the 2002 open source version of SC2 called The Urquan Masters which was initially released by Ford and Reiche and not opposed by Atari.
The likeliest explanation here is that Ford+Reiche owned copyright in SC2 bit didn't own the trademark "Star Control".
Second was the 2011 inclusion of Star Control 1 and 2 on the GOG store. As soon as it went on sale, Ford and Reiche objected and contacted Atari who worked out a new licensing agreement with Ford and Reiche.
This is entirely down to the details of the licensing agreement between FordReiche and Accolade. I've found it impossible to know what this was. It doesn't give us information to know who owns copyright, nor who owns trademark.
And BTW the need to teach students how to communicate clearly has been present for a couple hundred years. it's hardly a NewThing in education
I thought it was the opposite -- in the industrial revolution, and in a manufacturing economy with a slower pace of development, then there was vastly less need for people to develop (1) critical thinking and independent creativity+originality, (2) communication skills. Think of how vastly many more people worked in farming. Or of jobs in factories, or say doing bank ledgers. I think the recent move to service economies, coupled with the rapid pace of development, means that communication and creativity are vastly more important in the workplace now than they were 100 years ago.
How is this "AI"? What "complex data"? The sensors are simple. The program would look like if (concentration_of_gas1 > threshold_a && concentration_of_gas2 > threshold_b) {you_stink=true;}
I think you've answered your own question. The program won't look like that, because the cost and effort to tune all the "if" statements and thresholds correctly, and the likelihood of developers getting them good enough, is vanishingly small.
Instead the program will look like "take 1000 inputs which are kind of fuzzy because we haven't bothered to classify which precise input corresponds to which precise gas and indeed we don't have to. Feed it into a neural network which was previously trained on a set of training data and is characterized by about 1000 parameters. Read off the output."
In the computer industry we now call the second approach "AI" because (1) no developer sat down and wrote an algorithm or design procedure that even remotely resembles what you described, (2) no one on the team really has a clue what the weights represent in the neural network or why they're good ones or how it works; they just treat it as a black box and accept the output, (3) its weights/connections were developed through training data. "AI" is a pretty good descriptive term because (2) and (3) also apply to the human brain and human intelligence.
I swear, I've never seen such a longrunning and ineffective damage control campaign for a losing candidate. Is this a sign they really are going to run her again in 2020?
Your attitude (of thinking it's all just partisan bickering) is a seriously dangerous attitude.
History lesson. The US won the cold war because it turned into an economic war. It was an asymmetric economic war because capitalist US could vastly outspend socialist USSR on military. The Soviet Union just couldn't compete.
What we're seeing now are just the tiny opening salvos of a new war, a war of disinformation and manipulation. It is an asymmetric war because totalitarian Russia and China can and do easily control what information is spread in their societies, but open democratic US and other nations are mostly powerless to stop it. These are the opening salvos, proofs of concept, and they're going to get much bigger. In 20 years we'll find that a 1% vote sway is cheaper and more effective than an air-craft carrier fleet or 2000 ICBMs.
If we don't figure out how to defend ourselves in the coming disinformation warfare, then the US will lose. We urgently need to look at what's happening and figure out strategies that don't involve sacrificing our open democracies. The question of Hilary vs Trump is trivial and insignificant next to that. Please look at the big picture.
Russia tried to influence a US election. So what? This is standard stuff. Every country tries to protect its interests, and part of this is trying to influence other countries and their governments. News at 11:00.
It's not standard stuff, and attitudes like yours will be dangerous if they spread.
The US defeated the Soviet Union in the cold war by demonstrating it could vastly outspend on military, thanks to its capitalist system. It was economic warfare between capitalism and socialism -- asymmetric warfare because of capitalism's huge advantages in economics, so the US won.
Russia is now flexing its muscles in a new war, a war of disinformation and influence. It is information warfare between totalitarianism and democracy -- asymmetric warfare because democracies have a huge disadvantage in moderating the spread of disinformation. We're seeing tiny opening salvos in the war, but China and Russia will win unless we figure out how to counter.
Forget about Hillary vs Trump. That's trivial and irrelevant to the important questions. We (collectively as democratic nations) need to figure out how to wage this new information warfare without losing our open democratic societies.
911 will already transfer callers to suicide intervention, plus they can handle all of the related emergencies that require additional immediate support: for instance "I've just eaten a bunch of random pills" Every mental health professional in the US already has "If this is an emergency hang up and dial 911" on their voicemail.
The only thing I know about this area is from donating money to https://www.crisisconnections.... and attending their charity dinner and listening to their expert speakers, plus my housemate is one of their volunteers who answers their phonelines once a week. Crisis Connections handles about 350 crisis hotline calls per day, which if I remember right is about 90% of all calls made in Washington State. They are reachable on the number 2-1-1.
I got the impression that most calls are NOT emergencies. And that callers are put off by 911 because it's been drummed into them to only call 911 in case of emergencies. The people are calling 211 for support -- moments of crisis, domestic violence, uncertainty or loneliness. Where do I get food and shelter? My utilities have been turned off and I don't know what to do? I can't make rent and I'm being kicked out and I don't know whom to turn to? I'm lonely and don't have anyone and am worried I'll slide back into drugs? Not all of them (I believe only few of them) are right at the point of a suicide emergency intervention. Imagine if you call 911 and they ask you if you want police, fire service or ambulance, and you tell them you just need someone to talk to because you've run out of money and can't make rent and despair of what to do for your kids over Christmas. I don't think that would go down well with an impatient 911 operator who needs to quickly handle urgent emergencies.
The other thing that struck me is how Crisis Connections believes it urgently needs to invest more in texting -- a modern generation has grown up where a phone call is too big an obstacle (so imagine how they'd feel with 911!). Crisis Connections wants to meet them where they're at, i.e. over text messages.
If we ever discover life off the earth, there's going to have to be a ridiculous amount theological retrofitting and reinterpretation that goes on.
Given that the Vatican has its own observatory and hosts astronomy scientific researchers, you can be pretty sure that the Catholic Church has already worked through the implications of extraterrestrial life:
https://www.vofoundation.org/f...
I'm not an audiophile. My music is already in highly compressed mp3 format. But I prefer wired headphones because
* I like my Etymotics brand canalphones that stick far into my ear canal. They block out background noise really well, better than my wife's Bose noise-cancelling headphones. They passed the "sit next to a screaming baby on an airplane and not even realize that it's screaming because you can't hear it" test perfectly. I've not yet seen such "canally" canalphones in Bluetooth.
* The same headphones can either plug into my phone, or plug into the airplane's headphone jack so I can listen to music
This idea is hilarious. Tax text messages to pay for phones for the poor, who will then use it to send text messages! This is the government equivalent of a perpetual motion machine... It will hit the people it is trying to serve much harder than "the rich".
It's only like a perpetual motion machine if the exact same people receive benefits who are being taxed. But if (as in the plan) more people get taxed and fewer get the benefits, then it's just bog-standard redistributive taxation and unrelated to perpetual motion.
If it hits one group of people harder than another, that's another way of saying that it's like a perpetual motion machine.
The only way it can hit the people it's serving harder than "the rich" is if the benefits that people get (subsidized phones) have a value less than the surcharge they pay on their bill. That seems vanishingly unlikely.
I think it's much more likely to hurt most the people just slightly better off than those it's trying to serve.
This is a silly article. what the hell do you want me to do with this information besides forget about it because I don't know what the hell you want me to do with it. It's not relevant to anything I need to do
PLEASE DON'T WATCH ANY NATURE DOCUMENTARIES. Nor any international news. Definitely don't read any articles about cosmology in Scientific American. Nor go to the opera. And steer clear of learning any information about the Second World War. And if anyone offers you a "Joy of Knowledge Encyclopedia", please laugh in their face because it's an oxymoron.
Geez....you work for MONEY, and if you are bitching about not having any, then that should make your first priority coming out of school.
I think we can safely assume that amongst those millenials who come out of school and don't have enough money and bitch about it, there are almost no software developers...
Startups are great, but they should have a real product, not just the latest fad app. Advice: learn a trade first, whether it's engineering, medicine, law, plumbing, electricity, or science. Then use your experience to start your own company.
Are you basing your advice on the way you think the world should work, or the way it actually seems to have been working? My impression is that the startups which produce useless terrible apps are the ones that do well in their funding rounds. I don't like it. It's just my impression.
So you're telling me a nation that has a well documented history of being possible one of the, if not the biggest, abuser of human rights is going to tell us about the 'ethics risk' of video game. China; a nation that to this day is known to execute political prisoners and religious minorities and sell their organs on the black market is unironically going to talk about ethics?
I think there's a huge gulf in word use. In China, I get the impression they're concerned about harmonious social development - what they do to prisoners and ethnic/religious minorities is to that end, and what they want for video games is about that end. I suspect the very word "ethics" itself in this context should be translated as "how people and behavior should regulate themselves and be regulated to further harmonious social development". In that sense there's no contradiction.
I am actually designing a house to build in California Desert. Good design and energy efficiency dictates sloping roof inclines in a northern direction. So how is this new requirement to place solar panels on a roof going to effect building design?
I'd love to know what are those good design and efficiency principles that dictate a north-facing roof. I spent ten minutes on google, but the only principle I found was traditional Vasthu from India. I'd love if you could point to something, please?
I'm struck that in hot climates, buildings have typically had flat roofs. I don't know why.
The roof/architecture style I'm familiar with for hot climates was to have huge overhangs on the roof, so the entirety of all walls are shaded during almost all the day. If you have a north-facing roof then presumably you're not shading your south-facing wall at all?
Apple makes good but not great products. They sell based on their reputation which they haven't deserved in years.
I think they have a reputation for protecting your privacy better than the alternatives, which they have and continue to deserve.
Having fixed issues with deleting user data, excessive CPU and disk I/O during updates, ... [snip], I'm glad they're finally able to spend development time on making prettier icons
I'm not sure if you're arguing that a company shouldn't employ designers until after the code fundamentals are all of a uniformly high quality, or that anyone trained as a designer should stop their work on their specialty and retool as an engineer/tester, or ...?
You must be pretty damn sanctimonious to have never used "fuck" or any other language someone else might find objectionable in a professional setting.
That's quite a shifted goalpost. "Fuck or any other language someone else might find objectionable".
For what it's worth, I've never used "fuck" in 7 post-grad years in academia nor my 14 years in the software industry, and nor have I heard the word used in a way that was directed at a current or former colleague, nor at their work. I've worked with plenty people smarter than me and less smart, and plenty people more industrious than me and less industrious.
(per the terms of your shifted goalpost, there have been in that time lots of words that someone else might find objectionable, but that's such a watered-down goalpost that it's meaningless).
If someone needs to stay away from something, I normally say something like "Jones, I don't want you to work on this" or "Jones, don't work on this". The word fuck isn't needed to make my instruction stronger, and indeed wouldn't make it stronger.
If someone has made a mess of things in the past, I've said stuff like "the architecture for this model wasn't suited to the use-cases, and it'll require a ground-up rewrite, otherwise we'll face risks XYZ". Phrasing it as you suggested "fucked up and made a real fucking mess of things" isn't as actionable, wouldn't be as respected by management, and I'm having a hard time believing it would deliver results as well.
I'd rather not sit through some milquetoast discussion
None of what I've said is milquetoast. It's more directed and actionable that your suggested fuck phrasing, and it's effective at getting results.
My estimates based on a nice, large 70" TV at a normal 10 foot viewing distance for a random set of people... Now, in special cases, with huge, huge screens and sitting close, 8K might have some tiny value. But as it is, quality 1080P content, upscaled to a modern 4K TV is "good enough" for nearly everyone
I think your post amounts to "I conjecture that my experience and that of my friends is typical, and we don't benefit from higher resolutions, so likely most other people won't."
As for me, I and my friends game on 120"+ projection screens at 6-8' distance, where the pixels of 1080p are indeed very noticeable. I sit along with 15% of the audience in the front five rows of an IMAX theater (for me it's because having the screen fill my peripheral vision makes it feel more immersive), and again the pixels are noticeable.
I agree that HDR would be great. For me HDR ranks slightly above higher resolutions.
I think the question is different... as a private US individual just doing my own stuff unrelated to national security, I'd prefer to be spied upon by the Chinese rather than the US government, simply because they won't care about most of the things I do.
Counterexample: every country that joined the EU gave up the supremacy of its own high court, have up the ability to determine numerous regulations, indeed have up the final say on its national budget as we see with Italy today.
* helping them generate ad revenue for Google and give end users a world yet more overrun by ads
No reward in it for you apart from the taste, baw hah hah. Don't you live in a little fantasy world. I can assure you if you are drinking fully decaffeinated coffee, it is the caffeine that has you hooked, regardless of whether you accept it or not. To test yourself, simply drop all caffeine consumption for 24 hours and see how you feel. You might not consciously notice the continuous dribble of caffeine but your brain will and its physiological state will alter when caffeine no longer enters for an extended period of time.
Challenge accepted. I drink one or two decaf lattes a day. I make it myself on the coffee machine at work, so I pull the espresso only for the first 10 seconds or so while it's still dark and thick. This produces about 10 drops, about 1tsp worth, not quite enough to cover the bottom of the cup. I add about 2tbl of frothed milk.
I don't consume any other caffeine products (I have a pretty basic diet - salads for lunch and dinner, with grains and steamed vegetables and no dessert, and water to drink but no alcohol or soft drinks).
When I drop all caffeine consumption, I notice no difference in my mental state, nor do people around me. I don't have a coffee machine at home so I routinely have no coffee at the weekends. There are several days where in retrospect I realize I've been so busy that I didn't end up having any coffee, and it all feels fine.
(There are times when they bring in decaf beans that I assume have a higher caffeine level than I'm used to, and I notice it within the first half sip, and reject the coffee. About a quarter of the time at restaurants when they bring decaf coffee I don't drink it because I presume the caffeine level is too high. When my wife makes decaf coffee in her drip machine, the caffeine level there is too high for my preferences almost all the time).
Yep, I drink coffee because I like the flavor!
Seems like the sole purpose of the UN is letting 192 nations vote on how much money the United States should pay each of them.
How do you get that from this story? I don't see any aspect of it being about the US paying other nations. (indeed, it looks like it's other nations telling a US charity not to spend its money on something that might arguably help those other nations, i.e. the exact opposite of your characterization).