blacks neither adopted (made use of) the wheel nor of written languages.
Egypt, an African nation
Reading comprehension fail. Or you're an out and out SJW liar.
Ah; I see... you have some magical point at which skin pigmentation affects people's ability to write and use wheels. Might this be why I not only mentioned Egypt, whose inhabitants some might not consider "black enough" but also Sudan? Is this skin pigmentation dark enough for you to call "black"?
The entire point of calling out Egypt was to draw parallels with Sudan (the cultures lined up quite well, off by time more than by anything else) as everyone knows about Egypt.
So if you're not actually talking about skin pigmentation, and you're not talking genetics, what, pray tell, do you mean by "blacks?" If you're being racist, it's useful to actually define what you mean by race.
Oh yes, and what I didn't add to my other points: Many of the native peoples of North America and the Pacific islands also failed to create a written language or use the wheel. Some of them built quite advanced civilizations.
Obama hopes that the e-book scheme will support low-income households who significantly trail the national average for computer ownership and digital connectivity.
Your theory is great -- except that's what has been done for generations in Canadian politics, and the result hasn't been all that much better than in the US; it just took slightly longer for the same laws to get passed. On the plus side, it *has* resulted in 3 viable political parties instead of a homogeneous political landscape with two token parties plopped on top. But that means that when you vote for "one of the other guys" driving policy for the country will actually *change* during the next term. For both better and worse.
Here's a fun fact: before colonization, despite over a thousand years of contact with Arab traders, blacks neither adopted (made use of) the wheel nor of written languages.
Generalize much?
Egypt, an African nation, had chariots thousands of years ago. So did Sudan. Sudan, like Egypt, also had a written language based on heiroglyphics. They also had pyramids.
Now your fun facts do happen to be true for Nigeria, which despite being a trade hub of the world for thousands of years, never bothered with the wheel or written language. This suggests to me that a) wheels aren't too useful in a large river delta where sledges and barges make more sense, and b) they must have used some other method to keep track of trade; I have no idea what it was, but I'm now curious to find out.
What makes you feel that Nigeria's problems are a result of British colonization? What are the specific ways in which the "legacy of colonialism" has affected their recent history?
Good questions. I can sum up the answer in two words: Shell Oil.
You see, Nigeria left the commonwealth in 1960, but Big Oil didn't leave Nigeria. Oil is where the money is, and anyone who wanted to rise to power in Nigeria has had to deal with the oil companies. Those who have chosen not to, and have attempted to survive on traditional land-use have had their land polluted or taken by government and the oil industry. Since the 1960's, pretty much all exports from Nigeria other than oil (which is owned by foreign corporations) has dried up. As a result, most people choosing not to side with the government and the oil industry have turned to illegal means for survival, and are either part of or support the rebel groups in Nigeria. As an aside, this is where, until recently, the majority of the world's "419" or Nigerian Scam emails are from: they fund weapons purchases for Nigerian rebels. Now various Asian organized crime rings have found that's also lucrative. But that digresses from the point.
British Colonization was both a good and bad thing for Nigeria. Unfortunately, its legacy has been the same: if you are one of the privileged, the legacy has been good. If you are one of the powerless, the legacy has been bad. Nigeria is just starting to learn some of the lessons about how environmental protection is key to long-term sustainability.
I think you missed my point -- that question was more than a little tongue in cheek.
As in Demolition Man, the issue isn't that the Taco Bell franchise takes over everything, it's that a megacorp took the Taco Bell brand and slowly used it as branding across all aspects of life. In that world, Coke would have bought Pepsi, or bought the Taco Bell brand, and those two companies would then have merged, bought up TimeWarnerCable, Cox, Comcast and Verizon, then merged with GlaxoSmithKline, and at that point had the power to go after "small" players like Merck and Apple. To make things simple, the dining part of their empire would then be branded Taco Bell because that's what people associate with comfort food. The books part of their empire would be branded Amazon, the computer part Apple, etc.
When there are corporate protections erected by the government but no corporate restrictions, power accumulates, as investors get higher return from more concentration. Since publicly traded corporations are able to collect more buying power than private companies, they can corner the market and prevent true competition from companies unwilling to play their game. So eventually, everything gets run by a corporation with a CEO and board of directors, beholden to the shareholders. This framework effectively replaces country-based governance, as everyone is (mostly) limited to purchasing the corporation's products, and (almost) everyone works for the corporation.
Of course, this probably wouldn't actually happen; not for the reasons you state, but because if actual government broke down in this way, the corporation would have difficulty maintaining a safe environment for the populace. Since in an environment where the government isn't managing monopolies we'd essentially get a single corporate federated monopoly, eventually the corporation would have more power than the government, at which point it wouldn't really matter what the government said, because they'd be powerless to enforce it.
I think you just proved another point too -- obfuscation of hot topic keywords does seem to keep away the shills. I find that mildly disturbing, but plan to use that in similar future posts.
Another experiment to try in the future -- obfuscate the buzzwords that bring in one kind of shill, and drop in a few buzzwords for a different kind of shill (say, toss in a snoa den reference, something about the en essay, or even Halle Burton, and see what happens to the response thread....
The reason corporations are so powerful is because they're propped up by the government, but most people just don't get that.
That's because it isn't true. The reason corporations became so powerful is because they were propped up by the government. Now they're powerful because they're powerful and rich, and separate from the individuals that manage them.
If you suddenly took away corporate welfare, the powerful companies would quickly gobble up or destroy the smaller and weaker companies and race to control hearts and minds through the media. Government would quickly become irrelevant, as corporate treaties would rule.
Do you really want to live in a world run by Taco Bell?
Well, we could look at this another way: if the EPA can only work with public data, that means that it can require fracturing cocktails be made public, or the operators get shut down completely.
I bet if the Republicans pushing these changes got that sort of a response, they might re-think the bill.
...when they could have instead used a more succinct summary aimed at nerds, or, picked a different source document. I mean, this doesn't even tell us what hash algorithm is used to "scramble" our locally stored passphrase.
What I'd really like to see is a keychain helper (listening, Apple, onepass, etc?) that keylogs browser forms and performs this function against ANY password stored in the keychain. I mean, I've already got a keychain full of password/uri pairs -- why not do this with it as well?
The downside of course is that said helper would have to have full read access to the hashed keychain -- which while not a huge security issue, still could leak data like what uris you have stored in the keychain.
On iOS, it's likely using Apple's DisplayPDF engine to render the PDFs; likely Adobe's engine to distill them in the first place. But since PDF is a standard, that doesn't really matter; they should just have set up the app such that the PDFs could be exported to a separate reader for display (even Safari would work) as well as pulled up in the app's own interface.
I can empathize with their issues, having digitized a collection of tousands of PDF documents that need to be searchable -- iOS tends to run out of memory while doing this; I can't even load some individual PDFs in standard readers like iBooks without running out of memory. This however isn't due to the display engine or the distilling engine, but is due to memory handling in the UI, and how it decides to cache rendered pages for performance reasons.
They could easily store all the documents in GoodReader and have none of these problems (but also have less functionality surrounding cross-references etc.).
What gets me is that ham AR callsigns in general are significantly size constrained -- we're talking a standard of 5 letters and a digit, with some of those having reserved meanings, limiting the namespace. Sure, you have up to three letters appended as a location code as well, but this is still a restricted namespace.
But then, the airspace is also limited, so I guess we're lucky that there are enough dedicated hams around, while not so many that we run into significant issues that increased population density brings in any venue.
Other questions around this issue are: 1) Will the Spinel stop the second bullet? 2) is the Spinel still transparent enough to navigate through after the first hit?
Indeed -- the last thing I want are shards of something with a hardness of 7.7 and razor sharp edges flying around. Think obsidian arrowheads, and then think of something that'll hold an edge even better.
What I'd like to know about is how flexible the stuff is. Usually, the harder a material is, the more rigid it is -- which means that it is super hard right up to the point where it can't take the stress, at which point it fractures all over the place.
Safety glass gets around this by 1) being pretty flexible and 2) being a laminate of hard and soft materials, so that when the hard material shatters, it is still bonded to enough of the soft material to avoid (many) sharp edges.
I wonder what the behavioral properties of a laminate of spinel and lexan would be....
According to the article the bullets are not "self directed" but able to compensate for factors that could change the direction like weather, wind, or movement of the target.
Sounds like it's using some sort of inertial ballistic compensation inside; not sure how they managed this for something traveling at those speeds. But that doesn't account for "or movement of the target" -- do they mean that if you're tracking a target along a specific path, the bullet will continue to track that path as it moves through the air (allowing it to potentially curve behind obstructions to continue that trajectory)? This almost makes sense.
Of course, the other issue here is that these "silver bullets" will probably cost a few thousand dollars each. I'd also be interested to know if they've tested them with snipers, as it seems to me many of them would be put off by technology that compensates when they've already done so. This seems like ammunition that would have very limited use, as you wouldn't want to use it during a melee, nor from a sniping location (except in very specific situations -- and it would be useful in obscuring the location of the sniper), but mostly it would be useful for close range urban warfare so that you can fire selectively at a moving target without leaving temporary cover.
And then of course there's Kb vs KiB -- the second is the SI standard, but the first is commonly used in its place (even though it really means something slightly different).
Ah, but metres are used all over the place in the US. They're not the measure used by trade, but they ARE the measure used by science. This is why NASA ran into trouble: they're an organisation where science meets trade.
"They also hope to incorporate GPS data to adjust the direction of the headlights according to the lane that a driver is occupying, illuminating it more brightly compared to surrounding lanes."
I was all for the complicated but elegant solution until I hit that phrase. Considering how often GPS data sets can't even figure out that a road is one-way, this sounds like a solution that's going to behave very oddly when the data doesn't line up with the reality.
They've got lots of good ideas, but there are huge implementation obstacles with most of them. Give me lights that are smart enough to handle what they can actually see; I don't want lights depending on someone else's data set to get the job done.
I prefer Pratchett and Baxter's "The Long Earth" -- Fringe kind of devolved towards the end. Then again, with Pratchett dead in this universe, we've only got 3 of the 5 novels in the series; I don't see how it could be quite the same with just Baxter behind the keyboard. So it might devolve too.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading comprehension fail. Or you're an out and out SJW liar.
Ah; I see... you have some magical point at which skin pigmentation affects people's ability to write and use wheels. Might this be why I not only mentioned Egypt, whose inhabitants some might not consider "black enough" but also Sudan? Is this skin pigmentation dark enough for you to call "black"?
The entire point of calling out Egypt was to draw parallels with Sudan (the cultures lined up quite well, off by time more than by anything else) as everyone knows about Egypt.
So if you're not actually talking about skin pigmentation, and you're not talking genetics, what, pray tell, do you mean by "blacks?" If you're being racist, it's useful to actually define what you mean by race.
Oh yes, and what I didn't add to my other points: Many of the native peoples of North America and the Pacific islands also failed to create a written language or use the wheel. Some of them built quite advanced civilizations.
Ah, but the whole point here is to keep the "good" people in line, not to actually spy on the "bad" people.
And if they do serendipitously catch a "bad" person, they can lock them away for life for owning "illegal" tools.
I think I've "forgotten" why we're using "air quotes" here.
Seriously:
Obama hopes that the e-book scheme will support low-income households who significantly trail the national average for computer ownership and digital connectivity.
Oh, and oblig. https://images.duckduckgo.com/...
Your theory is great -- except that's what has been done for generations in Canadian politics, and the result hasn't been all that much better than in the US; it just took slightly longer for the same laws to get passed. On the plus side, it *has* resulted in 3 viable political parties instead of a homogeneous political landscape with two token parties plopped on top. But that means that when you vote for "one of the other guys" driving policy for the country will actually *change* during the next term. For both better and worse.
..the lobbyists descend like vultures and kill the bill in 3....2....1....
Probably not; who do you think actually wrote the bill?
Of course, what you think the bill is meant to do and what the bill actually accomplishes may be worlds apart.
Generalize much?
Egypt, an African nation, had chariots thousands of years ago. So did Sudan. Sudan, like Egypt, also had a written language based on heiroglyphics. They also had pyramids.
Now your fun facts do happen to be true for Nigeria, which despite being a trade hub of the world for thousands of years, never bothered with the wheel or written language. This suggests to me that a) wheels aren't too useful in a large river delta where sledges and barges make more sense, and b) they must have used some other method to keep track of trade; I have no idea what it was, but I'm now curious to find out.
What makes you feel that Nigeria's problems are a result of British colonization? What are the specific ways in which the "legacy of colonialism" has affected their recent history?
Good questions. I can sum up the answer in two words: Shell Oil.
You see, Nigeria left the commonwealth in 1960, but Big Oil didn't leave Nigeria. Oil is where the money is, and anyone who wanted to rise to power in Nigeria has had to deal with the oil companies. Those who have chosen not to, and have attempted to survive on traditional land-use have had their land polluted or taken by government and the oil industry. Since the 1960's, pretty much all exports from Nigeria other than oil (which is owned by foreign corporations) has dried up. As a result, most people choosing not to side with the government and the oil industry have turned to illegal means for survival, and are either part of or support the rebel groups in Nigeria. As an aside, this is where, until recently, the majority of the world's "419" or Nigerian Scam emails are from: they fund weapons purchases for Nigerian rebels. Now various Asian organized crime rings have found that's also lucrative. But that digresses from the point.
British Colonization was both a good and bad thing for Nigeria. Unfortunately, its legacy has been the same: if you are one of the privileged, the legacy has been good. If you are one of the powerless, the legacy has been bad. Nigeria is just starting to learn some of the lessons about how environmental protection is key to long-term sustainability.
I think you missed my point -- that question was more than a little tongue in cheek.
As in Demolition Man, the issue isn't that the Taco Bell franchise takes over everything, it's that a megacorp took the Taco Bell brand and slowly used it as branding across all aspects of life. In that world, Coke would have bought Pepsi, or bought the Taco Bell brand, and those two companies would then have merged, bought up TimeWarnerCable, Cox, Comcast and Verizon, then merged with GlaxoSmithKline, and at that point had the power to go after "small" players like Merck and Apple. To make things simple, the dining part of their empire would then be branded Taco Bell because that's what people associate with comfort food. The books part of their empire would be branded Amazon, the computer part Apple, etc.
When there are corporate protections erected by the government but no corporate restrictions, power accumulates, as investors get higher return from more concentration. Since publicly traded corporations are able to collect more buying power than private companies, they can corner the market and prevent true competition from companies unwilling to play their game. So eventually, everything gets run by a corporation with a CEO and board of directors, beholden to the shareholders. This framework effectively replaces country-based governance, as everyone is (mostly) limited to purchasing the corporation's products, and (almost) everyone works for the corporation.
Of course, this probably wouldn't actually happen; not for the reasons you state, but because if actual government broke down in this way, the corporation would have difficulty maintaining a safe environment for the populace. Since in an environment where the government isn't managing monopolies we'd essentially get a single corporate federated monopoly, eventually the corporation would have more power than the government, at which point it wouldn't really matter what the government said, because they'd be powerless to enforce it.
I think you just proved another point too -- obfuscation of hot topic keywords does seem to keep away the shills. I find that mildly disturbing, but plan to use that in similar future posts.
Another experiment to try in the future -- obfuscate the buzzwords that bring in one kind of shill, and drop in a few buzzwords for a different kind of shill (say, toss in a snoa den reference, something about the en essay, or even Halle Burton, and see what happens to the response thread....
The reason corporations are so powerful is because they're propped up by the government, but most people just don't get that.
That's because it isn't true. The reason corporations became so powerful is because they were propped up by the government. Now they're powerful because they're powerful and rich, and separate from the individuals that manage them.
If you suddenly took away corporate welfare, the powerful companies would quickly gobble up or destroy the smaller and weaker companies and race to control hearts and minds through the media. Government would quickly become irrelevant, as corporate treaties would rule.
Do you really want to live in a world run by Taco Bell?
Well, we could look at this another way: if the EPA can only work with public data, that means that it can require fracturing cocktails be made public, or the operators get shut down completely.
I bet if the Republicans pushing these changes got that sort of a response, they might re-think the bill.
...when they could have instead used a more succinct summary aimed at nerds, or, picked a different source document. I mean, this doesn't even tell us what hash algorithm is used to "scramble" our locally stored passphrase.
What I'd really like to see is a keychain helper (listening, Apple, onepass, etc?) that keylogs browser forms and performs this function against ANY password stored in the keychain. I mean, I've already got a keychain full of password/uri pairs -- why not do this with it as well?
The downside of course is that said helper would have to have full read access to the hashed keychain -- which while not a huge security issue, still could leak data like what uris you have stored in the keychain.
On iOS, it's likely using Apple's DisplayPDF engine to render the PDFs; likely Adobe's engine to distill them in the first place. But since PDF is a standard, that doesn't really matter; they should just have set up the app such that the PDFs could be exported to a separate reader for display (even Safari would work) as well as pulled up in the app's own interface.
I can empathize with their issues, having digitized a collection of tousands of PDF documents that need to be searchable -- iOS tends to run out of memory while doing this; I can't even load some individual PDFs in standard readers like iBooks without running out of memory. This however isn't due to the display engine or the distilling engine, but is due to memory handling in the UI, and how it decides to cache rendered pages for performance reasons.
They could easily store all the documents in GoodReader and have none of these problems (but also have less functionality surrounding cross-references etc.).
First they denied climate change, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a climatologist.
Then they denied human influence on the climate, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not an anthropologist.
Then they denied that man-made climate change will have adverse effects, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not an economist.
Then they denied saying all these things—and it was too late to take action.
What gets me is that ham AR callsigns in general are significantly size constrained -- we're talking a standard of 5 letters and a digit, with some of those having reserved meanings, limiting the namespace. Sure, you have up to three letters appended as a location code as well, but this is still a restricted namespace.
But then, the airspace is also limited, so I guess we're lucky that there are enough dedicated hams around, while not so many that we run into significant issues that increased population density brings in any venue.
Other questions around this issue are:
1) Will the Spinel stop the second bullet?
2) is the Spinel still transparent enough to navigate through after the first hit?
Indeed -- the last thing I want are shards of something with a hardness of 7.7 and razor sharp edges flying around. Think obsidian arrowheads, and then think of something that'll hold an edge even better.
What I'd like to know about is how flexible the stuff is. Usually, the harder a material is, the more rigid it is -- which means that it is super hard right up to the point where it can't take the stress, at which point it fractures all over the place.
Safety glass gets around this by 1) being pretty flexible and 2) being a laminate of hard and soft materials, so that when the hard material shatters, it is still bonded to enough of the soft material to avoid (many) sharp edges.
I wonder what the behavioral properties of a laminate of spinel and lexan would be....
According to the article the bullets are not "self directed" but able to compensate for factors that could change the direction like weather, wind, or movement of the target.
Sounds like it's using some sort of inertial ballistic compensation inside; not sure how they managed this for something traveling at those speeds. But that doesn't account for "or movement of the target" -- do they mean that if you're tracking a target along a specific path, the bullet will continue to track that path as it moves through the air (allowing it to potentially curve behind obstructions to continue that trajectory)? This almost makes sense.
Of course, the other issue here is that these "silver bullets" will probably cost a few thousand dollars each. I'd also be interested to know if they've tested them with snipers, as it seems to me many of them would be put off by technology that compensates when they've already done so. This seems like ammunition that would have very limited use, as you wouldn't want to use it during a melee, nor from a sniping location (except in very specific situations -- and it would be useful in obscuring the location of the sniper), but mostly it would be useful for close range urban warfare so that you can fire selectively at a moving target without leaving temporary cover.
And then of course there's Kb vs KiB -- the second is the SI standard, but the first is commonly used in its place (even though it really means something slightly different).
Ah, but metres are used all over the place in the US. They're not the measure used by trade, but they ARE the measure used by science. This is why NASA ran into trouble: they're an organisation where science meets trade.
"They also hope to incorporate GPS data to adjust the direction of the headlights according to the lane that a driver is occupying, illuminating it more brightly compared to surrounding lanes."
I was all for the complicated but elegant solution until I hit that phrase. Considering how often GPS data sets can't even figure out that a road is one-way, this sounds like a solution that's going to behave very oddly when the data doesn't line up with the reality.
They've got lots of good ideas, but there are huge implementation obstacles with most of them. Give me lights that are smart enough to handle what they can actually see; I don't want lights depending on someone else's data set to get the job done.
One Direction
I thought he was talking about entropy :-/
Just think... in some universe, Hawking might be the lead vocalist in One Direction....
Why am I always in the universe where things aren't going right?
You think things aren't going right in YOUR universe... you should see the other one. At least you don't have to deal with invisible flying elephants.
I prefer Pratchett and Baxter's "The Long Earth" -- Fringe kind of devolved towards the end. Then again, with Pratchett dead in this universe, we've only got 3 of the 5 novels in the series; I don't see how it could be quite the same with just Baxter behind the keyboard. So it might devolve too.