"So I'm afraid I must repeat (and I take no pleasure in saying this, believe me) your only three options this election are Trump, Clinton, or throwing your vote away."
If you vote for someone you believe in, your vote is never thrown away. They may not win, but people will see how much support they get, and that can lead to more support next time. You are right though, that FPTP is a poor system. It's particularly poor when it comes to electing presidents because (as far as I understand it), it is not possible for two candidates to combine their votes in any way, unlike parties which can combine their votes and form a coalition. The upshot of this is that people like Bernie Sanders won't risk standing as an independent for risk of splitting the left wing vote. You could have a system where candidates can pledge to transfer their votes to another candidate in the event they fail to secure enough votes themselves. It could bring an end to the endless oscillation between Republican and Democrat presidents.
Any battery developed by Dyson will no doubt be massively overpriced like their other products. Even if he were able to double the energy density of batteries, it seems likely you would be able to buy several of the conventional batteries for the same price.
" Microsoft is really dismissing how much legacy code is out there"
I had any illusions that they cared about that sort of thing shattered when they dumped Visual Basic. It was huge in industry and millions (perhaps hundreds of millions) of lines of code, representing untold millions of dollars, suddenly became legacy code. (VB.NET was/is a completely different language)
I doubt AR glasses will make you vomit since you will still be able to see most of the real world. However, Hololens has a crappy field of view which they do not seem interested in addressing. The demos they have shown have all been "fake" composites of what you would ideally see if the FOV was huge and if Hololens was also able to show objects darker than the background (which it isn't).
I don't think they seriously intend Hololens as a consumer product. I think it is all just marketing hype for windows 10.
Perhaps they would like a vote where people over 40 are excluded as well as Lincolnshire and any other strong Brexit areas. Really, the remain camp are not being very gracious in defeat. They would have been insufferable if they had won.
The Stay campaign seems far worse when it comes to scaremongering. Every day they are saying billions will be wiped of this or that, but in actual fact they really have no clue at all. There are plenty of intelligent arguments going both ways, but we have heard precisely zero of them from either campaign. Instead its just been unsubstantiated scaremongering. On top of this, the people who want to leave are being marginalized as racists, even though in the past, many of the leading left-wing politicians wanted to leave the EU, claiming it to be capitalistic and undemocratic.
7) For the industrial revolution plenty of freely available energy had to be lying around near the surface - ie coal. You can't melt iron with wood fires.
And we only had coal because when trees first appeared, there happened to be nothing around that could digest them, so they just piled up, got buried and eventually became coal. However, it's not a complete show stopper since you can make charcoal from wood which does burn hot enough for melting iron.
Mainly you can tell they are not socialist by the fact they are (a) permissive, and (b) happy - neither the sign of socialism at work (as well know all too well from countless historical examples, socialism and totalitarianism go hand in hand).
I think you may be confusing socialism with communism. Communism and totalitarianism have often gone hand in hand, not socialism and totalitarianism.
I've noticed in political debates in the US that the term "Socialism" is often used in such a negative way that it seems that they really mean Communism. It's quite bizarre.
The American dream is the idea that anyone with humble beginnings can rise up and become a success, perhaps a billionaire or president etc. There is however a name for this phenomenon. It's called social mobility and is quite measurable. The US has an absolutely terrible social mobility. Ironically, if you want the "American Dream" you will need to move to a more socialist country like Denmark, or perhaps more conveniently, right next door to Canada.
Boston Dynamics is lightyears ahead of this little robot
From what I've read, Boston Dynamics may have been misrepresenting the success of their robots via editing. A bit like someone filming themselves throwing a basketball over their shoulder and then uploading the 1 successful attempt out of 200 attempts. A soon as their bipedal robot was put to a live test at the Darpa competition, it seemed to be falling all over the place even on flat ground. This is sure to have rung alarm bells at google.
They probably don't use computers for it, but the Swiss public can overturn new legislation by instigating a referendum. I believe it requires something in the region of 50 thousand signatures to kick off a referendum. This is a good compromise between purely representative democracy (which is often not very representative at all) and absolute direct democracy . Let the government do its job making dull but necessary new laws etc, but if they get out of line with some new law etc, we should have a constitutional and effective way of striking it down that doesn't involve mass protest and teargas.
In Britain, referendums are rarely granted by the government and in a number of cases they have promised them and then actually backtracked. They don't like handing power over to the public. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be for the public to simply overrule the government over something like TPP?
It was a horrible mess, everything had to be re-written to be compatible because it was really an entirely new language. Developers were left in the lurch
I worked for a company with large amounts of VB6 code, certainly over a million dollars worth of developer time. The company simply could not afford to do a rewrite. I still can barely believe that Microsoft would screw so many businesses by doing that.
I vividly remember everyone gathering around as I used the project conversion wizard to convert from VB6 to VB.NET.
I knew it wouldn't really work due to fundamental differences in the languages, but I felt we had to go through the motions. We sat there and watched the estimated time of completion climb and climb and climb. Eventually I think it just crashed.
At the time we had a big meeting and I tried to convince the company that we should move away from Microsoft technologies to avoid similar pain in the future. However, such is the "Gravitational Pull" of Microsoft products, we ended up sticking with them.
Of course, if there had been a compatible rival product (some kind of Borland VB) then it would have been much harder for Microsoft to abandon the language. This could be an issue if they try to abandon.NET due to the existence of Mono.
Even if a solar panel in Geosynchronous orbit generated 100x more energy than an equivalent panel on earth (which seems unlikely), it makes no economic sense to put it there since you could put several hundred panels on the Earth's surface for a small fraction of the cost. In fact you could fill an entire football field full of panels for a fraction of the cost of the space based solution. Just through sheer numbers they would generate more than the space-based panel even on a cloudy day.
Simple repairs are also orders of magnitude cheaper for the ground-based solution.
Entrants must design a robot than can autonomously navigate to Amazon's vast cash mountain, located somewhere in Luxembourg, and seize the hundreds of millions they really owe in taxes.
In slow motion you can see that the bullet barely travels any distance at all. - Quote from the video
What we in fact see is that the object that "barely travels any distance at all" is the spent shell casing. This is completely fine as the aim is not to magically embed the spent shell casing into the target. That is what the projectile part is for. The projectile is likely to have whizzed off as expected, albeit not with great accuracy.
As for the general usefulness of plastic firearms, even if they can only fire a few shots, there are clear advantages.
1. You can obtain a firearm without it being registered to you or exposing yourself to criminal firearms dealers/police sting operations.
2. They are less detectable.
3. You can melt and/or burn the murder weapon with ease.
The tone of the video is a bit odd. It's comes across like a video trying to convince kids not to play with fireworks. It's not as if we all have loads of ammunition laying about here in the UK just waiting for a 3D Printed gun to come along so we can finally have some fun. Making something that can fire a bullet (at least here in the UK) is not the main obstacle to a working firearm. The main obstacle here is obtaining the ammunition.
I had a friend who was violently mugged here in the UK, and the police weren't even interested in taking a statement. They just told him to go to the hospital if he felt dizzy (the robbers hit him over the head).
When a UK journalist gets mugged though, he gets star treatment
I could point out that the BBC is really just Britain's Russia Today, and go into details why, but it would be a distraction from the more fundamental issue.
Most news organisations operate in the same non-objective way whether they are government controlled or completely commercial. They report more favourably on their host country (and allies) than on enemies. For example, the BBC will report on Iranian police violence against protesters very harshly. It will be implied that the police violence is extreme and unwarranted and the unarmed and peaceful nature of the protesters will be emphasised (with protester violence even being ignored). In contrast, the same kind of violence perpetrated by UK police will be reported very differently. It will either be under-reported ("Police scuffled with protesters") or the focus will be on protester violence.
All you have to do to see this for yourself is do a search and replace on country/city names in articles. Suddenly that article damning Russia for the Seige of Grozny will be an article damning the US for the Seige of Fallujah. You will notice that sentences like "What right does the US have to order the citizens to leave." are quite jarring and do not seem like the kind of thing the news would normally say in this situation. This is your clue that something is very wrong with mainstream media reporting.
The thing is, yes, the NSA et al are not interested in the average Joe as long as he remains an average Joe. But if that average Joe suddenly emerges as a "threat", by organising some big Occupy movement etc, they will already have all the private dirt on him they need to discredit him if necessary. This is why the average Joe should care, even if he doesn't. It's about the future, not just the present.
The vast majority of industry trade shows look quite professional. A small minority of industries that attract people with developmental problems (automobiles, guns, and games) don't.
I can't speak for the "vast majority" of trade shows, but many of the energy industry shows I've been to have had "booth babes". It is quite a common tactic (not the only one, but common nonetheless). It's about catching your eye. This can been done with brightly coloured displays, animated signs, movement etc, but with a large male patronage, attractive women seems to be effective.
If we are going to damn some companies for being so "stupid" or exploitative that they require beautiful women to attract men to their products, then perhaps we should also damn them for using other cheap tricks like bright colours, flashing signs etc.
Is it really wrong for attractive women or men to exploit their good looks for commercial gain? How about a man exploiting his natural physical strength for financial gain? Is it really so much better to be exploited for your brain than for your body? Being exploited for your brain can be very demeaning indeed. If I could earn good money standing around smiling at a trade show, I'd certainly consider it. Perhaps I'd feel exploited, I don't know, but I've certainly felt exploited in software development jobs I've had.
Those BNCs were pretty tough connectors. When I first got an IT job, the network consisted of two 486s connected via a BNC cable dangled over the carpet across the room. A clumsy co-worker tripped over it and both machines flew off the desks, hit each other in mid air like conkers and crashed onto the floor. The BNC cable and connectors were completely undamaged though.
Well the ideas about being ethical etc are often applied to regular jobs, and I thought it was worth talking about that. Increasingly though companies are employing people on contract so the line between a regular worker and a contractor becomes blurred.
Slashdot Mirror
"So I'm afraid I must repeat (and I take no pleasure in saying this, believe me) your only three options this election are Trump, Clinton, or throwing your vote away."
If you vote for someone you believe in, your vote is never thrown away. They may not win, but people will see how much support they get, and that can lead to more support next time. You are right though, that FPTP is a poor system. It's particularly poor when it comes to electing presidents because (as far as I understand it), it is not possible for two candidates to combine their votes in any way, unlike parties which can combine their votes and form a coalition. The upshot of this is that people like Bernie Sanders won't risk standing as an independent for risk of splitting the left wing vote. You could have a system where candidates can pledge to transfer their votes to another candidate in the event they fail to secure enough votes themselves. It could bring an end to the endless oscillation between Republican and Democrat presidents.
Any battery developed by Dyson will no doubt be massively overpriced like their other products. Even if he were able to double the energy density of batteries, it seems likely you would be able to buy several of the conventional batteries for the same price.
Besides which, it looks like there is already quite a breakthrough happening right now. http://news.mit.edu/2016/lithi...
" Microsoft is really dismissing how much legacy code is out there"
I had any illusions that they cared about that sort of thing shattered when they dumped Visual Basic. It was huge in industry and millions (perhaps hundreds of millions) of lines of code, representing untold millions of dollars, suddenly became legacy code. (VB.NET was/is a completely different language)
I doubt AR glasses will make you vomit since you will still be able to see most of the real world. However, Hololens has a crappy field of view which they do not seem interested in addressing. The demos they have shown have all been "fake" composites of what you would ideally see if the FOV was huge and if Hololens was also able to show objects darker than the background (which it isn't).
I don't think they seriously intend Hololens as a consumer product. I think it is all just marketing hype for windows 10.
Perhaps they would like a vote where people over 40 are excluded as well as Lincolnshire and any other strong Brexit areas. Really, the remain camp are not being very gracious in defeat. They would have been insufferable if they had won.
The Stay campaign seems far worse when it comes to scaremongering. Every day they are saying billions will be wiped of this or that, but in actual fact they really have no clue at all. There are plenty of intelligent arguments going both ways, but we have heard precisely zero of them from either campaign. Instead its just been unsubstantiated scaremongering. On top of this, the people who want to leave are being marginalized as racists, even though in the past, many of the leading left-wing politicians wanted to leave the EU, claiming it to be capitalistic and undemocratic.
7) For the industrial revolution plenty of freely available energy had to be lying around near the surface - ie coal. You can't melt iron with wood fires.
And we only had coal because when trees first appeared, there happened to be nothing around that could digest them, so they just piled up, got buried and eventually became coal. However, it's not a complete show stopper since you can make charcoal from wood which does burn hot enough for melting iron.
The mechanization of agriculture didn't result in 76% unemployment
It did for the horses. We are the horses now.
Mainly you can tell they are not socialist by the fact they are (a) permissive, and (b) happy - neither the sign of socialism at work (as well know all too well from countless historical examples, socialism and totalitarianism go hand in hand).
I think you may be confusing socialism with communism. Communism and totalitarianism have often gone hand in hand, not socialism and totalitarianism. I've noticed in political debates in the US that the term "Socialism" is often used in such a negative way that it seems that they really mean Communism. It's quite bizarre.
The American dream is the idea that anyone with humble beginnings can rise up and become a success, perhaps a billionaire or president etc. There is however a name for this phenomenon. It's called social mobility and is quite measurable. The US has an absolutely terrible social mobility. Ironically, if you want the "American Dream" you will need to move to a more socialist country like Denmark, or perhaps more conveniently, right next door to Canada.
Boston Dynamics is lightyears ahead of this little robot
From what I've read, Boston Dynamics may have been misrepresenting the success of their robots via editing. A bit like someone filming themselves throwing a basketball over their shoulder and then uploading the 1 successful attempt out of 200 attempts. A soon as their bipedal robot was put to a live test at the Darpa competition, it seemed to be falling all over the place even on flat ground. This is sure to have rung alarm bells at google.
This article springs to mind. http://www.popularmechanics.co...
We really need to see long unedited videos of any new robots in action to have any confidence in their reliability.
They probably don't use computers for it, but the Swiss public can overturn new legislation by instigating a referendum. I believe it requires something in the region of 50 thousand signatures to kick off a referendum. This is a good compromise between purely representative democracy (which is often not very representative at all) and absolute direct democracy . Let the government do its job making dull but necessary new laws etc, but if they get out of line with some new law etc, we should have a constitutional and effective way of striking it down that doesn't involve mass protest and teargas.
In Britain, referendums are rarely granted by the government and in a number of cases they have promised them and then actually backtracked. They don't like handing power over to the public. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be for the public to simply overrule the government over something like TPP?
The question is, how do we get there?
Using a fingerprint for authentication is like using one unchangeable password for every system. Bad practice!"
A password you also leave imprinted on anything you touch.
How did I manage to get a typo in such a short post? :)
...is Snowden's only hope is he returns to face the music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It was a horrible mess, everything had to be re-written to be compatible because it was really an entirely new language. Developers were left in the lurch
I worked for a company with large amounts of VB6 code, certainly over a million dollars worth of developer time. The company simply could not afford to do a rewrite. I still can barely believe that Microsoft would screw so many businesses by doing that.
.NET due to the existence of Mono.
I vividly remember everyone gathering around as I used the project conversion wizard to convert from VB6 to VB.NET. I knew it wouldn't really work due to fundamental differences in the languages, but I felt we had to go through the motions. We sat there and watched the estimated time of completion climb and climb and climb. Eventually I think it just crashed.
At the time we had a big meeting and I tried to convince the company that we should move away from Microsoft technologies to avoid similar pain in the future. However, such is the "Gravitational Pull" of Microsoft products, we ended up sticking with them.
Of course, if there had been a compatible rival product (some kind of Borland VB) then it would have been much harder for Microsoft to abandon the language. This could be an issue if they try to abandon
Even if a solar panel in Geosynchronous orbit generated 100x more energy than an equivalent panel on earth (which seems unlikely), it makes no economic sense to put it there since you could put several hundred panels on the Earth's surface for a small fraction of the cost. In fact you could fill an entire football field full of panels for a fraction of the cost of the space based solution. Just through sheer numbers they would generate more than the space-based panel even on a cloudy day.
Simple repairs are also orders of magnitude cheaper for the ground-based solution.
Entrants must design a robot than can autonomously navigate to Amazon's vast cash mountain, located somewhere in Luxembourg, and seize the hundreds of millions they really owe in taxes.
In slow motion you can see that the bullet barely travels any distance at all. - Quote from the video
What we in fact see is that the object that "barely travels any distance at all" is the spent shell casing. This is completely fine as the aim is not to magically embed the spent shell casing into the target. That is what the projectile part is for. The projectile is likely to have whizzed off as expected, albeit not with great accuracy.
As for the general usefulness of plastic firearms, even if they can only fire a few shots, there are clear advantages.
1. You can obtain a firearm without it being registered to you or exposing yourself to criminal firearms dealers/police sting operations.
2. They are less detectable.
3. You can melt and/or burn the murder weapon with ease.
The tone of the video is a bit odd. It's comes across like a video trying to convince kids not to play with fireworks. It's not as if we all have loads of ammunition laying about here in the UK just waiting for a 3D Printed gun to come along so we can finally have some fun. Making something that can fire a bullet (at least here in the UK) is not the main obstacle to a working firearm. The main obstacle here is obtaining the ammunition.
I had a friend who was violently mugged here in the UK, and the police weren't even interested in taking a statement. They just told him to go to the hospital if he felt dizzy (the robbers hit him over the head).
When a UK journalist gets mugged though, he gets star treatment
I could point out that the BBC is really just Britain's Russia Today, and go into details why, but it would be a distraction from the more fundamental issue.
Most news organisations operate in the same non-objective way whether they are government controlled or completely commercial. They report more favourably on their host country (and allies) than on enemies. For example, the BBC will report on Iranian police violence against protesters very harshly. It will be implied that the police violence is extreme and unwarranted and the unarmed and peaceful nature of the protesters will be emphasised (with protester violence even being ignored). In contrast, the same kind of violence perpetrated by UK police will be reported very differently. It will either be under-reported ("Police scuffled with protesters") or the focus will be on protester violence.
All you have to do to see this for yourself is do a search and replace on country/city names in articles. Suddenly that article damning Russia for the Seige of Grozny will be an article damning the US for the Seige of Fallujah. You will notice that sentences like "What right does the US have to order the citizens to leave." are quite jarring and do not seem like the kind of thing the news would normally say in this situation. This is your clue that something is very wrong with mainstream media reporting.
My simple response to the inevitable demonisation of Snowden is this...
Forget the mail-man. Read the letter.
The thing is, yes, the NSA et al are not interested in the average Joe as long as he remains an average Joe. But if that average Joe suddenly emerges as a "threat", by organising some big Occupy movement etc, they will already have all the private dirt on him they need to discredit him if necessary. This is why the average Joe should care, even if he doesn't. It's about the future, not just the present.
The vast majority of industry trade shows look quite professional. A small minority of industries that attract people with developmental problems (automobiles, guns, and games) don't.
I can't speak for the "vast majority" of trade shows, but many of the energy industry shows I've been to have had "booth babes". It is quite a common tactic (not the only one, but common nonetheless). It's about catching your eye. This can been done with brightly coloured displays, animated signs, movement etc, but with a large male patronage, attractive women seems to be effective.
If we are going to damn some companies for being so "stupid" or exploitative that they require beautiful women to attract men to their products, then perhaps we should also damn them for using other cheap tricks like bright colours, flashing signs etc.
Is it really wrong for attractive women or men to exploit their good looks for commercial gain? How about a man exploiting his natural physical strength for financial gain? Is it really so much better to be exploited for your brain than for your body? Being exploited for your brain can be very demeaning indeed. If I could earn good money standing around smiling at a trade show, I'd certainly consider it. Perhaps I'd feel exploited, I don't know, but I've certainly felt exploited in software development jobs I've had.
Those BNCs were pretty tough connectors. When I first got an IT job, the network consisted of two 486s connected via a BNC cable dangled over the carpet across the room. A clumsy co-worker tripped over it and both machines flew off the desks, hit each other in mid air like conkers and crashed onto the floor. The BNC cable and connectors were completely undamaged though.
Well the ideas about being ethical etc are often applied to regular jobs, and I thought it was worth talking about that. Increasingly though companies are employing people on contract so the line between a regular worker and a contractor becomes blurred.