Yetis are very reclusive, but also technologically very advanced. The labs in Yeti City have managed to re-engineer Yeti skin so its DNA is indistinguishable from bear skin
So you're saying they're... smarter than the average bear?
Think how many lives could be saved if only Congress would pass Safer Navigation Act which mandates autopilots and prevents other companies launching competitors to Google Autopilot incorporating Facebook Mobile Edition For Aviation.
Only airline pilots unions shills oppose it, and opposing it obviously that means they want people to die!
These "little gray cells" are associated with thinking, planning and complex behavior. The study found that dogs have about 530 million cortical neurons while cats have about 250 million. (For comparison, the human brain has 16 billion.) Another interesting discovery was that carnivores have about the same ratio of neurons to brain size as that of herbivores, "suggesting that there is just as much evolutionary pressure on the herbivores to develop the brain power to escape from predators as there is on carnivores to catch them,"
Sounds like whoever wrote this was a)and not a cat person and b)a vegetarian
I'll go back to getting my science from Obligate Carnivore magazine where the science correspondent is a foul tempered tomcat with the nom de plume Rodent Gobbler.
Yeah, everyone knows if a new technology can't support your lifestyle, the solution is to redesign your lifestyle so that doesn't matter rather than sticking with the old technology. Got to keep upgrading and chucking the old technology in a landfill, even if the 'upgrade' is worse! Think of the environment!
In both the UK and Taiwan you don't pay for incoming calls, only outgoing ones. In the US you pay for both.
The prices I quoted are the ones a caller pays to call someone in that country - it doesn't seem to matter where the caller actually is. So you get these prices
United States (Landline) $ 0.003 United States (Mobile) $ 0.003 United Kingdom (Landline) $ 0.003 United Kingdom (Main) (Mobile) $ 0.003 Taiwan (Landline) $ 0.006 Taiwan (Mobile) $ 0.045
Calling Taiwan Mobiles is relatively expensive probably because the VOIP network needs to make a physical phone call. I bet in the US or UK the mobile network just lets them set up a VOIP connection to the mobile company and the mobile company connects the call. I.e. there's something you can do with a server in the country to make very cheap calls so that the VOIP provider still makes money even charging people $ 0.003 (i.e. 0.3c) per minute.
Actually I'm not really sure how it's done because if I called someone even inside the US or UK, I'd pay a lot more $ 0.003.
But there's obviously some cheap way to make calls to UK numbers, where people don't pay an incoming call cost, and US ones where they do which doesn't exist in Taiwan. Where people also don't pay incoming call costs.
I think it's just better deals between UK and US telcos to be honest. Essentially VOIP gets you onto the backbone net the telcos use where everything is cheap. It's nothing to do with whether consumers pay to receive calls or not. That's just a weird US thing that no other country seems to do.
Even though calling Taiwan mobiles is relatively expensive a call to a Taiwan mobile number from anywhere in the world is only 4.5c a minute over VOIP. On T Mobile in the US, I pay 10c a minute to make/receive a call to/from someone in the US on my mobile once the minutes are up.
In the UK I don't pay for incoming calls but outgoing ones are expensive.
Calls to UK landlines and mobiles cost 25p per minute. Texts cost 10p each. To send a picture message you'll be charged 25p. Compared to some providers, such as Three or giffgaff, this is expensive. If you plan on making a significant amount of calls or sending hundreds of text messages, you can purchase a Tesco Mobile call or text bundle. There's a choice of two. The call bundle comes with 150 inclusive minutes, and costs £5. This lowers the per minute cost of making a call from 25p to 3p. To get it, text VOICE150 to 28948 from your Tesco Mobile phone.
Also Tesco Pay as You Go has triple credit - i.e. top up by £10, get £30. But in the UK I've got a fixed line phone and rarely make mobile calls. So a £10 top up gets me Internet (1GB for £7.5 a month) and the calls I need for a month.
Still VOIP is cheaper than anything else there too - even fixed line calls.
That's the reason I didn't buy a Windows 8 laptop to be honest. I knew I could install Classic Shell but it irked me that I had to do that. So I kept my Windows 7 laptop.
Actually I think Windows has a Good/Bad release strategy. I.e. it's tolerable if you skip every other release, at least post Windows 2000 which I also liked.
Windows XP - Good Vista - Bad 7 - Good 8 - Bad 10 - Good
Admittedly I don't have any Windows 10 machines either. I do run an unactivated copy in Parallels VM on my Macbook though. And it's... OK. It is to 8 what 7 was to Vista. They've toned down the most irritating stuff and it's reasonably fast.
CGP Grey did a good video on why social media is bad. Basically in a world where clicks and comments and shares is the metric, people create content which makes people angry
Add in the fact that most social media platforms have a very strong bias because they are full of young, college educated people and that people who try to derail the continuous Three Minute Hate against the outgroup(them) get banned for 'hate speech' and you can see why it is cancer.
And the final insult is that the people who run these companies want regulation of the ISPs, aka Net Neutrality to stop them doing things like zero rating and then claiming it's about free speech. Even though the FCC didn't actually ban zero rating when T Mobile did it
I.e. they're lobbying for it because they think it will stop zero rating, which would might force them to pay ISPs to be zero rated, and it won't. We know that because even when it was in place the FCC had no problem with T Mobile's Binge On. They don't actually have a principled objection to zero rating, because they did it themselves.
Even with Vista and 8 they claimed each had 'sold better than any previous Windows version'.
Of course that will be the case given that
1) PC shipments increase globally with time 2) Most PC OEMs have a contract which says they must install an OS on each machine
It's the reason Dell sold machines with FreeDos on them for a while. Their contract with MS stopped them selling machines with no OS.
3) PC OEMs get a discount on Windows 4) Most customers prefer Windows to any alternative OS.
So something like Vista or 8 which was relatively unpopular sold better than something like XP, 7 or (arguably) 10 which was relatively well received. In fact you could argue that each release of Windows since 2000 has been controversial once it started coming on new machines by default. Still each one sold better than the last one.
Still MS will continue to claim that everything is fine, regardless of whether an OS release is well received - 7 springs to mind after the disastrous Vista, or very badly received - 8 or Vista.
It's what happens when monopolies take the fact that people have to accept what they're doing as a sign that people like what they're doing.
Yeah, that's very worrying possibility. Hell in places like Russia or China I wouldn't put it past them to plant stuff in your baggage and then use that to detain you until you pay them off.
It's not economic to mine Bitcoin on anything less than custom ASIC rig as far as I know.
It started off being economic to mine on CPUs. The Bitcoin algorithm increases the difficulty level automatically with time. Eventually it became uneconomic to mine on CPUs and people moved to GPUs. The difficulty level rose again. Now it is uneconomic to mine on anything but ASICs.
I.e. you'll spend more on electricity than you make in Bitcoins on a CPU.
These days there is a legion of well paid climate spin doctors. Their job is to keep the debate binary: either you believe climate change is real and dangerous or you're a denier who thinks it's a hoax.
But there's a third possibility they refuse to acknowledge: that it's real but not dangerous. That's what I mean by lukewarming, and I think it is by far the most likely prognosis.
I am not claiming that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas; it is.
I am not saying that its concentration in the atmosphere is not increasing; it is.
I am not saying the main cause of that increase is not the burning of fossil fuels; it is.
I am not saying the climate does not change; it does.
I am not saying that the atmosphere is not warmer today than it was 50 or 100 years ago; it is.
And I am not saying that carbon dioxide emissions are not likely to have caused some (probably more than half) of the warming since 1950.
I agree with the consensus on all these points.
I am not in any sense a "denier", that unpleasant, modern term of abuse for blasphemers against the climate dogma, though the Guardian and New Scientist never let the facts get in the way of their prejudices on such matters. I am a lukewarmer.
Being a lukewarmer is perfectly consistent with the consensus. Ironically people saying that we'll get 20 feet of sea rise in our lifetimes are saying something inconsistent with the consensus. They're the deniers, not the lukewarmers. And actually if you look at experimental measurements of temperature models, they show warming happening slower than the IPCC's models.
Also the Darwin kernel, i.e. BSD on Mach, is already open source. Even though BSD is BSD not GPL licensed and they'd be legally allowed to keep their very extensive changes secret, Apple still release their changes
They also don't release the source code for the user mode stuff, but then they don't have to.
And it seems like they already get the benefit of any 'many eyes make all bugs shallow' effect from opening up the kernel.
'Many eyes make all bugs shallow' is bogus anyway. It's not like many people are going to sit, read the source to something and find a vulnerability. And even if they did there's nothing to stop them selling it to someone other than the vendor - e.g. Russian/Chinese mafia, NSA, GCHQ etc probably all pay better.
Gore is a rent seeking scumbag who disguises his rent seeking as environmentalism. You can be a capitalist and dislike rent seeking, and think the solution to that is to reduce the number of areas the government regulates and hence the opportunities for rent seeking. That's essentially the free market position.
In 1992 they measured this amount of melting in Greenland. 10 years later this is what happened. And here is the melting from 2005. Tony Blair's scientific advisor has said that because of what is happening in Greenland right now, the map of the world will have to be redrawn. If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida.
Global Warming induced sea rise fffect on Florida
This is what would happen in the San Francisco Bay.
A lot of people live in these areas. The Netherlands, the low-countries: absolutely devastating.
The instrumental record of modern sea level change shows evidence for onset of sea level rise during the 19th century. Estimates for the 20th century show that global average sea level rose at a rate of about 1.7 mm/yr.
Now at 1.7 mm per year 20 foot or around 6000mm of sea rise would take 3500 years! Not to mention he's being disingenuous with the Netherlands. The Netherlands isn't just 'low lying', big chunks of it are actual below sea level. They've built protective earthworks and sea walls to stop the sea coming in. If the sea level rises by 1.7mm per year they'll just need to plan to raise the height of the sea walls by on average that much plus some safety factor.
Al Gore is a lot of things, but he's not an idiot. He must know that showing Google Maps of NYC now mostly flooded by a 20 foot sea level rise when that rise will happen over 3500 years is dishonest. Presumably he thinks being dishonest about this is morally justified because it will get people to make changes he believes they need to make anyway. Still his motives are not pure. He bet big time by investing in a bunch of companies who'd benefit from things like emissions trading. If it doesn't happen, those companies will disappear. He'lll still be richer than Crassus of course, but not as rich as if people followed his policy recommendations.
The NYT is pretty pro Democrat but even they pointed out that he has a conflict of interest
Windows 95's UI changes were genuinely "bold", "courageous", and a definite step in the right direction. Windows 8 (and Metro, and everything since) was NOT.
Couldn't agree more. Microsoft's ability to design user interfaces peaked around the Windows 95 period but the old kernel was terrible. The NT kernel was good, and Windows 2000 adopted the 95 user interface. XP was a bit ugly but OK. Vista was crippled in terms of speed. Windows 7 was basically something that looked like XP but had handy updates. Windows 8 was a complete mess. Windows 10 is to Windows 8 what 7 was to Vista, but none of the Metro stuff is worth having.
The odds are the next thing they do will really suck.
Slashdot Mirror
Yetis are very reclusive, but also technologically very advanced. The labs in Yeti City have managed to re-engineer Yeti skin so its DNA is indistinguishable from bear skin
So you're saying they're ... smarter than the average bear?
The Tomasulo scheduler?
https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/f...
Node.js is a very serious heresy. Long live the Holy Binarchy of C/C++! Kill the heretics, language crusade now!
Think how many lives could be saved if only Congress would pass Safer Navigation Act which mandates autopilots and prevents other companies launching competitors to Google Autopilot incorporating Facebook Mobile Edition For Aviation.
Only airline pilots unions shills oppose it, and opposing it obviously that means they want people to die!
These "little gray cells" are associated with thinking, planning and complex behavior. The study found that dogs have about 530 million cortical neurons while cats have about 250 million. (For comparison, the human brain has 16 billion.) Another interesting discovery was that carnivores have about the same ratio of neurons to brain size as that of herbivores, "suggesting that there is just as much evolutionary pressure on the herbivores to develop the brain power to escape from predators as there is on carnivores to catch them,"
Sounds like whoever wrote this was a)and not a cat person and b)a vegetarian
I'll go back to getting my science from Obligate Carnivore magazine where the science correspondent is a foul tempered tomcat with the nom de plume Rodent Gobbler.
Windows 10 isn't all that bad. I'd say it's about as well received as XP or 7.
Yeah, everyone knows if a new technology can't support your lifestyle, the solution is to redesign your lifestyle so that doesn't matter rather than sticking with the old technology. Got to keep upgrading and chucking the old technology in a landfill, even if the 'upgrade' is worse! Think of the environment!
Homophobia from the left? Why am I not surprised...
In both the UK and Taiwan you don't pay for incoming calls, only outgoing ones. In the US you pay for both.
The prices I quoted are the ones a caller pays to call someone in that country - it doesn't seem to matter where the caller actually is. So you get these prices
Calling Taiwan Mobiles is relatively expensive probably because the VOIP network needs to make a physical phone call. I bet in the US or UK the mobile network just lets them set up a VOIP connection to the mobile company and the mobile company connects the call. I.e. there's something you can do with a server in the country to make very cheap calls so that the VOIP provider still makes money even charging people $ 0.003 (i.e. 0.3c) per minute.
Actually I'm not really sure how it's done because if I called someone even inside the US or UK, I'd pay a lot more $ 0.003.
But there's obviously some cheap way to make calls to UK numbers, where people don't pay an incoming call cost, and US ones where they do which doesn't exist in Taiwan. Where people also don't pay incoming call costs.
I think it's just better deals between UK and US telcos to be honest. Essentially VOIP gets you onto the backbone net the telcos use where everything is cheap. It's nothing to do with whether consumers pay to receive calls or not. That's just a weird US thing that no other country seems to do.
Even though calling Taiwan mobiles is relatively expensive a call to a Taiwan mobile number from anywhere in the world is only 4.5c a minute over VOIP. On T Mobile in the US, I pay 10c a minute to make/receive a call to/from someone in the US on my mobile once the minutes are up.
In the UK I don't pay for incoming calls but outgoing ones are expensive.
https://www.cable.co.uk/review...
Calls to UK landlines and mobiles cost 25p per minute. Texts cost 10p each. To send a picture message you'll be charged 25p. Compared to some providers, such as Three or giffgaff, this is expensive.
If you plan on making a significant amount of calls or sending hundreds of text messages, you can purchase a Tesco Mobile call or text bundle. There's a choice of two.
The call bundle comes with 150 inclusive minutes, and costs £5. This lowers the per minute cost of making a call from 25p to 3p. To get it, text VOICE150 to 28948 from your Tesco Mobile phone.
Also Tesco Pay as You Go has triple credit - i.e. top up by £10, get £30. But in the UK I've got a fixed line phone and rarely make mobile calls. So a £10 top up gets me Internet (1GB for £7.5 a month) and the calls I need for a month.
Still VOIP is cheaper than anything else there too - even fixed line calls.
https://shipyourenemiesglitter...
That's the reason I didn't buy a Windows 8 laptop to be honest. I knew I could install Classic Shell but it irked me that I had to do that. So I kept my Windows 7 laptop.
Actually I think Windows has a Good/Bad release strategy. I.e. it's tolerable if you skip every other release, at least post Windows 2000 which I also liked.
Windows XP - Good
Vista - Bad
7 - Good
8 - Bad
10 - Good
Admittedly I don't have any Windows 10 machines either. I do run an unactivated copy in Parallels VM on my Macbook though. And it's ... OK. It is to 8 what 7 was to Vista. They've toned down the most irritating stuff and it's reasonably fast.
CGP Grey did a good video on why social media is bad. Basically in a world where clicks and comments and shares is the metric, people create content which makes people angry
This Video Will Make You Angry
Or as Andrew Klavan put it 'outrage is the Devil's cocaine'
See also
I can tolerate anything except the outgroup
Add in the fact that most social media platforms have a very strong bias because they are full of young, college educated people and that people who try to derail the continuous Three Minute Hate against the outgroup(them) get banned for 'hate speech' and you can see why it is cancer.
And the final insult is that the people who run these companies want regulation of the ISPs, aka Net Neutrality to stop them doing things like zero rating and then claiming it's about free speech. Even though the FCC didn't actually ban zero rating when T Mobile did it
https://www.engadget.com/2015/...
So a US ISP can do exactly what Portugal's MEO did even if Net Neutrality stays in place
http://www.telecomsense.com/20...
And of course Google and Facebook launched a non Net Neutral service with zero rating in India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I.e. they're lobbying for it because they think it will stop zero rating, which would might force them to pay ISPs to be zero rated, and it won't. We know that because even when it was in place the FCC had no problem with T Mobile's Binge On. They don't actually have a principled objection to zero rating, because they did it themselves.
There are third party hacks out there to disable telemetry.
Right, but it was still 'the Government', right? I.e. it was a public sector entity not a private sector one.
Even with Vista and 8 they claimed each had 'sold better than any previous Windows version'.
Of course that will be the case given that
1) PC shipments increase globally with time
2) Most PC OEMs have a contract which says they must install an OS on each machine
It's the reason Dell sold machines with FreeDos on them for a while. Their contract with MS stopped them selling machines with no OS.
3) PC OEMs get a discount on Windows
4) Most customers prefer Windows to any alternative OS.
So something like Vista or 8 which was relatively unpopular sold better than something like XP, 7 or (arguably) 10 which was relatively well received. In fact you could argue that each release of Windows since 2000 has been controversial once it started coming on new machines by default. Still each one sold better than the last one.
Still MS will continue to claim that everything is fine, regardless of whether an OS release is well received - 7 springs to mind after the disastrous Vista, or very badly received - 8 or Vista.
It's what happens when monopolies take the fact that people have to accept what they're doing as a sign that people like what they're doing.
Yeah, that's very worrying possibility. Hell in places like Russia or China I wouldn't put it past them to plant stuff in your baggage and then use that to detain you until you pay them off.
It's not economic to mine Bitcoin on anything less than custom ASIC rig as far as I know.
It started off being economic to mine on CPUs. The Bitcoin algorithm increases the difficulty level automatically with time. Eventually it became uneconomic to mine on CPUs and people moved to GPUs. The difficulty level rose again. Now it is uneconomic to mine on anything but ASICs.
I.e. you'll spend more on electricity than you make in Bitcoins on a CPU.
No. Personally I think global warming is happening, but it's not all that serious, i.e. I'm a lukewarmer like Matt Ridley
https://www.thegwpf.org/matt-r...
These days there is a legion of well paid climate spin doctors. Their job is to keep the debate binary: either you believe climate change is real and dangerous or you're a denier who thinks it's a hoax.
But there's a third possibility they refuse to acknowledge: that it's real but not dangerous. That's what I mean by lukewarming, and I think it is by far the most likely prognosis.
I am not claiming that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas; it is.
I am not saying that its concentration in the atmosphere is not increasing; it is.
I am not saying the main cause of that increase is not the burning of fossil fuels; it is.
I am not saying the climate does not change; it does.
I am not saying that the atmosphere is not warmer today than it was 50 or 100 years ago; it is.
And I am not saying that carbon dioxide emissions are not likely to have caused some (probably more than half) of the warming since 1950.
I agree with the consensus on all these points.
I am not in any sense a "denier", that unpleasant, modern term of abuse for blasphemers against the climate dogma, though the Guardian and New Scientist never let the facts get in the way of their prejudices on such matters. I am a lukewarmer.
Being a lukewarmer is perfectly consistent with the consensus. Ironically people saying that we'll get 20 feet of sea rise in our lifetimes are saying something inconsistent with the consensus. They're the deniers, not the lukewarmers. And actually if you look at experimental measurements of temperature models, they show warming happening slower than the IPCC's models.
https://imgur.com/a/WWeun
Also the Darwin kernel, i.e. BSD on Mach, is already open source. Even though BSD is BSD not GPL licensed and they'd be legally allowed to keep their very extensive changes secret, Apple still release their changes
https://opensource.apple.com/s...
The don't release all the kernel mode code though - e.g. they don't release the source code to "Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext"
http://www.osxbook.com/book/bo...
They also don't release the source code for the user mode stuff, but then they don't have to.
And it seems like they already get the benefit of any 'many eyes make all bugs shallow' effect from opening up the kernel.
'Many eyes make all bugs shallow' is bogus anyway. It's not like many people are going to sit, read the source to something and find a vulnerability. And even if they did there's nothing to stop them selling it to someone other than the vendor - e.g. Russian/Chinese mafia, NSA, GCHQ etc probably all pay better.
Gore is a rent seeking scumbag who disguises his rent seeking as environmentalism. You can be a capitalist and dislike rent seeking, and think the solution to that is to reduce the number of areas the government regulates and hence the opportunities for rent seeking. That's essentially the free market position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The TSA allowed a reporter to photograph the master keys for those stupid TSA locks.
https://www.wired.com/2015/09/...
With the result that now anyone anywhere in the world can open your luggage, take stuff out and reseal it.
How do you get that figure?
Exactly. In 'An Inconvenient Truth he showed the affects of a 20 foot sea level rise on various bits of the UK
http://www.global-warming-trut...
Impact of 20 Foot Rise in Sea Level
In 1992 they measured this amount of melting in Greenland. 10 years later this is what happened. And here is the melting from 2005. Tony Blair's scientific advisor has said that because of what is happening in Greenland right now, the map of the world will have to be redrawn. If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida.
Global Warming induced sea rise fffect on Florida
This is what would happen in the San Francisco Bay.
A lot of people live in these areas. The Netherlands, the low-countries: absolutely devastating.
https://www.ipcc.ch/publicatio...
The instrumental record of modern sea level change shows evidence for onset of sea level rise during the 19th century. Estimates for the 20th century show that global average sea level rose at a rate of about 1.7 mm/yr.
Now at 1.7 mm per year 20 foot or around 6000mm of sea rise would take 3500 years! Not to mention he's being disingenuous with the Netherlands. The Netherlands isn't just 'low lying', big chunks of it are actual below sea level. They've built protective earthworks and sea walls to stop the sea coming in. If the sea level rises by 1.7mm per year they'll just need to plan to raise the height of the sea walls by on average that much plus some safety factor.
Al Gore is a lot of things, but he's not an idiot. He must know that showing Google Maps of NYC now mostly flooded by a 20 foot sea level rise when that rise will happen over 3500 years is dishonest. Presumably he thinks being dishonest about this is morally justified because it will get people to make changes he believes they need to make anyway. Still his motives are not pure. He bet big time by investing in a bunch of companies who'd benefit from things like emissions trading. If it doesn't happen, those companies will disappear. He'lll still be richer than Crassus of course, but not as rich as if people followed his policy recommendations.
The NYT is pretty pro Democrat but even they pointed out that he has a conflict of interest
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11...
Give Americans more credit. It's more likely to be
Windows 95's UI changes were genuinely "bold", "courageous", and a definite step in the right direction. Windows 8 (and Metro, and everything since) was NOT.
Couldn't agree more. Microsoft's ability to design user interfaces peaked around the Windows 95 period but the old kernel was terrible. The NT kernel was good, and Windows 2000 adopted the 95 user interface. XP was a bit ugly but OK. Vista was crippled in terms of speed. Windows 7 was basically something that looked like XP but had handy updates. Windows 8 was a complete mess. Windows 10 is to Windows 8 what 7 was to Vista, but none of the Metro stuff is worth having.
The odds are the next thing they do will really suck.