While that's certainly true, if you're going to run your computer anyway, you can capitalize by reducing your energy costs elsewhere. Having a more efficient source of heating simply means that your savings are not as great, but you can still save money.
I realize you jest, but having a gaming computer that puts off a fair bit of heat isn't a bad thing in parts of the country during the winter. The waste heat is hardly wasted at that point. Gives even more reason to overclock as well.
By definition, exercise will always be hard. If it were easy, there wouldn't be much gain from it as it wasn't taxing our bodies.
Technology and science can make exercise more efficient by learning the most effective means for exercising and being able to accurately measure it. We might learn that following a 20 minute daily workout routine that satisfies certain conditions such as heart rate level, etc. is as effective as older routines that were an hour long and that we can use technology to help us avoid other behaviors with negative health impacts such as remaining seated for prolonged periods without standing and moving around a bit.
However, the exercise will still be hard work. You don't build muscles if you don't strain the ones you have. Perhaps some day we'll eventually have a pill that will just grow them for you without the work, and to some degree we already have substances that have that effect to certain degrees. It's a bit like learning math. You aren't going to get good at it without practice and some hard work. We can identify alternative learning styles that may suit various individuals better than other approaches, but at the end of the day, effort still needs to be expended to grow.
Probably because the OS represents at least another $10 from all of the various crapware that they get money for installing on it. I would imagine if they could make as much from packaging a Linux install with all of that crap they wouldn't have a problem with it. That and having a no OS option is just going to result in some idiots who don't know better selecting it and complaining.
While I agree with you that automation is good for the economy as a whole (any increase in productivity is an increase in the amount of wealth that can be generated) you're overestimating the skill sets of some people.
There are people who aren't qualified for much more than a simple job and lack the drive or perhaps even the capacity to learn something better, or perhaps the amount of effort that must be expended to train them does not generate a net increase in wealth.
As automation gets better, the types of jobs that can be automated grows and the people who are the least able to acquire the types of skills that cannot yet be automated find themselves in a position where there isn't a lot that they can do or where they need to build a completely new skill set as their previous one is no longer useful.
Perhaps by the time this becomes a large enough problem, automation will have made our productivity and wealth generation sufficient that we can just provide everyone the resources they need to live off of while they acquire a new skill set, but it always comes back to the problem of making sure people aren't free loading. Perhaps it just comes down to doing it anyway because the alternative is spending even more resources to police and arrest those people who do turn to crime.
Maybe in terms of raw numbers, but only because there are more people now.
Look up how many civilian casualties there were when the Mongols under Genghis Khan were invading neighboring countries. If anything there's a tendency for modern civilizations to be far less cruel in terms of harm to civilians. Yeah, it still happens, but most aren't going out of their way to run up the body count.
One could also point out that a lot of these civilian deaths are needless because one side of the conflict often refuses to fight conventionally (not that it's in their interest to do so) and hides amongst civilians or otherwise launches military operations from civilian-inhabited areas hoping that this will prevent retaliation.
Monitors aren't exactly expensive (seriously, there are some 22" 1080p monitors on newegg for $100 and I imagine there are better deals out there.) these days. If a second monitor makes your employees even 2% more productive on average, it will pay for itself in short order. For some jobs, it's going to be a hell of a lot more than 2%.
I think you missed the part where the OP pointed out that it doesn't come down completely to race:
Importantly, the white-only homicide rate in the US overall is still much higher than the total homicide rate in the above states, so the cause is not simple.
Also there's no indication that race causes more gun violence, merely that it's correlated with it, which is why the cause is not that simple. Add in some simple controls for socioeconomic status and it becomes obvious that makes more a difference than race, but because those two have a strong correlation in the U.S. people often hastily jump to conclusions.
You've jumped to conclusions as well and have been quick to label someone else a racist because you didn't take the time to read. Maybe you just didn't read fully, or perhaps you've decided that any mention of race at all makes someone racist, or perhaps worse yet you're the type of person who casually applies the term to anyone you disagree with.
Homogenous societies in general tend to have less violence regardless of the race of the people involved. I think that's the point that was being made.
I have a feeling that there are some people who would take a polite "You're wrong and I disagree with you for the following reasons . .." as trolling. Sure the "I hope you die in a car fire" and "I'm going to kill your animals" are low-hanging fruit, but there's a line there somewhere and it's not always easy to find. I'm not very comfortable with laws that require some form of human interpretation as guilt comes down entirely to the human doing the interpreting and at that point you have to hope they don't have an ax to grind or some other reason for disliking you.
It's a correlation first of all and it merely indicates that given those factors, some event is more likely, not guaranteed. Having a small reception or not going to church doesn't cause divorce, it's merely likely that those things are indicative of other factors that have more of a causal relationship with whether or not people are likely to divorce. For example, one could speculate that the reason church attendance is correlated to a lower divorce rate is that people who regularly attend church have access to a social group that will likely help them get through relationship problems and may also exert some peer pressure to avoid getting divorced in favor of trying to solve relationship problems.
In that case it's easy to see why going to church itself doesn't directly change the rates and it's arguable that other types of social groups with similar functions would be as good of a substitute. Similar logic can be applied to the other factors to try and suss out the underlying reasons that affect the divorce rate.
I would have hypothesized that it would be the other way around simple because people who live together and realize that they're incompatible after doing so for a time are probably much less likely to actually get married in the first place. To more accurately measure such a thing you would need to look at couples who break up or split apart after living together (or not) for some minimal threshold and compare that against married couples who also spend at least that much time together before filing for a divorce.
I assume that there are biology, immunology, etc. nerds on Slashdot as well as mathematicians, physicists, and programmers. I'll agree that this article is probably stretching the bounds of that more than a little, but if a researcher made an interesting discovering regarding the disease, it would be hard to complain about it appearing here.
There a probably a few posters here who do have some valuable insights they could offer, but again this story is stretching the bounds of relevance as it has more to do with the individual rather than the disease itself and the individual is only noteworthy because they have died from this disease, not because they found a cure, etc.
It's a mixed bag. There were also a lot of people who were jumping to conclusions and just making the situation worse. Ignoring the rioters and looters who were acting on incomplete information and their own emotional biases is just as disingenuous as attempting to claim that that particular group of people was the only group of people at all.
However, if there's a belief that the situation won't be properly investigated, it's perfectly rational to expect for people to riot and rebel. The country was founded along similar lines. If nothing else, hopefully this serves as a valuable lesson that will help prevent future mistakes from being made.
So what? The truth (whatever that may ultimately be as I'm not suggesting that my own current understanding is the final say on the matter) is still the truth whether anyone likes it or not. We can stick our heads in the sand and pretend it isn't, but invariably we'll have to accept it if we want to get anywhere. Let's just be brave enough to conduct the necessary experiments and improve our understanding of world whether those results tell us we've been horribly misguided or not.
You should probably read the studies. The researchers found no statistical difference in color preference at the time of testing, which suggests that color preference is socially acquired as children age. That and the differences in preferences across multiple cultures also suggests any color preferences are arbitrary in and of themselves. However, they did notice the difference in toy preference. If dressing children in specific colors had an impact, why didn't the infants show a difference in color preference? Why would that effect only be noticed in terms of toy preference?
Also, the reason they believe that it's not a social factor is because they found similar results in monkeys. Infant male monkeys had a stronger preference for wheeled toys as well. Given that monkeys are unlikely to naturally have toys for their offspring or socially constructed gender roles, it seems to point to biological underpinnings that evolved at some point before humans became divergent as a species, although it would be necessary to conduct a similar study with other groups of primates in order to ascertain whether or not it's something that evolved independently in both species.
Humans are sexually dimorphic. It's been known for some time that male and female children develop at different rates (e.g. boys tend to develop fine motor skills more slowly, but develop gross motor skills more quickly) and once puberty hits have rather stark physical differences in terms of muscular development and strength. Is it really that difficult to accept that there are differences in the ways that the brain develops between the two sexes and that this manifests in subtle differences such as toy preference?
There's probably nothing that prohibits anyone with capable intelligence from learning anything, but there may be underlying differences in the sexes due to the way our brains are physically different, which is just as good of an explanation as to why men and women have different writing styles. I lean towards that explanation as opposed to social factors, simply because there is other research that points to biological sex determining behavior. For example, young children of opposite sexes have different toy preferences. There's evidence to suggest that some things are certainly acquired due to social factors: color preference for example.
I've heard other interesting theories for the disparity as well such as autism-spectrum disorders being more prevalent in males than females and that people who are have more mild forms of disorders along that spectrum tend to be more attracted to computers and machines than they are to occupations that involve dealing with people. This also explains the stereotype of engineers and computer scientists being socially awkward, which there is some truth to.
If he would have had other money in a different account that couldn't be directly linked to the enterprise, they probably wouldn't be able to touch it. However imagine if it were a more typical drug bust and they had seized a pile of cash at a warehouse, etc. All of that would be held as well and wouldn't be useful to the defendant to pay legal fees, unless there were a lawyer willing to accept a promise of payment based on the assumption that the money would be returned on a non-guilty verdict.
The moral of the story: If you're going to do something illegal, don't keep all of the money in one place.
To be fair, it seems like a lot of online journalism in general reaches for inflammatory, click-bait headlines because that's what's most profitable. As print journalism continues to fade, many have discovered that it's far easier (and more profitable) to push out 20 opinion pieces that only barely qualify as news or are little more than a regurgitation of company press releases than it is to spend the time carefully researching a single story. There are plenty of sites that also pander to certain market segments (Mac fans, Linux users, car enthusiasts, etc.) and get their traffic that way.
Every other agenda already seems to have an outlet, so why should it be surprising that there are people who are willing to pander to a new segment of the market because it practically guarantees them money. Plenty of others have made a fortune doing it.
Or just any *nix. I've got some machines that are well passed that point that are still happy running recent versions of various Linux distros. They're obviously not the workhorses they once were, but they're still capable of running the latest versions of the OS (granted that doesn't include all of the bells and whistles that have been tacked on to the UI) and the only real reason to consider them obsolete is that over time it would be cheaper to replace them with a single machine running multiple VMs simply because the newer machine would consume far less power due to improvements in efficiency.
Doubtful. Walk into most gas stations or any major retail store and you're under video surveillance and their notification amounts to a sticker on the window of the door or on the wall as you enter the building. If there's a notification on the visor, that would be sufficient in my opinion. Those are about as non-intrusive as it gets so why should a car be held to higher standards?
The parts that aren't deserts tend to receive a rather high average rainfall. See the following images showing areas of the world which are deserts and the average rainfall: Average rainfall and desert distribution. Just because the majority of Earth's deserts are in the tropics doesn't also mean that it doesn't receive some of the highest average rainfall.
Also a military submarine is a hell of a lot bigger than an octopus or a fish. Eventually you would reach a size where the solution doesn't scale anywhere near as well. Otherwise you could conceivably build one of these so large that moving 10 times its body length in one second would travel faster than light. While that would require a rather massive vessel, it's quite obvious that the idea wouldn't work even if we could build such a vessel.
I think the problem comes from medical professionals only or almost always dealing with the people who are having terrible health problems. If the only time you see older people is when they're in pain or suffering from horrible illness, you wouldn't want to be old either. I suspect that as many of them actually age they find that they still enjoy life and that when they retire they're able to spend time with their families and grandkids and that being old isn't a constant state of suffering or misery. However, medical professionals are only exposed to the worst of old age, so it's hardly surprising that they have such a negative outlook.
It's easy to sit back from my position and say that, but I would imagine that my opinions would change if the vast majority of my day were spent being confronted with what happens to people who don't take care of their bodies or experiencing other illnesses that aren't currently preventable. If nothing else, one would think that this would motivate medical professionals to take good care of their health, so they can avoid finding themselves in that position.
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While that's certainly true, if you're going to run your computer anyway, you can capitalize by reducing your energy costs elsewhere. Having a more efficient source of heating simply means that your savings are not as great, but you can still save money.
I realize you jest, but having a gaming computer that puts off a fair bit of heat isn't a bad thing in parts of the country during the winter. The waste heat is hardly wasted at that point. Gives even more reason to overclock as well.
By definition, exercise will always be hard. If it were easy, there wouldn't be much gain from it as it wasn't taxing our bodies.
Technology and science can make exercise more efficient by learning the most effective means for exercising and being able to accurately measure it. We might learn that following a 20 minute daily workout routine that satisfies certain conditions such as heart rate level, etc. is as effective as older routines that were an hour long and that we can use technology to help us avoid other behaviors with negative health impacts such as remaining seated for prolonged periods without standing and moving around a bit.
However, the exercise will still be hard work. You don't build muscles if you don't strain the ones you have. Perhaps some day we'll eventually have a pill that will just grow them for you without the work, and to some degree we already have substances that have that effect to certain degrees. It's a bit like learning math. You aren't going to get good at it without practice and some hard work. We can identify alternative learning styles that may suit various individuals better than other approaches, but at the end of the day, effort still needs to be expended to grow.
Probably because the OS represents at least another $10 from all of the various crapware that they get money for installing on it. I would imagine if they could make as much from packaging a Linux install with all of that crap they wouldn't have a problem with it. That and having a no OS option is just going to result in some idiots who don't know better selecting it and complaining.
While I agree with you that automation is good for the economy as a whole (any increase in productivity is an increase in the amount of wealth that can be generated) you're overestimating the skill sets of some people.
There are people who aren't qualified for much more than a simple job and lack the drive or perhaps even the capacity to learn something better, or perhaps the amount of effort that must be expended to train them does not generate a net increase in wealth.
As automation gets better, the types of jobs that can be automated grows and the people who are the least able to acquire the types of skills that cannot yet be automated find themselves in a position where there isn't a lot that they can do or where they need to build a completely new skill set as their previous one is no longer useful.
Perhaps by the time this becomes a large enough problem, automation will have made our productivity and wealth generation sufficient that we can just provide everyone the resources they need to live off of while they acquire a new skill set, but it always comes back to the problem of making sure people aren't free loading. Perhaps it just comes down to doing it anyway because the alternative is spending even more resources to police and arrest those people who do turn to crime.
Maybe in terms of raw numbers, but only because there are more people now.
Look up how many civilian casualties there were when the Mongols under Genghis Khan were invading neighboring countries. If anything there's a tendency for modern civilizations to be far less cruel in terms of harm to civilians. Yeah, it still happens, but most aren't going out of their way to run up the body count.
One could also point out that a lot of these civilian deaths are needless because one side of the conflict often refuses to fight conventionally (not that it's in their interest to do so) and hides amongst civilians or otherwise launches military operations from civilian-inhabited areas hoping that this will prevent retaliation.
Monitors aren't exactly expensive (seriously, there are some 22" 1080p monitors on newegg for $100 and I imagine there are better deals out there.) these days. If a second monitor makes your employees even 2% more productive on average, it will pay for itself in short order. For some jobs, it's going to be a hell of a lot more than 2%.
Importantly, the white-only homicide rate in the US overall is still much higher than the total homicide rate in the above states, so the cause is not simple.
Also there's no indication that race causes more gun violence, merely that it's correlated with it, which is why the cause is not that simple. Add in some simple controls for socioeconomic status and it becomes obvious that makes more a difference than race, but because those two have a strong correlation in the U.S. people often hastily jump to conclusions.
You've jumped to conclusions as well and have been quick to label someone else a racist because you didn't take the time to read. Maybe you just didn't read fully, or perhaps you've decided that any mention of race at all makes someone racist, or perhaps worse yet you're the type of person who casually applies the term to anyone you disagree with.
Homogenous societies in general tend to have less violence regardless of the race of the people involved. I think that's the point that was being made.
Who gets to decide what qualifies as trolling?
." as trolling. Sure the "I hope you die in a car fire" and "I'm going to kill your animals" are low-hanging fruit, but there's a line there somewhere and it's not always easy to find. I'm not very comfortable with laws that require some form of human interpretation as guilt comes down entirely to the human doing the interpreting and at that point you have to hope they don't have an ax to grind or some other reason for disliking you.
I have a feeling that there are some people who would take a polite "You're wrong and I disagree with you for the following reasons . .
It's a correlation first of all and it merely indicates that given those factors, some event is more likely, not guaranteed. Having a small reception or not going to church doesn't cause divorce, it's merely likely that those things are indicative of other factors that have more of a causal relationship with whether or not people are likely to divorce. For example, one could speculate that the reason church attendance is correlated to a lower divorce rate is that people who regularly attend church have access to a social group that will likely help them get through relationship problems and may also exert some peer pressure to avoid getting divorced in favor of trying to solve relationship problems.
In that case it's easy to see why going to church itself doesn't directly change the rates and it's arguable that other types of social groups with similar functions would be as good of a substitute. Similar logic can be applied to the other factors to try and suss out the underlying reasons that affect the divorce rate.
I would have hypothesized that it would be the other way around simple because people who live together and realize that they're incompatible after doing so for a time are probably much less likely to actually get married in the first place. To more accurately measure such a thing you would need to look at couples who break up or split apart after living together (or not) for some minimal threshold and compare that against married couples who also spend at least that much time together before filing for a divorce.
You'd probably be more successful if you offered to coat the bridge in tin-foil free of charge.
Is there a more sleazy, incompetent corporate entity on the face of this planet?
Comcast.
I assume that there are biology, immunology, etc. nerds on Slashdot as well as mathematicians, physicists, and programmers. I'll agree that this article is probably stretching the bounds of that more than a little, but if a researcher made an interesting discovering regarding the disease, it would be hard to complain about it appearing here.
There a probably a few posters here who do have some valuable insights they could offer, but again this story is stretching the bounds of relevance as it has more to do with the individual rather than the disease itself and the individual is only noteworthy because they have died from this disease, not because they found a cure, etc.
It's a mixed bag. There were also a lot of people who were jumping to conclusions and just making the situation worse. Ignoring the rioters and looters who were acting on incomplete information and their own emotional biases is just as disingenuous as attempting to claim that that particular group of people was the only group of people at all.
However, if there's a belief that the situation won't be properly investigated, it's perfectly rational to expect for people to riot and rebel. The country was founded along similar lines. If nothing else, hopefully this serves as a valuable lesson that will help prevent future mistakes from being made.
So what? The truth (whatever that may ultimately be as I'm not suggesting that my own current understanding is the final say on the matter) is still the truth whether anyone likes it or not. We can stick our heads in the sand and pretend it isn't, but invariably we'll have to accept it if we want to get anywhere. Let's just be brave enough to conduct the necessary experiments and improve our understanding of world whether those results tell us we've been horribly misguided or not.
You should probably read the studies. The researchers found no statistical difference in color preference at the time of testing, which suggests that color preference is socially acquired as children age. That and the differences in preferences across multiple cultures also suggests any color preferences are arbitrary in and of themselves. However, they did notice the difference in toy preference. If dressing children in specific colors had an impact, why didn't the infants show a difference in color preference? Why would that effect only be noticed in terms of toy preference?
Also, the reason they believe that it's not a social factor is because they found similar results in monkeys. Infant male monkeys had a stronger preference for wheeled toys as well. Given that monkeys are unlikely to naturally have toys for their offspring or socially constructed gender roles, it seems to point to biological underpinnings that evolved at some point before humans became divergent as a species, although it would be necessary to conduct a similar study with other groups of primates in order to ascertain whether or not it's something that evolved independently in both species.
Humans are sexually dimorphic. It's been known for some time that male and female children develop at different rates (e.g. boys tend to develop fine motor skills more slowly, but develop gross motor skills more quickly) and once puberty hits have rather stark physical differences in terms of muscular development and strength. Is it really that difficult to accept that there are differences in the ways that the brain develops between the two sexes and that this manifests in subtle differences such as toy preference?
There's probably nothing that prohibits anyone with capable intelligence from learning anything, but there may be underlying differences in the sexes due to the way our brains are physically different, which is just as good of an explanation as to why men and women have different writing styles. I lean towards that explanation as opposed to social factors, simply because there is other research that points to biological sex determining behavior. For example, young children of opposite sexes have different toy preferences. There's evidence to suggest that some things are certainly acquired due to social factors: color preference for example.
I've heard other interesting theories for the disparity as well such as autism-spectrum disorders being more prevalent in males than females and that people who are have more mild forms of disorders along that spectrum tend to be more attracted to computers and machines than they are to occupations that involve dealing with people. This also explains the stereotype of engineers and computer scientists being socially awkward, which there is some truth to.
If he would have had other money in a different account that couldn't be directly linked to the enterprise, they probably wouldn't be able to touch it. However imagine if it were a more typical drug bust and they had seized a pile of cash at a warehouse, etc. All of that would be held as well and wouldn't be useful to the defendant to pay legal fees, unless there were a lawyer willing to accept a promise of payment based on the assumption that the money would be returned on a non-guilty verdict.
The moral of the story: If you're going to do something illegal, don't keep all of the money in one place.
To be fair, it seems like a lot of online journalism in general reaches for inflammatory, click-bait headlines because that's what's most profitable. As print journalism continues to fade, many have discovered that it's far easier (and more profitable) to push out 20 opinion pieces that only barely qualify as news or are little more than a regurgitation of company press releases than it is to spend the time carefully researching a single story. There are plenty of sites that also pander to certain market segments (Mac fans, Linux users, car enthusiasts, etc.) and get their traffic that way.
Every other agenda already seems to have an outlet, so why should it be surprising that there are people who are willing to pander to a new segment of the market because it practically guarantees them money. Plenty of others have made a fortune doing it.
Or just any *nix. I've got some machines that are well passed that point that are still happy running recent versions of various Linux distros. They're obviously not the workhorses they once were, but they're still capable of running the latest versions of the OS (granted that doesn't include all of the bells and whistles that have been tacked on to the UI) and the only real reason to consider them obsolete is that over time it would be cheaper to replace them with a single machine running multiple VMs simply because the newer machine would consume far less power due to improvements in efficiency.
Doubtful. Walk into most gas stations or any major retail store and you're under video surveillance and their notification amounts to a sticker on the window of the door or on the wall as you enter the building. If there's a notification on the visor, that would be sufficient in my opinion. Those are about as non-intrusive as it gets so why should a car be held to higher standards?
The parts that aren't deserts tend to receive a rather high average rainfall. See the following images showing areas of the world which are deserts and the average rainfall: Average rainfall and desert distribution. Just because the majority of Earth's deserts are in the tropics doesn't also mean that it doesn't receive some of the highest average rainfall.
Also a military submarine is a hell of a lot bigger than an octopus or a fish. Eventually you would reach a size where the solution doesn't scale anywhere near as well. Otherwise you could conceivably build one of these so large that moving 10 times its body length in one second would travel faster than light. While that would require a rather massive vessel, it's quite obvious that the idea wouldn't work even if we could build such a vessel.
I think the problem comes from medical professionals only or almost always dealing with the people who are having terrible health problems. If the only time you see older people is when they're in pain or suffering from horrible illness, you wouldn't want to be old either. I suspect that as many of them actually age they find that they still enjoy life and that when they retire they're able to spend time with their families and grandkids and that being old isn't a constant state of suffering or misery. However, medical professionals are only exposed to the worst of old age, so it's hardly surprising that they have such a negative outlook.
It's easy to sit back from my position and say that, but I would imagine that my opinions would change if the vast majority of my day were spent being confronted with what happens to people who don't take care of their bodies or experiencing other illnesses that aren't currently preventable. If nothing else, one would think that this would motivate medical professionals to take good care of their health, so they can avoid finding themselves in that position.