This was true until about five years ago when Steve outsourced the division to a company China, which in contracted the actual work to various groups in Africa.
Better yet, what happens if a lot of people start setting their own balloons as decoys? I.e. how quickly can people coordinate a network of disinformation?
Regardless of what their intentions are, they're gathering data on us. How we react, how quickly, how cohesively, whether we react at all, etc. That's the thing about sociological experiments; they always produce data.
The data will be useful. It won't help bring a man to Mars, or fight terrorists in Afghanistan, but it will be useful in some way, shape or form. What they may then do is, based on the responses or lack thereof to this challenge, modify their next sociological experiment to hopefully attain a different dataset.
Android can potentially run on any device. While it has made the most noise in the phone market, it may now be sufficient for small hardware manufacturers to slap Android on their GPS-enabled device and call it a GPS without having to go through the trouble of buying maps and coding their own shortest path algorithm. This is what's worrisome.
Don't blame the Chinese, blame the Western culture of consumption, in particular the American culture of use-and-throw-away. It's free market principles at work. There's a need for cheap goods, and the Chinese came in to fill that need. If they didn't, well, somebody else would have.
That having been said, the US is still a huge exporter of products that needs to reliably meet spec, as Chinese products are largely associated with cheap as opposed to reliable. Products that get used only once or twice before being thrown away or put in a box somewhere don't really need to be terribly reliable. Until they can solve that QA problem, there's plenty of room for Western "quality" players. It's only when those companies start cutting corners that they can't compete anymore.
What this signifies, potentially, is that China will enter competition into higher-quality goods. What to do about it, well, is the question at hand.
Funny thing is, drivers tend to be better in Asian countries than in the US. Actually, drivers tend to be better everywhere else.
There are two reasons I can think of for this:
1) Driving is more exclusive, and so only the better drivers get to drive. 2) They don't treat driving like a walk in the park, and treat it like driving.
They should just take this into account on the driving test. You don't need a genetic screen. Just make the test (road or written or otherwise) take this into account. That way, people who shouldn't be on the road won't be, and the people who are on the road won't suffer because of it.
Well, yes and no. I like your sibling's response better though. It's not about laws, it's about the predictability of your behavior. And the laws usually support this. But occasionally, you have speed traps that go from 65 to 25 on a bend, and you suddenly have to short stop to stay within the speed limit. That's unpredictable behavior mandated by the law.
So it's not about the laws, it's about your individual behavior with respect to others. It's not far off from what you're saying though. It just means that if everybody on the road is doing 80 on a 65, you better not be doing 60 on the left lane and thinking there's something wrong with everybody else.
Few accidents are the result of a driver forgetting how to drive, they are the result of a driver not knowing how to really drive in the first place
This is a false dichotomy. Accidents don't happen in a vacuum. They're usually comprised of several factors. Aggressive driving is one factor, but by itself, it's not sufficient to cause an accident. An unexpected event like a pedestrian runnig out is a second factor, but also not necessarily enough to cause an accident, even when said pedestrian runs out into an aggressive driver. And a driver who forgets how to drive, even momentarily, won't necessarily cause an accident, even with any one of the above factors in play.
Put all three together however, and that changes things significantly.
Safety requires all three aspects. Anybody thinking that their aggressive driving won't cause an accident because they know what they're doing is delusional. Anybody thinking that they can drive however they like so long as they're within the limits of the law is delusional. Anybody thinking that driving is time for pleasure, relaxation, or unwinding, is delusional.
Driving is about cooperation. Cooperation with the conditions of the road, with the other drivers on the road, and with the other elements that can enter the road. Since drivers have no control over what enters the road (pedestrians, a dog, etc.), a good driver needs both things you've described, an ability to make predicitons, and an ability to react to the unpredictable. The former is tied to experience and training, which is why new drivers are far more dangerous, because they're lacking in both (you can't honestly call the driving test real training).
The article implies that a certain subset of people are lacking in the ability to retain this. It means that their driving ability is automatically decreased. Even if they can react unnaturally quickly, even if they're typically "safe" drivers that drive within the limits of the law, they're still more prone to accidents by nature of their deficit. Even if they drive slower and less aggressive, if their training doesn't kick in at a moment of need, they're still more likely to get into an accident.
In the end though, it's about chance. When something major happens, your ability to avoid it is really about whether you're feeling lucky or not.
Granted they say it would have to be proven much smaller than a planck length for most people to accept this as empirical proof
You mean most physicists. Most people couldn't tell you what qualifies as empirical proof, much less what planck's length is, if it hit them on the head.
Don't knock the comedians. Most comedians are very intelligent people, and as knowledgable or more than the averaged informed person. They are so intelligent, in fact, that they long ago realized that the best way to put out controversial statements is through comedy, that the best way to combat ridiculousness is not by shouting it down, but through ridicule.
You can't say certain things and get away with it, but comedians can in their routine. Why do you think the Daily Show and Colbert Report are so popular? They say the things that we're all thinking, but we can't say for fear of the repurcussions. You don't see people calling Jon Stewart or Steven Colbert unpatriotic when they constantly derided Bush and co. But any other public figure would've had hell to pay had they said the same thing, on or off the air.
So don't go knocking comedians. They make people think while making them laugh.
You could say that the universe is forever splitting into infinitely many versions every instant, or that the wave function of the universe is getting infinitely more complex every instant...
Maybe this accounts for entropy, and why it cannot be reversed?
Slashdot Mirror
The same can be said of Windows software. Perhaps there's a potential selling point there:
Windows 7. Runs 80% of software written for Windows XP.
This was true until about five years ago when Steve outsourced the division to a company China, which in contracted the actual work to various groups in Africa.
And you wonder why ninjas hate pirates.
To answer this question, I reference Idiocracy.
Fortunately, it'll only be a matter of time before the creators bypass the distribution companies entirely.
perform DDoS attacks on Royal Navy ships
It doesn't help that said navy ships are also running Windows.
They did that already.
Better yet, what happens if a lot of people start setting their own balloons as decoys? I.e. how quickly can people coordinate a network of disinformation?
Well, at least those guys actually were doing something to earn their money. Some others got money handed to them and it went into a big black hole.
Regardless of what their intentions are, they're gathering data on us. How we react, how quickly, how cohesively, whether we react at all, etc. That's the thing about sociological experiments; they always produce data.
The data will be useful. It won't help bring a man to Mars, or fight terrorists in Afghanistan, but it will be useful in some way, shape or form. What they may then do is, based on the responses or lack thereof to this challenge, modify their next sociological experiment to hopefully attain a different dataset.
Android can potentially run on any device. While it has made the most noise in the phone market, it may now be sufficient for small hardware manufacturers to slap Android on their GPS-enabled device and call it a GPS without having to go through the trouble of buying maps and coding their own shortest path algorithm. This is what's worrisome.
Don't blame the Chinese, blame the Western culture of consumption, in particular the American culture of use-and-throw-away. It's free market principles at work. There's a need for cheap goods, and the Chinese came in to fill that need. If they didn't, well, somebody else would have.
That having been said, the US is still a huge exporter of products that needs to reliably meet spec, as Chinese products are largely associated with cheap as opposed to reliable. Products that get used only once or twice before being thrown away or put in a box somewhere don't really need to be terribly reliable. Until they can solve that QA problem, there's plenty of room for Western "quality" players. It's only when those companies start cutting corners that they can't compete anymore.
What this signifies, potentially, is that China will enter competition into higher-quality goods. What to do about it, well, is the question at hand.
We stopped being in Kansas a long time ago. Or maybe Kansas stopped being in us, for most of us anyway.
Let me know how you make out when you're getting passed on the right and on the left and the guy in front of you blows a tire.
Funny thing is, drivers tend to be better in Asian countries than in the US. Actually, drivers tend to be better everywhere else.
There are two reasons I can think of for this:
1) Driving is more exclusive, and so only the better drivers get to drive.
2) They don't treat driving like a walk in the park, and treat it like driving.
They should just take this into account on the driving test. You don't need a genetic screen. Just make the test (road or written or otherwise) take this into account. That way, people who shouldn't be on the road won't be, and the people who are on the road won't suffer because of it.
Well, yes and no. I like your sibling's response better though. It's not about laws, it's about the predictability of your behavior. And the laws usually support this. But occasionally, you have speed traps that go from 65 to 25 on a bend, and you suddenly have to short stop to stay within the speed limit. That's unpredictable behavior mandated by the law.
So it's not about the laws, it's about your individual behavior with respect to others. It's not far off from what you're saying though. It just means that if everybody on the road is doing 80 on a 65, you better not be doing 60 on the left lane and thinking there's something wrong with everybody else.
Few accidents are the result of a driver forgetting how to drive, they are the result of a driver not knowing how to really drive in the first place
This is a false dichotomy. Accidents don't happen in a vacuum. They're usually comprised of several factors. Aggressive driving is one factor, but by itself, it's not sufficient to cause an accident. An unexpected event like a pedestrian runnig out is a second factor, but also not necessarily enough to cause an accident, even when said pedestrian runs out into an aggressive driver. And a driver who forgets how to drive, even momentarily, won't necessarily cause an accident, even with any one of the above factors in play.
Put all three together however, and that changes things significantly.
Safety requires all three aspects. Anybody thinking that their aggressive driving won't cause an accident because they know what they're doing is delusional. Anybody thinking that they can drive however they like so long as they're within the limits of the law is delusional. Anybody thinking that driving is time for pleasure, relaxation, or unwinding, is delusional.
Driving is about cooperation. Cooperation with the conditions of the road, with the other drivers on the road, and with the other elements that can enter the road. Since drivers have no control over what enters the road (pedestrians, a dog, etc.), a good driver needs both things you've described, an ability to make predicitons, and an ability to react to the unpredictable. The former is tied to experience and training, which is why new drivers are far more dangerous, because they're lacking in both (you can't honestly call the driving test real training).
The article implies that a certain subset of people are lacking in the ability to retain this. It means that their driving ability is automatically decreased. Even if they can react unnaturally quickly, even if they're typically "safe" drivers that drive within the limits of the law, they're still more prone to accidents by nature of their deficit. Even if they drive slower and less aggressive, if their training doesn't kick in at a moment of need, they're still more likely to get into an accident.
In the end though, it's about chance. When something major happens, your ability to avoid it is really about whether you're feeling lucky or not.
Granted they say it would have to be proven much smaller than a planck length for most people to accept this as empirical proof
You mean most physicists. Most people couldn't tell you what qualifies as empirical proof, much less what planck's length is, if it hit them on the head.
Don't knock the comedians. Most comedians are very intelligent people, and as knowledgable or more than the averaged informed person. They are so intelligent, in fact, that they long ago realized that the best way to put out controversial statements is through comedy, that the best way to combat ridiculousness is not by shouting it down, but through ridicule.
You can't say certain things and get away with it, but comedians can in their routine. Why do you think the Daily Show and Colbert Report are so popular? They say the things that we're all thinking, but we can't say for fear of the repurcussions. You don't see people calling Jon Stewart or Steven Colbert unpatriotic when they constantly derided Bush and co. But any other public figure would've had hell to pay had they said the same thing, on or off the air.
So don't go knocking comedians. They make people think while making them laugh.
What's more interesting is that the URL parser here has parsed your second link to go to:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/14/1219215/com/example/foo/bar/baz
Funny thing is, the forward slash is actually going backwards when text written. And the backslash is actually going forwards.
Switch to - for switches, or put in intelligent command line parsing like UNIX has?
You could say that the universe is forever splitting into infinitely many versions every instant, or that the wave function of the universe is getting infinitely more complex every instant...
Maybe this accounts for entropy, and why it cannot be reversed?
that is only kept intact by the fact that if it didn't stay intact, we wouldn't be here to notice.
Maybe it's the other way around: If we weren't here to notice it, the universe wouldn't stay intact.
Hey, what do you have against Argentina?