The first posts on the 15 year old Slashdot article linked here suggest something darker and more interesting than what I watched last weekend. This Alita was a remix of Pinocchio, Ben Hur and a few others. It looked very well made but to me it didn't feel really new. I'm just too old compared to the target audience, I guess.
Imagine all (or a lot of) the people... earning enough money to cover their needs and then spending time advancing free projects. A lot of rubbish would be produced, but occasionally we'd get something as good as Wikipedia.
So net expected migration would be away from the equator because the rest of the world gets a little nicer, not because the equator gets worse. (Except for flooding, which the jury is still out on)
It's not just surface temperature and the weather feeling nice/not nice for people.
With coral reefs dying out due to change in water temperature and acidity, you should expect migration away from many areas where this causes food security to be affected, independently from the distance to the equator. I don't know if Indonesia and the Indochina region count as "near the equator" for this conversation, but I'd say that mass migration in such populous countries will cause a lot more suffering than what happens in Australia when their summer maximum temperatures become really high.
Imagine a bell shaped curve for a distribution of the number of civilisations per... area. We could be in one of the star systems that has nothing around it, while there could be other star systems with 1 or more civilisations, surrounded by other such star systems. They are close enough to see each other, and have all sorts of Star Wars/Star Trek type of interactions, while we are here in the middle of nowhere.
Infinity War stole the show in terms of blockbusters but there were plenty of other mainstream films worth watching.
A Star is Born was a top movie despite Eddie Vedder advising friend Bradley Coopper not to go ahead with this remake. Turns out Bradley looks like a taller and more intoxicated Eddie in some parts of the film. I'll get the original soundtrack one of these days. Lady Gaga was awesome, in the proper sense of awesome.
Still on this musical theme, Bohemian Rhapsody did what it had to do to make quite a few Queen fans happy, and while it was a 2017 release, I watched Coco in January 2018, so I'll say it's a *beautifully* made film. Pixar at their best. Sorry, but not too sorry for mentioning it in this 2018 thread. Yardie and its Jamaican sound systems made for a good debut for director Idris Elba.
Ready Player One was quite a spectacular thing, somewhat funny because of all the gaming references. Tomb Raider had Alicia Vikander enact many scenes from the recent game I played, it was interesting at that level. Widows had some seriously bad ass villains.
So many sequels... Deadpool is worth watching for a laugh with your mates, Solo: A SW Story and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom were enjoyable at the time but probably more memorable for the investors than for me. Ocean's 8 was good fun, especially the social engineering demo in the first few minutes. Ant Man and the Wasp was good enough to recover from the Infinity War hangover without feeling a Marvel overdose. Creed II had a part where I felt like the film was a pointless remake, but then they turned it around well.
BlackKKKlansman was funny and creepy, The First Purge was just creepy, The Meg was so bad and so cliche'd that it becomes good. There must be a movie-badness-continuum, but Mission Impossible: Fall out just could not get acros to the good side:)
That's a bold statement to come from the world's largest car maker. Automotive development cycles are long. What if they get it wrong and EVs don't prove to be universally applicable; for example because some can't charge at their homes?
Perhaps the change from ICE to other-powered-vehicles will also result in redefining market segments and regions where they want to sell. With the knowledge of the markets these guys have, maybe they understand what are the markets where they are going to be big winners and those where divesting makes more sense.
VW Group owns many brands, and they don't mean the same to customers in different geographies. It could happen that VW and Audi move 100% carbon neutral, while Skoda or Seat retain a few petrol variants for specific markets. Ducati are also owned by the group and they will probably want to keep selling exotic V twin engined bikes for a long time.
If the VW group also has heavy goods or military or emergency vehicles in their portfolio, some will be well suited for electrification and others might not be at all. The group can look at their data and make big decisions about all those matters.
It said that people and businesses are fleeing the State in droves which is absolutely true and factual.
Do you have a good source for that?
I'm not American, but when I find stats on this subject, I get the impression that California population growth rate is reducing, which is compatible with what you said but I don't think was what you meant.
Fun fact: A high school student working less that 20 hours a week at minimum wage makes more than 90% of the rest of humanity.
Do you have other fun facts about housing costs or the cost of living in general?
My understanding is that in the USA land is much cheaper than over here in the UK, but the overall situation is similar: if you want to be employable, you have to live in the right places. The alternatives all can have very serious drawbacks: - relocating across regions can be very expensive - moving to where the jobs are involves seriously expensive rent - living where the jobs are can mean forever be someone's housemate, instead of enjoying a more conventional family life.
Where I'm getting at is that the first mover advantage and real estate costs trump everything, and the high nominal salaries mean very little. IMHO, this is especially true when comparing to back in the day when cities were being built; or comparing to non-western world places where the quality of life is way inferior to what we know was available to our family 40 or 50 years ago.
It's annoying we don't all have flying cars, but the real disappointment is to look at the 21st century and having to settle for "at least we get smartphones instead of polio".
Like the guy says, "Ads in your inbox. Sounds like something you'd expect from the likes of Google or Yahoo" Somehow, if the ads are not showing on the browser and instead they are on a desktop application, then it's a big deal. What is wrong with you people?
When I open my Gmail box, there are advertisements showing at the top of the message list, with a subject and sender, to make them look like a normal email. I've been using Gmail for 10+ years, free of charge, so it's kind of shitty to complain.
Plenty of mobile apps do worse. They have the sort of irritating pop up ads that made adblock a necessity. They have silly excuses for games with 50 too-easy-to-be-playable game levels just to have more opportunities to display interstitial ads. The ads have minuscule "close buttons" in random places, made for hopefully getting clickthroughs by accident. That's OK as well, if the rest of the app is free(mium). Pretty bad after spending £600+ on a smartphone, heh?
But Microsoft? NOOO! Microsoft gives the desktop email client for free, like they've done with Outlook Express and the 2012 Essentials email application, maybe with a free mail service like the one from Google or Yahoo et. al. and then they decide to push their ads, people lose their minds on Slashdot. Windows being a paid for OS does not mean that everything connected to Windows should be included in the price.
With 1% annual growth rate the technical term for Microsoft's PC effort is "vanity project"
Sorry, no. It's not a vanity project. It's a very much needed strategy to stop Microsoft from being the guys who sell unloved old-school software to old people who will run it on ugly machines; while Apple and Google sell a great ecosystem of desirable devices running all the popular apps. It should be obvious which way would be a dead end.
I'm all for car drivers and pedestrians to wear crash helmets. As well as offering protection from impact, making HUDs mainstream would be safer than walking or driving around looking down at smartphone screens.
Here are two different perspectives on that: 1) The end of Windows started a long time ago when Android became a real competitor, free of charge and with excellent hardware compatibility out of the box.
2) The end of Windows will not really happen. It just becomes an OS commanding a smaller share of overall number of OS buyers than back in the day. How this corresponds to real market share (in money) and to real revenue, I don't know.
Nobody knows and that's a knowledge gap that has certainly been reduced by telemetry. Back in the day, people could read about number of units shipped, about licenses sold and come up with some sort of estimate. Today, if Microsoft really wanted to disclose the number of active devices, they probably could.
I dunno, food insecurity because in the last 2 years nobody did anything about logistics capacity in UK ports looks pretty bad.
If I have to choose between bad copyright laws with a full stomach, or good copyright laws on an empty stomach with a side of Theresa May's snooping charter... I think I'll go with bad copyright laws and hope to change them asap.
This is a huge money pit and the UK should shut this off, or at least dial it back, until they can figure out how to better manage wind power than paying the windmill owners to not produce power.
Here's a suggestion: instead of having multiple private companies involved, this could all be money moving from one pocket of a public energy company to another pocket of the same company, without the tax payer being burdened by the inefficiency of this made-up "competitive market".
Solar is not a solution, it can be part of the solution but it is not a solution on it's own. Hydro, nuclear, and wind are solutions. The main part is that hydro, nuclear, and wind must ALL be included in the solution. Without all three the solution falls apart.
Oh, and natural gas. It's going to be difficult to go all hydro, nuclear, and wind at once. Until that happens we should use lots of natural gas to get off of coal and oil.
hi
from all that what stands out for me is the criticism of solar electricity generation. Some of the stats you have there for ROI are US-based, while the "ideal" mix is based on experience from countries in the north of Europe. I think we probably will have different optimal solutions and varying ROI depending on the place. Logistics, availability of capital, sun hours per day and quality of the distribution grid will be important factors, and the availability of historical data for alternative energy is also skewed by early adoption in wealthier countries.
In short: I wouldn't dismiss photovoltaic just because hydro/nuclear/wind have better historical better performance.
Once different countries get serious about phasing out fossil fuel, some will have local advantages in using solar vs wind, or will not have the capital for nuclear, or will prefer not to convert to gas altogether. YMMV.
Literally, the headline. European Parliament has no actual legislative power. It just has a power of veto. All legislation must come from European Commission, which European Parliament gets to vote on. It's a "yes/no" vote with no right to modify the package and vote on the modified legislation.
Rather than linking to the source, maybe pointing at the right part of that document would have been more useful. From the link:
How does the Parliament work? Parliament's work comprises two main stages: Committees - to prepare legislation. The Parliament numbers 20 committees and two subcommittees, each handling a particular policy area. The committees examine proposals for legislation, and MEPs and political groups can put forward amendments or propose to reject a bill. These issues are also debated within the political groups.
To look at this and conclude that the parliament does not have legislative power is a bit of a stretch.
This is a power comparable to a veto power, and by definition is not a legislative power as the name "Parliament" and its supposedly being a "legislative branch" would imply.
IDK.
In most states, this is a power comparable to one of the powers held by the executive, who gets to veto legislative packages or approve them by signing.
The EU is not a state and is not a federation (at the time of writing). Their rules and ways of working can be compared but really it's not fair to disqualify what goes on in Brussels/Strasbourg just because it does not match exactly what works in a national context.
It's also the only actual power European Parliament has, and of the key issues with EU's legislative system and why EU is routinely criticised for being undemocratic.
People do like to moan and the EU and that kind of comment sound to me like the kind of thing that people repeat rather than understand or care much about. In any case, yes, people do say that the EU is undemocratic. Is there a point is measuring and comparing democratic-ness? What guarantees could ever be that having the EU legislate in the same way as the USA, India, Australia, Germany, Russia or any other federation would be suitable for this unique organisation?
It's something closer to an early Roman Senate, where unelected aristocrats selected by other members of aristocracy similar to the current state of European Commission gets to decide on what legislation to run through
I particularly dislike this comparison as it suggests that the EC is unfairly appointed, or that somehow they are not elected by the people. The European Commission is appointed by the governments of member states and those have been elected according to the rules of each member state. The role of the commissioner has similarities with that of ministers for specific areas. I don't know about other countries, but in the UK people don't vote for "who should be the minister for education". No, people vote for a party and while there are candidates that are expected to become ministers, nobody really knows in advance whether Boris Johnson or Lord Buckethead are going to be appointed.
[...] and the plebeian Tribune of the latter days of Roman Republic (the European Parliament) can either block the legislative package or accept it, but has no legal ability to change the contents of the legislation.
The text linked earlier suggests that there is a production line between the commission, council and parliament. It does not look that clear cut that the parliament is unable to make changes or propose changes before there is a vote by MEPs.
As a result, unless it's a Commission's legislative initiative, it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
Thats the cynical and conspiracy theory world view. An alternative to that is that Saudi Arabia will still sell oil for making plastics and many other useful products, while being involved in the business that replaces some of the oil burning for transportation. Much more money to be earned in business than in hoping that battery business will slow down.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for going to Mars and sending someone there.
Agreed. Send Trump & Pence :D
The first posts on the 15 year old Slashdot article linked here suggest something darker and more interesting than what I watched last weekend.
This Alita was a remix of Pinocchio, Ben Hur and a few others. It looked very well made but to me it didn't feel really new. I'm just too old compared to the target audience, I guess.
And was that mistake the greatest of all times?
Imagine all (or a lot of) the people... earning enough money to cover their needs and then spending time advancing free projects. A lot of rubbish would be produced, but occasionally we'd get something as good as Wikipedia.
Totally agree. We should get an additional sun.
So net expected migration would be away from the equator because the rest of the world gets a little nicer, not because the equator gets worse. (Except for flooding, which the jury is still out on)
It's not just surface temperature and the weather feeling nice/not nice for people.
With coral reefs dying out due to change in water temperature and acidity, you should expect migration away from many areas where this causes food security to be affected, independently from the distance to the equator.
I don't know if Indonesia and the Indochina region count as "near the equator" for this conversation, but I'd say that mass migration in such populous countries will cause a lot more suffering than what happens in Australia when their summer maximum temperatures become really high.
c) A sort of mixed scenario.
Imagine a bell shaped curve for a distribution of the number of civilisations per... area. We could be in one of the star systems that has nothing around it, while there could be other star systems with 1 or more civilisations, surrounded by other such star systems.
They are close enough to see each other, and have all sorts of Star Wars/Star Trek type of interactions, while we are here in the middle of nowhere.
Is the state gluten-free?
Infinity War stole the show in terms of blockbusters but there were plenty of other mainstream films worth watching.
A Star is Born was a top movie despite Eddie Vedder advising friend Bradley Coopper not to go ahead with this remake. Turns out Bradley looks like a taller and more intoxicated Eddie in some parts of the film. I'll get the original soundtrack one of these days. Lady Gaga was awesome, in the proper sense of awesome.
Still on this musical theme, Bohemian Rhapsody did what it had to do to make quite a few Queen fans happy, and while it was a 2017 release, I watched Coco in January 2018, so I'll say it's a *beautifully* made film. Pixar at their best. Sorry, but not too sorry for mentioning it in this 2018 thread. Yardie and its Jamaican sound systems made for a good debut for director Idris Elba.
Ready Player One was quite a spectacular thing, somewhat funny because of all the gaming references. Tomb Raider had Alicia Vikander enact many scenes from the recent game I played, it was interesting at that level. Widows had some seriously bad ass villains.
So many sequels... Deadpool is worth watching for a laugh with your mates, Solo: A SW Story and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom were enjoyable at the time but probably more memorable for the investors than for me. Ocean's 8 was good fun, especially the social engineering demo in the first few minutes. Ant Man and the Wasp was good enough to recover from the Infinity War hangover without feeling a Marvel overdose. Creed II had a part where I felt like the film was a pointless remake, but then they turned it around well.
BlackKKKlansman was funny and creepy, The First Purge was just creepy, The Meg was so bad and so cliche'd that it becomes good. There must be a movie-badness-continuum, but Mission Impossible: Fall out just could not get acros to the good side :)
That's a bold statement to come from the world's largest car maker. Automotive development cycles are long. What if they get it wrong and EVs don't prove to be universally applicable; for example because some can't charge at their homes?
Perhaps the change from ICE to other-powered-vehicles will also result in redefining market segments and regions where they want to sell. With the knowledge of the markets these guys have, maybe they understand what are the markets where they are going to be big winners and those where divesting makes more sense.
VW Group owns many brands, and they don't mean the same to customers in different geographies. It could happen that VW and Audi move 100% carbon neutral, while Skoda or Seat retain a few petrol variants for specific markets. Ducati are also owned by the group and they will probably want to keep selling exotic V twin engined bikes for a long time.
If the VW group also has heavy goods or military or emergency vehicles in their portfolio, some will be well suited for electrification and others might not be at all. The group can look at their data and make big decisions about all those matters.
Is Excel + PowerPivot + Power BI very distant from what you are after?
It said that people and businesses are fleeing the State in droves which is absolutely true and factual.
Do you have a good source for that?
I'm not American, but when I find stats on this subject, I get the impression that California population growth rate is reducing, which is compatible with what you said but I don't think was what you meant.
Fun fact: A high school student working less that 20 hours a week at minimum wage makes more than 90% of the rest of humanity.
Do you have other fun facts about housing costs or the cost of living in general?
My understanding is that in the USA land is much cheaper than over here in the UK, but the overall situation is similar: if you want to be employable, you have to live in the right places. The alternatives all can have very serious drawbacks:
- relocating across regions can be very expensive
- moving to where the jobs are involves seriously expensive rent
- living where the jobs are can mean forever be someone's housemate, instead of enjoying a more conventional family life.
Where I'm getting at is that the first mover advantage and real estate costs trump everything, and the high nominal salaries mean very little. IMHO, this is especially true when comparing to back in the day when cities were being built; or comparing to non-western world places where the quality of life is way inferior to what we know was available to our family 40 or 50 years ago.
It's annoying we don't all have flying cars, but the real disappointment is to look at the 21st century and having to settle for "at least we get smartphones instead of polio".
Like the guy says, "Ads in your inbox. Sounds like something you'd expect from the likes of Google or Yahoo"
Somehow, if the ads are not showing on the browser and instead they are on a desktop application, then it's a big deal. What is wrong with you people?
When I open my Gmail box, there are advertisements showing at the top of the message list, with a subject and sender, to make them look like a normal email. I've been using Gmail for 10+ years, free of charge, so it's kind of shitty to complain.
Plenty of mobile apps do worse. They have the sort of irritating pop up ads that made adblock a necessity. They have silly excuses for games with 50 too-easy-to-be-playable game levels just to have more opportunities to display interstitial ads. The ads have minuscule "close buttons" in random places, made for hopefully getting clickthroughs by accident. That's OK as well, if the rest of the app is free(mium). Pretty bad after spending £600+ on a smartphone, heh?
But Microsoft? NOOO!
Microsoft gives the desktop email client for free, like they've done with Outlook Express and the 2012 Essentials email application, maybe with a free mail service like the one from Google or Yahoo et. al. and then they decide to push their ads, people lose their minds on Slashdot. Windows being a paid for OS does not mean that everything connected to Windows should be included in the price.
Get a grip.
With 1% annual growth rate the technical term for Microsoft's PC effort is "vanity project"
Sorry, no. It's not a vanity project. It's a very much needed strategy to stop Microsoft from being the guys who sell unloved old-school software to old people who will run it on ugly machines; while Apple and Google sell a great ecosystem of desirable devices running all the popular apps.
It should be obvious which way would be a dead end.
I'm all for car drivers and pedestrians to wear crash helmets. As well as offering protection from impact, making HUDs mainstream would be safer than walking or driving around looking down at smartphone screens.
this is the beginning of the end for Windows.
Here are two different perspectives on that:
1) The end of Windows started a long time ago when Android became a real competitor, free of charge and with excellent hardware compatibility out of the box.
2) The end of Windows will not really happen. It just becomes an OS commanding a smaller share of overall number of OS buyers than back in the day. How this corresponds to real market share (in money) and to real revenue, I don't know.
Bill monthly :)
Nobody knows and that's a knowledge gap that has certainly been reduced by telemetry.
Back in the day, people could read about number of units shipped, about licenses sold and come up with some sort of estimate. Today, if Microsoft really wanted to disclose the number of active devices, they probably could.
I dunno, food insecurity because in the last 2 years nobody did anything about logistics capacity in UK ports looks pretty bad.
If I have to choose between bad copyright laws with a full stomach, or good copyright laws on an empty stomach with a side of Theresa May's snooping charter... I think I'll go with bad copyright laws and hope to change them asap.
This is a huge money pit and the UK should shut this off, or at least dial it back, until they can figure out how to better manage wind power than paying the windmill owners to not produce power.
Here's a suggestion: instead of having multiple private companies involved, this could all be money moving from one pocket of a public energy company to another pocket of the same company, without the tax payer being burdened by the inefficiency of this made-up "competitive market".
Solar is not a solution, it can be part of the solution but it is not a solution on it's own. Hydro, nuclear, and wind are solutions. The main part is that hydro, nuclear, and wind must ALL be included in the solution. Without all three the solution falls apart.
Oh, and natural gas. It's going to be difficult to go all hydro, nuclear, and wind at once. Until that happens we should use lots of natural gas to get off of coal and oil.
hi
from all that what stands out for me is the criticism of solar electricity generation.
Some of the stats you have there for ROI are US-based, while the "ideal" mix is based on experience from countries in the north of Europe. I think we probably will have different optimal solutions and varying ROI depending on the place. Logistics, availability of capital, sun hours per day and quality of the distribution grid will be important factors, and the availability of historical data for alternative energy is also skewed by early adoption in wealthier countries.
In short: I wouldn't dismiss photovoltaic just because hydro/nuclear/wind have better historical better performance.
Once different countries get serious about phasing out fossil fuel, some will have local advantages in using solar vs wind, or will not have the capital for nuclear, or will prefer not to convert to gas altogether. YMMV.
(PS: I like solar)
Literally, the headline. European Parliament has no actual legislative power. It just has a power of veto. All legislation must come from European Commission, which European Parliament gets to vote on. It's a "yes/no" vote with no right to modify the package and vote on the modified legislation.
Rather than linking to the source, maybe pointing at the right part of that document would have been more useful.
From the link:
How does the Parliament work?
Parliament's work comprises two main stages:
Committees - to prepare legislation.
The Parliament numbers 20 committees and two subcommittees, each handling a particular policy area. The committees examine proposals for legislation, and MEPs and political groups can put forward amendments or propose to reject a bill. These issues are also debated within the political groups.
To look at this and conclude that the parliament does not have legislative power is a bit of a stretch.
This is a power comparable to a veto power, and by definition is not a legislative power as the name "Parliament" and its supposedly being a "legislative branch" would imply.
IDK.
In most states, this is a power comparable to one of the powers held by the executive, who gets to veto legislative packages or approve them by signing.
The EU is not a state and is not a federation (at the time of writing). Their rules and ways of working can be compared but really it's not fair to disqualify what goes on in Brussels/Strasbourg just because it does not match exactly what works in a national context.
It's also the only actual power European Parliament has, and of the key issues with EU's legislative system and why EU is routinely criticised for being undemocratic.
People do like to moan and the EU and that kind of comment sound to me like the kind of thing that people repeat rather than understand or care much about. In any case, yes, people do say that the EU is undemocratic. Is there a point is measuring and comparing democratic-ness? What guarantees could ever be that having the EU legislate in the same way as the USA, India, Australia, Germany, Russia or any other federation would be suitable for this unique organisation?
It's something closer to an early Roman Senate, where unelected aristocrats selected by other members of aristocracy similar to the current state of European Commission gets to decide on what legislation to run through
I particularly dislike this comparison as it suggests that the EC is unfairly appointed, or that somehow they are not elected by the people. The European Commission is appointed by the governments of member states and those have been elected according to the rules of each member state. The role of the commissioner has similarities with that of ministers for specific areas. I don't know about other countries, but in the UK people don't vote for "who should be the minister for education". No, people vote for a party and while there are candidates that are expected to become ministers, nobody really knows in advance whether Boris Johnson or Lord Buckethead are going to be appointed.
[...] and the plebeian Tribune of the latter days of Roman Republic (the European Parliament) can either block the legislative package or accept it, but has no legal ability to change the contents of the legislation.
The text linked earlier suggests that there is a production line between the commission, council and parliament. It does not look that clear cut that the parliament is unable to make changes or propose changes before there is a vote by MEPs.
As a result, unless it's a Commission's legislative initiative, it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
Harsh.
Thats the cynical and conspiracy theory world view. An alternative to that is that Saudi Arabia will still sell oil for making plastics and many other useful products, while being involved in the business that replaces some of the oil burning for transportation. Much more money to be earned in business than in hoping that battery business will slow down.
It has design faults and inconsistencies that were in Win3.1 and still haven't been fixed.
That's a very strange kind of inconsistency.