whether the technology creates an unrealistic expectation of having to have "perfectly smooth looking" skin
As the article alludes, this is nothing more than a digital form of makeup. And that has been used for decades for TV and films - and even longer in the real world.
There really aren't any additional issues here. If is simply a modern version of an old, old, tradition.
In general technological change has been much slower than people expected: where's my flying car?
In some respects it has either stood still or gone backwards - the US and Russian space programmes being an example of both.
But in broad terms, the direction that the future was supposed to take was defined by the HAL9000, Androids (dreaming of electric sheep) and space travel. Just about the only person who foresaw an internet-type thing was John Brunner in The Shockwave Rider and he didn't focus on one hell of a lot of its consequences.
The only area where technology has surpassed expectations has been in electronics. Although that has been held back by the massive historical bloat and baggage that software has created. We are starting to make inroads into biological developments, though none of those are "household" products and some drugs of the future could be truly revolutionary. For the few people who will be able to afford them.
Also, what effect would that LIDAR have on surveillance cameras? I assume they could be fitted with filters, provided their IR operations are not affected.
the person who has to hear the content to know it comes from a computer
There is an issue of extent here.
Pretty much everything that is written online has some element of "coming from a computer". Whether that is spell-checking (and auto-correct) or looking up facts and references online to insert into the content. It is arguable that the only truly human generated content is when the author has written everything, personally.
Even then, that relies on what they learned: at school, in front of a computer screen, watching TV or from the media. What is the "from a computer" content of all that?
And asking for anything to be signed "written by Blogbot v1.0" or some such is naive in the extreme. Doesn't this guy understand: people (and computers) can tell lies.
The only signs of aging that matter are the decline in physical and mental abilities. If P&G have got a device that can restore muscle mass, sexual stamina, memory and.... I've forgotten what else, then I'm in.
If it is merely a bit of robot-applied slap then forget it.
So by the simple act of ensuring there is less than 7GB free for Microsoft to reserve, I can put a stop to all these annoying and inconvenient updates that keep getting in the way?
The paradox was observed in the coal era. It suggests that when a resource gets to be used more efficiently, that increases demand for it and therefore increases consumption.
So while Ethereum might produce more efficient code to reduce the per transaction waste, the overall effect of making each transaction so much cheaper could simply be to make transactions more attractive by a greater amount.
The video games sector now accounts for more than half of the entertainment market in UK, ... the gaming market's value rose to $4.85bn ... Despite being the youngest of our three sectors, it is now by far the biggest."
However, that amount is smaller than the BBC's budget: £5Bn, or $6Bn. So the reality is that the entire gaming market isn't even bigger than a single broadcaster.
The entertainment market must include TV. Just like it must include films, music, print (yes, there is still some left). If you wanted to stretch it you could probably say restaurants, bars and drugs count as "entertainment", too.
This sounds like someone trying to mislead to gain publicity. They might have meant just the online entertainment market. But they should not say simply the "entertainment market".
It's still miles better than any other free image editor.
Well, being zero-cost is no excuse for having a crappy UI. The problem is that designing an intuitive, well set out UI is much more difficult than all the bells'n'whistles functions the developers add to the menus.
If only they would apply their talent to that instead of gratuitously adding more obscure features, they would have a product to be proud of. But UI design is probably beyond their capabilities.
Facebook users value the company's service so highly...
The most important point is that we should never believe anything that comes from a survey. Creating corporate policy by asking people hypothetical questions is a disastrous way to run a business. The only reliable course is to see what they actually do. Not what they say they might do.
Secondly, there is a massive difference between the inducement that people say they need to do something and what they would actually pay for the opposite. So they say it would take $1000 to get them to close their account. I doubt if even 1% of them worldwide would be willing to pay $1 to open a new account. Or to access "premium" features.
It seems to me that the people who are complaining about plastic bottles are also the ones complaining about plastic bags. The issue with these is that they look untidy (esp. when bags get stuck in trees). Whether that is what offends people: having to look at rubbish, or that plastic is a manifestation of a wasteful society? Who can say.
Since it doesn't decompose, plastic appears to be more plentiful that other forms of garbage that have the good grace to disappear from sight (either dissolving into the ground, being eaten by bugs or being exhausted from vehicles), even though it represents just as much un-recycled resource.
It is even possible that it has nothing to do with either and is just a backlash against obvious consumerism. Whatever the real reason for all the hate against plastics - surely the most useful class of material ever invented - I feel that if / when the protesters get their way, they will simply turn their wrath against something else.
For many years mobile phones were banned on commercial flights in case there might be a problem of unspecified nature that may have been caused by the phone signals.
And it is the same here, there is practically no knowledge or hard facts about what damage a drone would do to an airliner. But it is far easier to simply ban them and then spin it as being "look, we've done something positive to make your lives safer" than it is to conduct research and then produce conclusions that some people will inevitably question, or doubt.
Especially as most people consider drones to be annoyances and therefore have an inbuilt hostility to them.
All this incident does is to send a message that something (which may not even exist, there is no video or photos of these purported drones near the airport: the textbook UFO!) which looks or acts like a drone can cause upheaval and chaos. And that there is little chance that the perpetrators will be caught.
Does having a spaceship or an alien in the plot make a film Science Fiction?
The superficial and ignorant answer is "yes". Whereas those who are prepared to look deeper often recognise that these are merely props to the more basic story - not crucial elements of it.
The last paragraph should start, "In conclusion," then summarize the previous three paragraphs
So if the final paragraph summaries the preceding stuff, that is all a reader needs to bother with. Just skip to the last few sentences and it will convey the "meat" of the essay. And that means the reader doesn't have to wade through all the redundant stuff above it.
That sounds like a win, to me. A bit like an abstract in an academic paper.
Bill Anders..."What's the imperative? What's pushing us to go to Mars?" he said, adding "I don't think the public is that interested".
I have to agree that right now, Mars seems like a desolate hole with little attraction apart from overcoming the difficulty in getting there and the intellectual challenge of exploring and "solving" the remote environment.
And as such, there are plenty of desolate holes on Earth that are nearly as difficult to get to and survive in. Whether Antarctica or ocean depths. Or the inner recesses of the human mind.
However if one of our probes was to discover life on Mars, then there could be a good case to send people to research it, in situ.
The only other reason that I can think of for wanting to settle the place is the same as the first European arrivals in the americas: for tax purposes!
The original purpose of a university is to provide a rounded education
I suppose that depends on the country.
In most countries it is secondary education that provides the broad base, the "rounded" education. Tertiary education (university) courses specialise in a single subject or a set of closely related and inter-dependent subjects. The american concept of a "major" subject and other ones, that are unrelated, seems a bit pointless if you were already taught all that other stuff before you were 18. Which in most countries, children are.
As it is, with the cost of a university education, a person would have to be from an elite family to be able to afford 3 years of university merely for the sake of it. Without hoping and expecting it to lead to a better quality of life.
They teach doctors everything about doctoring. Other medical branches, too. The teach lawyers about the law. They teach accountants to account. The teach architects to do whatever the hell it is they do.
In fact almost every profession requires a degree qualification in the relevant subject as a basis for entrance. Therefore in almost every well-paid job, there will be a person who was taught how to do it at university. In a course specifically designed to feed into the jobs market.
The first job I took after leaving university was in a field that didn't exist when I started the course, 3 years earlier.
And because of that, nobody was able to assess my ability to do it. However, it turns out that because of my broad range of skills and understanding of things that hadn't been on the curriculum as part of my undergrad studies - but which interested me anyway - I was able to beat many other candidates with better academic results. But who had far narrower fields of knowledge.
And it turned out I was pretty good at the job, too! It formed the basis for my career.
The crucial point to remember about the 90% of plastic not being recycled is where than plastic is. If it is not in your country then there is very little you can do that will affect the outcome. Many countries have far better records on recycling. So for people there to assume this figure applies to them is unhelpful and misleading.
Worry about things you can do, not about those you can't change.
Given the ease with which people dressed in red suits that hide body shape (and gender) and with large amounts of white facial hair, can move about unnoticed at this time of year, it probably isn't the best time to test this technology out.
Old software that isn't patched has some advantages. You know that what you are running is what was tested.
Also, how would a missile based explain that it hadn't fired its missiles because the software had received a pushed update and was too busy applying it. And that it was more important to fix a bug in a foreign font than to unleash a nuclear holocaust.
The americans created a software environment that allows people to influence the views and votes of others. Then they complain when someone else uses it for that purpose.
What have I missed? Was it just that it was being used by the wrong sort of people?
This says the number of "users" increased. Does this mean that the number of people holding BTC has gone up?
If so all that means is that rather than having speculators who buy on a rising market and then sell at a higher price to realise their gain (in proper money), those who were left holding the baby, as it were, have decided not to sell up and take a loss. Presumably they are hoping that at some point there will be an upturn and their loss might even turn into a profit.
But that pattern of behaviour is one of hope rather than reality. Simply holding onto a worthless asset doesn't mean you might make some money from it in the future. It just means the holders are in denial.
The three most important criteria students look for in job opportunities are
I think you will find that this is "interview bullshit". It is the sort of answer that people think the ask-er wants to hear.
The reality is that is you offer a candidate a lower than expected "nice to have" salary, say: 50% less, they'll walk to the next employer who is offering more.
Slashdot Mirror
whether the technology creates an unrealistic expectation of having to have "perfectly smooth looking" skin
As the article alludes, this is nothing more than a digital form of makeup. And that has been used for decades for TV and films - and even longer in the real world.
There really aren't any additional issues here. If is simply a modern version of an old, old, tradition.
In some respects it has either stood still or gone backwards - the US and Russian space programmes being an example of both.
But in broad terms, the direction that the future was supposed to take was defined by the HAL9000, Androids (dreaming of electric sheep) and space travel. Just about the only person who foresaw an internet-type thing was John Brunner in The Shockwave Rider and he didn't focus on one hell of a lot of its consequences.
The only area where technology has surpassed expectations has been in electronics. Although that has been held back by the massive historical bloat and baggage that software has created. We are starting to make inroads into biological developments, though none of those are "household" products and some drugs of the future could be truly revolutionary. For the few people who will be able to afford them.
Also, what effect would that LIDAR have on surveillance cameras? I assume they could be fitted with filters, provided their IR operations are not affected.
the person who has to hear the content to know it comes from a computer
There is an issue of extent here.
Pretty much everything that is written online has some element of "coming from a computer". Whether that is spell-checking (and auto-correct) or looking up facts and references online to insert into the content. It is arguable that the only truly human generated content is when the author has written everything, personally.
Even then, that relies on what they learned: at school, in front of a computer screen, watching TV or from the media. What is the "from a computer" content of all that?
And asking for anything to be signed "written by Blogbot v1.0" or some such is naive in the extreme. Doesn't this guy understand: people (and computers) can tell lies.
If it is merely a bit of robot-applied slap then forget it.
Great news to start the year.
So while Ethereum might produce more efficient code to reduce the per transaction waste, the overall effect of making each transaction so much cheaper could simply be to make transactions more attractive by a greater amount.
The video games sector now accounts for more than half of the entertainment market in UK,
... the gaming market's value rose to $4.85bn
... Despite being the youngest of our three sectors, it is now by far the biggest."
However, that amount is smaller than the BBC's budget: £5Bn, or $6Bn. So the reality is that the entire gaming market isn't even bigger than a single broadcaster.
The entertainment market must include TV. Just like it must include films, music, print (yes, there is still some left). If you wanted to stretch it you could probably say restaurants, bars and drugs count as "entertainment", too.
This sounds like someone trying to mislead to gain publicity. They might have meant just the online entertainment market. But they should not say simply the "entertainment market".
It's still miles better than any other free image editor.
Well, being zero-cost is no excuse for having a crappy UI. The problem is that designing an intuitive, well set out UI is much more difficult than all the bells'n'whistles functions the developers add to the menus.
If only they would apply their talent to that instead of gratuitously adding more obscure features, they would have a product to be proud of. But UI design is probably beyond their capabilities.
Facebook users value the company's service so highly ...
The most important point is that we should never believe anything that comes from a survey. Creating corporate policy by asking people hypothetical questions is a disastrous way to run a business. The only reliable course is to see what they actually do. Not what they say they might do.
Secondly, there is a massive difference between the inducement that people say they need to do something and what they would actually pay for the opposite. So they say it would take $1000 to get them to close their account. I doubt if even 1% of them worldwide would be willing to pay $1 to open a new account. Or to access "premium" features.
Since it doesn't decompose, plastic appears to be more plentiful that other forms of garbage that have the good grace to disappear from sight (either dissolving into the ground, being eaten by bugs or being exhausted from vehicles), even though it represents just as much un-recycled resource.
It is even possible that it has nothing to do with either and is just a backlash against obvious consumerism. Whatever the real reason for all the hate against plastics - surely the most useful class of material ever invented - I feel that if / when the protesters get their way, they will simply turn their wrath against something else.
What am I overlooking?
Public perception.
For many years mobile phones were banned on commercial flights in case there might be a problem of unspecified nature that may have been caused by the phone signals.
And it is the same here, there is practically no knowledge or hard facts about what damage a drone would do to an airliner. But it is far easier to simply ban them and then spin it as being "look, we've done something positive to make your lives safer" than it is to conduct research and then produce conclusions that some people will inevitably question, or doubt.
Especially as most people consider drones to be annoyances and therefore have an inbuilt hostility to them.
All this incident does is to send a message that something (which may not even exist, there is no video or photos of these purported drones near the airport: the textbook UFO!) which looks or acts like a drone can cause upheaval and chaos. And that there is little chance that the perpetrators will be caught.
The superficial and ignorant answer is "yes". Whereas those who are prepared to look deeper often recognise that these are merely props to the more basic story - not crucial elements of it.
The last paragraph should start, "In conclusion," then summarize the previous three paragraphs
So if the final paragraph summaries the preceding stuff, that is all a reader needs to bother with. Just skip to the last few sentences and it will convey the "meat" of the essay. And that means the reader doesn't have to wade through all the redundant stuff above it.
That sounds like a win, to me. A bit like an abstract in an academic paper.
Bill Anders ..."What's the imperative? What's pushing us to go to Mars?" he said, adding "I don't think the public is that interested".
I have to agree that right now, Mars seems like a desolate hole with little attraction apart from overcoming the difficulty in getting there and the intellectual challenge of exploring and "solving" the remote environment.
And as such, there are plenty of desolate holes on Earth that are nearly as difficult to get to and survive in. Whether Antarctica or ocean depths. Or the inner recesses of the human mind.
However if one of our probes was to discover life on Mars, then there could be a good case to send people to research it, in situ.
The only other reason that I can think of for wanting to settle the place is the same as the first European arrivals in the americas: for tax purposes!
The original purpose of a university is to provide a rounded education
I suppose that depends on the country.
In most countries it is secondary education that provides the broad base, the "rounded" education. Tertiary education (university) courses specialise in a single subject or a set of closely related and inter-dependent subjects. The american concept of a "major" subject and other ones, that are unrelated, seems a bit pointless if you were already taught all that other stuff before you were 18. Which in most countries, children are.
As it is, with the cost of a university education, a person would have to be from an elite family to be able to afford 3 years of university merely for the sake of it. Without hoping and expecting it to lead to a better quality of life.
They don't teach job skills
They absoluteley do!
They teach doctors everything about doctoring. Other medical branches, too. The teach lawyers about the law. They teach accountants to account. The teach architects to do whatever the hell it is they do.
In fact almost every profession requires a degree qualification in the relevant subject as a basis for entrance. Therefore in almost every well-paid job, there will be a person who was taught how to do it at university. In a course specifically designed to feed into the jobs market.
The first job I took after leaving university was in a field that didn't exist when I started the course, 3 years earlier.
And because of that, nobody was able to assess my ability to do it. However, it turns out that because of my broad range of skills and understanding of things that hadn't been on the curriculum as part of my undergrad studies - but which interested me anyway - I was able to beat many other candidates with better academic results. But who had far narrower fields of knowledge.
And it turned out I was pretty good at the job, too! It formed the basis for my career.
Worry about things you can do, not about those you can't change.
Although that strategy could explain the reported 100% FAILURE rate that the system has produced.
It's acceptable because no one is home to receive the package.
That does NOT make it acceptable to simply leave a package in full view of the street.
Also, how would a missile based explain that it hadn't fired its missiles because the software had received a pushed update and was too busy applying it. And that it was more important to fix a bug in a foreign font than to unleash a nuclear holocaust.
The americans created a software environment that allows people to influence the views and votes of others. Then they complain when someone else uses it for that purpose.
What have I missed? Was it just that it was being used by the wrong sort of people?
If so all that means is that rather than having speculators who buy on a rising market and then sell at a higher price to realise their gain (in proper money), those who were left holding the baby, as it were, have decided not to sell up and take a loss. Presumably they are hoping that at some point there will be an upturn and their loss might even turn into a profit.
But that pattern of behaviour is one of hope rather than reality. Simply holding onto a worthless asset doesn't mean you might make some money from it in the future. It just means the holders are in denial.
The three most important criteria students look for in job opportunities are
I think you will find that this is "interview bullshit". It is the sort of answer that people think the ask-er wants to hear.
The reality is that is you offer a candidate a lower than expected "nice to have" salary, say: 50% less, they'll walk to the next employer who is offering more.