It seems to me that logic doesn't give a clear answer, as (1) cooperation may help your civilization to grow and exploit more faster; development is not a zero sum game; (2) any alien civilization should also expect that there is probably out there a more advanced alien civilization that it would need to compete with, and it might aid and use ally itself with smaller threats to defend itself against the larger threat. Ultimately, which approach is taken would probably be decided more by the context in which the alien society evolved.
I've never heard about this side of the story, certainly never thought of PARC and OLPC in the same sentence. Is there really evidence that OLPC led to breakthroughs in low cost computing? Is it possible to disentangle that effect from the effect of mobile and chromebooks? I'm skeptical but if such a story exists I would find it fascinating.
Sorry, formatting.
"I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty." means that they are your parents.
"I love my parents, and Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty." means that they are not, without the Oxford comma.
"I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Humpty Dumpty." also means that they are not, using the Oxford comma.
While these examples are cute, the point above stands. Without the comma it is still clear.
I prefer Oxford commas for style reasons but there is an entirely correct way to write when you are not using them.
"I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty."
"I love my parents, and Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty."
"I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Humpty Dumpty."
-> If "packing for shipment or distribution" was one item, then there would be another "or" before "packing":
This is absolutely correct and really an underrated comment. The ruling is equivalent to saying, "although you wrote beach and you meant the land near the water, since nobody is a good speller, it is ambiguous with the beech tree, and so there is uncertainty on the part of the reader because they may not know how to spell it, and when they sound it out it's the same."
If 100% of global energy demand was met by solar, wouldn't that further increase global warming by reducing the Earth's albedo? Although I have not sense of whether the effects would be more or less significant than from CO2...
Just curious -- do you believe that more rigorous driver training can reduce this problem? Or requiring driver re-certifications? In general, tackling the driver education side of the problem rather than the design/engineering side.
Unlike Apple, Nokia made a variety of phones with different specs. They're mostly known for their low end phones, unfortunately sounds like that is what you were using too. I also used Nokia exclusively during the 2000s and had a completely different experience than you. IMO, the only area that the iPhone stomped the Nokias was web browsing and third party apps.
Because yeah, I hate how, for example, my Nokia N8 had so many features that the first... and second... and third... and some of these even fourth-gen iPhones were missing:
* Bluetooth (I mean, other than headsets for voice calls...)
* OLED screen
* Gorilla glass
* Haptic feedback
* Video calling
* Swype keyboard (actually, not sure when iPhone got this)
* USB OTG
* Offline GPS (very important back before cheap mobile data)
I'm astonished that a self proclaimed "geek" found these features worthless because of the interface. Nokia PC suite was excellent also-- tethering, offline app installation, local or remote backup...
And yet that happens in every form of government... granted, stupidity is not only a characteristic only of politicians but also of majorities. Yet, what use would Athens have been if it lasted 600 years instead of 200 if it meant never attempting democracy? Is the goal of a society to exist for as long as possible? Furthermore, a case study of one is far from enough experience from which to derive a natural law that direct democracy must degenerate to chaos or bad decisions.
We know a lot about how direct democracies could be dysfunctional due to not only to lessons from the Peloponnesian War but also insightful recent work by Mancur Olson and others... perhaps could be put to good use in designing a democratic system that is resilient to some of the pitfalls.
think about what a logistical nightmare the auditing thing would be. do you really think that receipts could be aggregated in any meaningful way? now, if the machines printed a receipt immediately after voting, and deposited it into a box that was held the same way as paper ballots currently are, that might be useful... but what is the substantive difference from doing that versus using machine-readable paper ballots to begin with?
I've been thinking about what systems would be required for direct democracy... if we could make all decisions by some system of popular voting, we could remove the entire legislative branch of government. if the people could spend from a pool of points to pass or veto parts of a budget, I wonder what the result would look like. I agree on all the security and other concerns about such a scheme at this point in history, but if it could be done successfully, an interactive, rapid voting system would remove one of the most significant remaining barriers to a functioning direct democracy.
With a few more conservative assumptions, the difference in mercury emissions due to total conversion of lighting sources in all households in the US in 2010 may be closer to:
Incandescent: 360mg*20*114825428 households=661,394 kilograms. With an 85% effective scrubber at the power plant, that drops to 99,209kg.
CFLs: 5mg*22*114825428 households=12,630 kg.
In total, 45% of US electricity comes from coal. 8000 hours lifespan. CFL MTBF may be something like 10,000 in lab settings. But plenty of reports of far lower lifespan out of the lab. Also take into account that, with cheaper lighting, people will use more light. Let's say 10% more (some arbitrary fraction of the difference in cost of running a CFL). And 23wCFL to 100w is a more accurate comparison. So, let's say 288mg of mercury for all the incandescent used to replace one CFL. I don't know the coal average mercury ppm, so I accept yours. With an average of 45 light bulbs per household of varying size, equivalent to 20x 100w/23wCFLs (average will rise to 22 bulbs if CFLs),
That's still a lot more mercury! Admitted. Although the coal mercury ppm is an open question. Furthermore, mercury contamination concentrated around a power plant is much easier to mitigate than ubiquitous low level contamination. Recall that CFL will surely have a much larger fraction improperly thrown in garbage or broken bulbs at home. I use CFL at home, but I do it because it is subsidized and costs less to run. I am not against CFL at all -- but I think that the ban is bad public policy. We want to reduce emissions? Increase cost of electricity. Regulate emissions at the source of power generation.
Those are all over Japan.
Let me tell you -- the worst is not that you lose the excess time -- it's that the meter maximum is enforced. No more minutes after the same car has been there for n hours!
However it still works to exit and re-enter the spot.
um, that works so well for all the junk mail I get in my meatspace mailbox...
also I would resent my mail account getting hacked and getting a $4,000,000 bill from my ISP.
Now if BMI could only come up with a system to remember acronyms...
In all seriousness, this seems to be the new paradigm. I admit that a camera phone and evernote have turned me into a compulsive forgetter.
I agree with posters above that there is simply more to remember than ever before, but I also agree that we don't use memory as much... it is considered bad education to use rote memorization; we value creativity above skill. Interesting books on the subject -- 'The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci' and 'The Mnemonist'.
Just this happened with Fallout 3 (Van Buren) years after the project was terminated... (and we shouldn't miss an opportunity to mention that fact again and again!)
Or actually, why public transit keeps kicking, because I think that it's more comparable to the mainframe concept. Urban train and subway networks were growing quickly, then stopped in many places after the Ford or other cheap personal cars. Yet in some cases it still makes sense to use and even expand these networks.
Reminds me of the scene in the film _The Magic Christian_ where they fill a pool of vile liquids and drop a bunch of fivers in it and people go for them... good stuff. With Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, re-released a couple years back on DVD.
The problem with your idea is that a lot of people who wouldn't go for the money would get stomped... so the number of people who really went bananas would look a lot higher than it really would be. It only takes a few people to make an entire crowd look riotous (remember the WTO Seattle riots -- about 20 anarchists on a road trip from Eugene).
anyone remember bloomba? I don't know whether it came before or after gmail, but it's basically an offline version of gmail useful for consolidating and searching every email I've sent or recieved (minus spam) from pine, eudora, foxmail, outlook etc. I looked at the patterns of my sending and receiving mail over the years and what I see is that I used to send and receive fewer, longer emails. Now it's shorter, frequent messages.
Having developed a sophisticated way of organizing mail, as I'm sure many of you have too, it was hard to move to gmail. But structured searches are the only way to cope with the new volume of messages. Whether bloomba (please come back, bloomba!) or gmail, it's the future. Unless we want to end up stuck in our ways, and explaining to our kids when their world comes how things used to be better and why we don't understand their newfangled technology.
360 could have made Microsoft a _lot_ more money if they sold the first units they had for $600. Then there wouldn't have been a shortage; everyone who could afford one, gets one. A month later when they've sold all they can to the Lik-Sang crowd, it drops $200.
Sony may have just learned from the 360 release that they can charge a lot more to the early adopters by releasing a limited supply and then drop the price soon after. I hate Sony too (having to do with their tech support, not the products, which are generally solid), but I see the logic here. It's about avoiding a shortage on the release date.
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It seems to me that logic doesn't give a clear answer, as (1) cooperation may help your civilization to grow and exploit more faster; development is not a zero sum game; (2) any alien civilization should also expect that there is probably out there a more advanced alien civilization that it would need to compete with, and it might aid and use ally itself with smaller threats to defend itself against the larger threat. Ultimately, which approach is taken would probably be decided more by the context in which the alien society evolved.
I've never heard about this side of the story, certainly never thought of PARC and OLPC in the same sentence. Is there really evidence that OLPC led to breakthroughs in low cost computing? Is it possible to disentangle that effect from the effect of mobile and chromebooks? I'm skeptical but if such a story exists I would find it fascinating.
Sorry, formatting.
"I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty." means that they are your parents.
"I love my parents, and Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty." means that they are not, without the Oxford comma.
"I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Humpty Dumpty." also means that they are not, using the Oxford comma.
While these examples are cute, the point above stands. Without the comma it is still clear.
I prefer Oxford commas for style reasons but there is an entirely correct way to write when you are not using them.
"I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty."
"I love my parents, and Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty."
"I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Humpty Dumpty."
-> If "packing for shipment or distribution" was one item, then there would be another "or" before "packing":
This is absolutely correct and really an underrated comment. The ruling is equivalent to saying, "although you wrote beach and you meant the land near the water, since nobody is a good speller, it is ambiguous with the beech tree, and so there is uncertainty on the part of the reader because they may not know how to spell it, and when they sound it out it's the same."
If 100% of global energy demand was met by solar, wouldn't that further increase global warming by reducing the Earth's albedo? Although I have not sense of whether the effects would be more or less significant than from CO2...
Just curious -- do you believe that more rigorous driver training can reduce this problem? Or requiring driver re-certifications? In general, tackling the driver education side of the problem rather than the design/engineering side.
Unlike Apple, Nokia made a variety of phones with different specs. They're mostly known for their low end phones, unfortunately sounds like that is what you were using too. I also used Nokia exclusively during the 2000s and had a completely different experience than you. IMO, the only area that the iPhone stomped the Nokias was web browsing and third party apps. Because yeah, I hate how, for example, my Nokia N8 had so many features that the first... and second... and third... and some of these even fourth-gen iPhones were missing:
* Bluetooth (I mean, other than headsets for voice calls...)
* OLED screen
* Gorilla glass
* Haptic feedback
* Video calling
* Swype keyboard (actually, not sure when iPhone got this)
* USB OTG
* Offline GPS (very important back before cheap mobile data)
I'm astonished that a self proclaimed "geek" found these features worthless because of the interface. Nokia PC suite was excellent also-- tethering, offline app installation, local or remote backup...
Having the library books available boosts the device's usefulness = more sales. That should be enough reason.
And yet that happens in every form of government... granted, stupidity is not only a characteristic only of politicians but also of majorities. Yet, what use would Athens have been if it lasted 600 years instead of 200 if it meant never attempting democracy? Is the goal of a society to exist for as long as possible? Furthermore, a case study of one is far from enough experience from which to derive a natural law that direct democracy must degenerate to chaos or bad decisions.
We know a lot about how direct democracies could be dysfunctional due to not only to lessons from the Peloponnesian War but also insightful recent work by Mancur Olson and others... perhaps could be put to good use in designing a democratic system that is resilient to some of the pitfalls.
think about what a logistical nightmare the auditing thing would be. do you really think that receipts could be aggregated in any meaningful way? now, if the machines printed a receipt immediately after voting, and deposited it into a box that was held the same way as paper ballots currently are, that might be useful... but what is the substantive difference from doing that versus using machine-readable paper ballots to begin with?
I've been thinking about what systems would be required for direct democracy... if we could make all decisions by some system of popular voting, we could remove the entire legislative branch of government. if the people could spend from a pool of points to pass or veto parts of a budget, I wonder what the result would look like. I agree on all the security and other concerns about such a scheme at this point in history, but if it could be done successfully, an interactive, rapid voting system would remove one of the most significant remaining barriers to a functioning direct democracy.
and! coal share of us electric production is projected to fall.
With a few more conservative assumptions, the difference in mercury emissions due to total conversion of lighting sources in all households in the US in 2010 may be closer to:
Incandescent: 360mg*20*114825428 households=661,394 kilograms. With an 85% effective scrubber at the power plant, that drops to 99,209kg. CFLs: 5mg*22*114825428 households=12,630 kg.
In total, 45% of US electricity comes from coal. 8000 hours lifespan. CFL MTBF may be something like 10,000 in lab settings. But plenty of reports of far lower lifespan out of the lab. Also take into account that, with cheaper lighting, people will use more light. Let's say 10% more (some arbitrary fraction of the difference in cost of running a CFL). And 23wCFL to 100w is a more accurate comparison. So, let's say 288mg of mercury for all the incandescent used to replace one CFL. I don't know the coal average mercury ppm, so I accept yours. With an average of 45 light bulbs per household of varying size, equivalent to 20x 100w/23wCFLs (average will rise to 22 bulbs if CFLs),
That's still a lot more mercury! Admitted. Although the coal mercury ppm is an open question. Furthermore, mercury contamination concentrated around a power plant is much easier to mitigate than ubiquitous low level contamination. Recall that CFL will surely have a much larger fraction improperly thrown in garbage or broken bulbs at home. I use CFL at home, but I do it because it is subsidized and costs less to run. I am not against CFL at all -- but I think that the ban is bad public policy. We want to reduce emissions? Increase cost of electricity. Regulate emissions at the source of power generation.
Those are all over Japan. Let me tell you -- the worst is not that you lose the excess time -- it's that the meter maximum is enforced. No more minutes after the same car has been there for n hours! However it still works to exit and re-enter the spot.
Yes, me too! Only a matter of time until someone is ticketed while on their way to purchase a parking permit.
um, that works so well for all the junk mail I get in my meatspace mailbox... also I would resent my mail account getting hacked and getting a $4,000,000 bill from my ISP.
Now if BMI could only come up with a system to remember acronyms... In all seriousness, this seems to be the new paradigm. I admit that a camera phone and evernote have turned me into a compulsive forgetter. I agree with posters above that there is simply more to remember than ever before, but I also agree that we don't use memory as much... it is considered bad education to use rote memorization; we value creativity above skill. Interesting books on the subject -- 'The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci' and 'The Mnemonist'.
Just this happened with Fallout 3 (Van Buren) years after the project was terminated...
(and we shouldn't miss an opportunity to mention that fact again and again!)
http://www.nma-fallout.com/article.php?id=35862
Or actually, why public transit keeps kicking, because I think that it's more comparable to the mainframe concept. Urban train and subway networks were growing quickly, then stopped in many places after the Ford or other cheap personal cars. Yet in some cases it still makes sense to use and even expand these networks.
Reminds me of the scene in the film _The Magic Christian_ where they fill a pool of vile liquids and drop a bunch of fivers in it and people go for them... good stuff. With Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, re-released a couple years back on DVD.
The problem with your idea is that a lot of people who wouldn't go for the money would get stomped... so the number of people who really went bananas would look a lot higher than it really would be. It only takes a few people to make an entire crowd look riotous (remember the WTO Seattle riots -- about 20 anarchists on a road trip from Eugene).
anyone remember bloomba? I don't know whether it came before or after gmail, but it's basically an offline version of gmail useful for consolidating and searching every email I've sent or recieved (minus spam) from pine, eudora, foxmail, outlook etc. I looked at the patterns of my sending and receiving mail over the years and what I see is that I used to send and receive fewer, longer emails. Now it's shorter, frequent messages.
Having developed a sophisticated way of organizing mail, as I'm sure many of you have too, it was hard to move to gmail. But structured searches are the only way to cope with the new volume of messages. Whether bloomba (please come back, bloomba!) or gmail, it's the future. Unless we want to end up stuck in our ways, and explaining to our kids when their world comes how things used to be better and why we don't understand their newfangled technology.
360 could have made Microsoft a _lot_ more money if they sold the first units they had for $600. Then there wouldn't have been a shortage; everyone who could afford one, gets one. A month later when they've sold all they can to the Lik-Sang crowd, it drops $200.
Sony may have just learned from the 360 release that they can charge a lot more to the early adopters by releasing a limited supply and then drop the price soon after. I hate Sony too (having to do with their tech support, not the products, which are generally solid), but I see the logic here. It's about avoiding a shortage on the release date.