Gladwell wrote an article for the New Yorker a while back opining that it is the iterative inventions rather than the "breakthroughs" that are most important. Here it is: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell He is riffing on another article that claims that the industrial revolution started in Britain because "it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work."
It seems that TFA is misled by the fact that nobody remembers the long history of tweaking and engineering that results in a popular product. For example, everyone thinks that Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, but he was just one of many engineers improving on a concept.
You could cause a poor person's electricity bill to increase so much that they cannot afford medical care, or the utility company cuts off their heat and they freeze to death.
Everyone buys the things that are necessary to give them the time and tools to create what they really want to create. Of course a Real Programmer would never use a keyboard when she could use a butterfly, but she's probably going to go buy the right butterfly rather than engineering it herself in her custom-made biolab. Sometimes it is better (or more fun) to hack a solution creatively, and sometimes we trade money for time so that we can focus on what we really care about (i.e., a different, more fun/creative/important hack).
tl;dr Time is money. No need to reinvent the wheel (unless you're making a better wheel).
Dropbox's main advantage over things like FreeFileSync is that it is compatible and integrated with all major platforms, including smartphones. If BitTorrent Sync can pull that off, then they have my attention.
I don't think the data is stored anywhere except on the owner's devices. From what I can tell, the point is to sync data across devices, not to have "cloud" storage for your data. It performs the same sync function as Dropbox, without the cloud storage part. It is true that there are other ways to do this (e.g. Owncloud, mentioned by another poster). Bittorrent might have certain advantages, especially if you have the data synced with many different devices. If they can make it as simple as Dropbox, then I would be interested. I don't really need Dropbox's cloud storage, they just make it really easy to sync across many platforms.
The Thrawn Trilogy was set 5 years after Return of the Jedi -- I wonder how far out they will go for the new movies. If they set them 32 years after Return of the Jedi, then they can still use the original cast.
"The first genetically modified plant was produced in 1983, using an antibiotic-resistant tobacco plant. In 1994, the transgenic Flavr Savr tomato was approved by the FDA for marketing in the US" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food#History
It took 11 years between the first GMO ever produced and the first GMO approved by the FDA. If you only count from the FDA approval, you should be able to start eating Flavr Savr tomatoes by next year.
Thanks to the excellent graphic at the end of the article, I now know that the Spitfire's "performance" was located under the fuselage, and its "aerodynamics" were located in the tail section. Thank you, BBC.
Here is the difference between investment and gambling. When you gamble, you win or lose money arbitrarily. There is no net gain in value from a gambling transaction, only a transfer of wealth. When you factor in transaction costs, gambling becomes a deadweight loss to society. Gambling is a negative-sum game. Investment, by contrast, is expected to be a positive sum game, and to create wealth. The ideal investment will be Pareto efficient -- something that can never happen with gambling. This is why investing in a business is different from a casino. If I invest $100 in a business and that business grows by 10%, I make $10 and the business owner also makes money. If I win a $10 bet with you, I make $10, you lose $10, and we have both wasted the time it took to make the bet and roll the dice. The end result of all of this is that investments gain money in the aggregate over time, and gamblers always lose money in the aggregate over time.
When you get into derivative trading and actively managed funds, things start to look a lot less like investments and a lot more like gambling. Wealth is transferred (minus commissions), but it's hard to see where wealth is created. Indeed, actively managed funds tend to under-perform the market in the aggregate. Here's a nice little parable by Warren Buffet: http://davidatwood.com/files/The%20Gotrocks%20Family.pdf
Currencies are only speculative if you are a currency speculator. Currencies are not supposed to be investments, which is why Bitcoin is not a good currency. Currencies are meant to facilitate exchange, not to store value. This is why currencies are designed to be slightly inflationary. We want to encourage people to go do useful things with their time, not sit at home on top of a pile of cash. Bitcoin is generally treated as a commodity rather than a currency. See, for example: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/golden-cyberfetters/
This idea actually strikes me as cool. Sure, it has no practical uses, but so what? A Lamborghini has no practical uses, but it's still cool that somebody actually made it. It only sounds stupid because they're trying to claim that it's useful.
Since I've started working with documents in an office, I've come to appreciate the advantages of paper vs. working on a display. The main advantage is space: you're not constrained to a half-meter-square workspace if you're using sheets of paper. You can organize documents spatially. You can write on a sheet of paper with one hand while talking on the phone. You can quickly skim through a stack of documents which would take a long time to open individually on a computer. You can make notes graphically using a pen.
I always thought we would eventually bring these advantages to electronics by having displays that are as big a desk, and can tilt to a comfortable working angle. This is another solution that may have promise.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury.
1) Guns should also be fitted with an electronic device which reads minds to ascertain whether the carrier intends to fire it for good or bad reasons. "Good" and "bad" can be decided by a live, crowdsourced twitter feed of the gun-carrier's thoughts. If bad intent is identified, a speaker on the gun's handle will begin reading responsive tweets, attempting to persuade the carrier not to fire (these responses will also be crowdsourced for appropriateness and effectiveness). At the same time, a special wireless network will alert emergency personnel of the carrier's location and mental state.
2) All guns should be fitted with miniaturized versions of TSA body scanners which will scan all passersby to determine whether they are carrying guns whose safety features are disabled.
3) All guns should be fitted with a voice-recognition system which is able to analyze the screams of shooting victims and disable the gun if they are determined to be children.
4) Finally, guns should be fitted with an electronic device which can summon Jesus Christ and a his angels to heal the injured, resurrect the dead, and reverse time in the event of a shooting.
Nobody CAN enforce it, which makes the whole discussion academic at best. Until we have technology sufficient to create a property conflict in space, it's all just talk. The ultimate issue will be decided the same way colonial boundaries were decided in centuries past: you get as much land as you can win a war on.
you can't earn many political points by commissioning a study that doesn't allow you to create a scapegoat or enact some laws
Actually it's the opposite. Appointing a commission scores big points now when the issue is on the front page, but by the time the commission's report comes out everybody has forgotten about the issue and it's safe for the politicians to ignore it without actually doing anything.
Whether you agree or disagree with a hypothesis (in this case, "violent video games cause violent behavior"), you should be in favor of scientific investigation. I am always amazed at the amount of logical fallacies that Slashdotters trot out every time video games are attacked; it reminds me of the NRA. Why can't we just say, "Interesting hypothesis, let's see if the data supports it." The only reason to be against science is if you know you're wrong and you're afraid that other people will find out.
Granted, TFA is talking about a "commission" and not a "scientific study," but it's at least purporting to look at facts (and hopefully science) in a thoughtful way. If it turns out that violent games do cause violent behaviors in certain cases, and that we could take some reasonable actions to prevent that violence, then I would be in favor of doing so. I'm not going to sit here like some gun nut screaming "You ain't gonna take away my video games!" I always thought the only benefits to giving up video games were more free time, money, increased productivity, weight loss, and a better sex life. If we could add "fewer mass murders" to the list, that wouldn't be a bad thing.
That is offset by the number of children that were saved by cars (e.g. ambulances). If we suddenly destroyed all cars, society would collapse and millions would die of starvation and diseases untreatable due to lack of supplies. The real question is how many MORE people were killed versus people saved. Once they perfect self-driving cars, I'll gladly give up my right to drive in exchange for protection from stupid human drivers.
Less risk, less reward, but essentially venture capitalism for the masses.
Actually it's much more risk with much less reward. Try this: "invest" $5,000 in 5 kickstarter projects, and $5,000 in 5 IPOs. Compare the return on investment after two years. "Venture capitalism for the masses" is called the stock market. Kickstarter is designed to fool consumers into giving away money for free by dangling shiny objects in front of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Gladwell wrote an article for the New Yorker a while back opining that it is the iterative inventions rather than the "breakthroughs" that are most important. Here it is: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell
He is riffing on another article that claims that the industrial revolution started in Britain because "it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work."
It seems that TFA is misled by the fact that nobody remembers the long history of tweaking and engineering that results in a popular product. For example, everyone thinks that Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, but he was just one of many engineers improving on a concept.
You could cause a poor person's electricity bill to increase so much that they cannot afford medical care, or the utility company cuts off their heat and they freeze to death.
Everyone buys the things that are necessary to give them the time and tools to create what they really want to create. Of course a Real Programmer would never use a keyboard when she could use a butterfly, but she's probably going to go buy the right butterfly rather than engineering it herself in her custom-made biolab. Sometimes it is better (or more fun) to hack a solution creatively, and sometimes we trade money for time so that we can focus on what we really care about (i.e., a different, more fun/creative/important hack).
tl;dr Time is money. No need to reinvent the wheel (unless you're making a better wheel).
Dropbox's main advantage over things like FreeFileSync is that it is compatible and integrated with all major platforms, including smartphones. If BitTorrent Sync can pull that off, then they have my attention.
I don't think the data is stored anywhere except on the owner's devices. From what I can tell, the point is to sync data across devices, not to have "cloud" storage for your data. It performs the same sync function as Dropbox, without the cloud storage part. It is true that there are other ways to do this (e.g. Owncloud, mentioned by another poster). Bittorrent might have certain advantages, especially if you have the data synced with many different devices. If they can make it as simple as Dropbox, then I would be interested. I don't really need Dropbox's cloud storage, they just make it really easy to sync across many platforms.
The Thrawn Trilogy was set 5 years after Return of the Jedi -- I wonder how far out they will go for the new movies. If they set them 32 years after Return of the Jedi, then they can still use the original cast.
"The first genetically modified plant was produced in 1983, using an antibiotic-resistant tobacco plant. In 1994, the transgenic Flavr Savr tomato was approved by the FDA for marketing in the US" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food#History
It took 11 years between the first GMO ever produced and the first GMO approved by the FDA. If you only count from the FDA approval, you should be able to start eating Flavr Savr tomatoes by next year.
Slashdot just had a discussion on this exact issue: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/01/18/1846206/hacktivism-civil-disobedience-or-cyber-crime
They're using Megaupload as a preprocessor? Clever - that way there's no copyright infringement at compile time.
Most people would rather die than lose the ability to watch cat videos on YouTube.
Thanks to the excellent graphic at the end of the article, I now know that the Spitfire's "performance" was located under the fuselage, and its "aerodynamics" were located in the tail section. Thank you, BBC.
More like a Lamborghini replica kit. It looks cool (or horrible, depending on your aesthetics), but it doesn't actually help you go faster.
Here is the difference between investment and gambling. When you gamble, you win or lose money arbitrarily. There is no net gain in value from a gambling transaction, only a transfer of wealth. When you factor in transaction costs, gambling becomes a deadweight loss to society. Gambling is a negative-sum game. Investment, by contrast, is expected to be a positive sum game, and to create wealth. The ideal investment will be Pareto efficient -- something that can never happen with gambling. This is why investing in a business is different from a casino. If I invest $100 in a business and that business grows by 10%, I make $10 and the business owner also makes money. If I win a $10 bet with you, I make $10, you lose $10, and we have both wasted the time it took to make the bet and roll the dice. The end result of all of this is that investments gain money in the aggregate over time, and gamblers always lose money in the aggregate over time.
When you get into derivative trading and actively managed funds, things start to look a lot less like investments and a lot more like gambling. Wealth is transferred (minus commissions), but it's hard to see where wealth is created. Indeed, actively managed funds tend to under-perform the market in the aggregate. Here's a nice little parable by Warren Buffet: http://davidatwood.com/files/The%20Gotrocks%20Family.pdf
Currencies are only speculative if you are a currency speculator. Currencies are not supposed to be investments, which is why Bitcoin is not a good currency. Currencies are meant to facilitate exchange, not to store value. This is why currencies are designed to be slightly inflationary. We want to encourage people to go do useful things with their time, not sit at home on top of a pile of cash. Bitcoin is generally treated as a commodity rather than a currency. See, for example: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/golden-cyberfetters/
This idea actually strikes me as cool. Sure, it has no practical uses, but so what? A Lamborghini has no practical uses, but it's still cool that somebody actually made it. It only sounds stupid because they're trying to claim that it's useful.
Since I've started working with documents in an office, I've come to appreciate the advantages of paper vs. working on a display. The main advantage is space: you're not constrained to a half-meter-square workspace if you're using sheets of paper. You can organize documents spatially. You can write on a sheet of paper with one hand while talking on the phone. You can quickly skim through a stack of documents which would take a long time to open individually on a computer. You can make notes graphically using a pen.
I always thought we would eventually bring these advantages to electronics by having displays that are as big a desk, and can tilt to a comfortable working angle. This is another solution that may have promise.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury.
I think that you will find this last quote to be empirically inaccurate. Here is a much-cited paper which uses facts to examine the survival of democracies: http://www.polarizationandconflict.org/Papers/przeworsky.pdf
1) Guns should also be fitted with an electronic device which reads minds to ascertain whether the carrier intends to fire it for good or bad reasons. "Good" and "bad" can be decided by a live, crowdsourced twitter feed of the gun-carrier's thoughts. If bad intent is identified, a speaker on the gun's handle will begin reading responsive tweets, attempting to persuade the carrier not to fire (these responses will also be crowdsourced for appropriateness and effectiveness). At the same time, a special wireless network will alert emergency personnel of the carrier's location and mental state.
2) All guns should be fitted with miniaturized versions of TSA body scanners which will scan all passersby to determine whether they are carrying guns whose safety features are disabled.
3) All guns should be fitted with a voice-recognition system which is able to analyze the screams of shooting victims and disable the gun if they are determined to be children.
4) Finally, guns should be fitted with an electronic device which can summon Jesus Christ and a his angels to heal the injured, resurrect the dead, and reverse time in the event of a shooting.
The Lego store has bins of loose bricks that they sell by weight. You can also buy generic kits like this: http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Ultimate-Building-Set-Pieces/dp/B000NO9GT4/ref=sr_1_1?s=toys-and-games&ie=UTF8&qid=1356303783&sr=1-1
TFA is complaining about a problem that doesn't exist.
Nobody CAN enforce it, which makes the whole discussion academic at best. Until we have technology sufficient to create a property conflict in space, it's all just talk. The ultimate issue will be decided the same way colonial boundaries were decided in centuries past: you get as much land as you can win a war on.
you can't earn many political points by commissioning a study that doesn't allow you to create a scapegoat or enact some laws
Actually it's the opposite. Appointing a commission scores big points now when the issue is on the front page, but by the time the commission's report comes out everybody has forgotten about the issue and it's safe for the politicians to ignore it without actually doing anything.
Whether you agree or disagree with a hypothesis (in this case, "violent video games cause violent behavior"), you should be in favor of scientific investigation. I am always amazed at the amount of logical fallacies that Slashdotters trot out every time video games are attacked; it reminds me of the NRA. Why can't we just say, "Interesting hypothesis, let's see if the data supports it." The only reason to be against science is if you know you're wrong and you're afraid that other people will find out.
Granted, TFA is talking about a "commission" and not a "scientific study," but it's at least purporting to look at facts (and hopefully science) in a thoughtful way. If it turns out that violent games do cause violent behaviors in certain cases, and that we could take some reasonable actions to prevent that violence, then I would be in favor of doing so. I'm not going to sit here like some gun nut screaming "You ain't gonna take away my video games!" I always thought the only benefits to giving up video games were more free time, money, increased productivity, weight loss, and a better sex life. If we could add "fewer mass murders" to the list, that wouldn't be a bad thing.
That is offset by the number of children that were saved by cars (e.g. ambulances). If we suddenly destroyed all cars, society would collapse and millions would die of starvation and diseases untreatable due to lack of supplies. The real question is how many MORE people were killed versus people saved. Once they perfect self-driving cars, I'll gladly give up my right to drive in exchange for protection from stupid human drivers.
http://thismodernworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/TMW2011-01-12acolorlowres-copy.jpg
That's from two massacres ago.
Less risk, less reward, but essentially venture capitalism for the masses.
Actually it's much more risk with much less reward. Try this: "invest" $5,000 in 5 kickstarter projects, and $5,000 in 5 IPOs. Compare the return on investment after two years. "Venture capitalism for the masses" is called the stock market. Kickstarter is designed to fool consumers into giving away money for free by dangling shiny objects in front of them.