1,464 karma · joined March 18, 2013
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale#Example...
was it really "designed"? To me one of the issues with modern development is that it is explicitly "designed/planned" and thus diversity and vibrancy is naturally limited by the views/imagination of the designers/developers and politicians. (an illustration from another area - it is like "planned" economy vs. naturally evolving/developing capitalist economy)
It is one of the reasons why email is such a mainstay of collaboration.
yes, convenience is a like a drug, and this is what we, tech, exploit. The resulting disappearance of privacy and freedom is what the author blasts the tech for.
>We techies know we can have tech and freedom too
The users just should use our tech responsibly.
why would you need a formal empire if you can make governments in different countries do your bidding? Any empire of the past had local governors/governments who would manage the daily routine of keeping flock in check and sewer flow. And current governments, especially in Western world, are doing it pretty effectively.
>And so their dual, revolutions, are also becoming increasingly rare.
people make revolution when they hit the wire and other means don't cut anymore. So if one manage to keep the population even just a small distance from the "wire", by providing minimal employment (or more precisely enough "bread and circuses"), policing without too much abuse, etc... - no revolution. Many countries have reached or coming close to this optimum, while some (i.e. Arabian Spring) hasn't mastered it yet.
BTC isn't money. You make a great comparison of BTC to gold, a commodity. Gold isn't used anymore as money because there isn't enough of it for that role. BTC is in even worse situation. BTC is a great collectible commodity that will be growing in value, like Campbell soup paintings or Ferrari California. Great storage of value, yet not usable as money.
The next cryptocurrency which would contain infinite mining, balanced by infinitely increasing complexity, will very possibly make it as a money. It is understandable that BTC in order to crack the glass ceiling and gain trust and acceptance had deflation built-in. Now that POC succeeded the full-featured release is to come (though lets see about alpha/beta/etc... :)
Considering that Bezos understands drones and Google is competitor to Amazon and has been missing the quiet revolution coming, this isn't a surpising salvo.
"...and changing it [license] is allowed as long as the name is changed."
edit: i was joking :)
it is great to have a Mandela like champion of your cause. Yet what about uncountable people (or animals) - victims of violence and injustice ( or they may be even not considered to have any rights for justice thus even "injustice" can't be claimed ). Sirian war is still going on. Women's rights in muslim world still an issue to say the least. Hungry and ill children around the world. Tibetans still set themselves on fire (latest one - 2 days ago). Gestation crates, dog fights, eutanasia of multi-millions annually and all the other things we do to animals.... A lot of causes needing their Mandela.
yes, great example. If people want back to that game of witch hunting, and with incomparably, multiple orders of magnitude, increased capabilities of witch hunters (like J. Edgar Hoover looking into a fusion center palantir by Palantir) - well, i rest my case.
the difference here is the actual massive surveillance (basically total possible by the technological means of the time) performed by the KGB/Stasi outside of the due process inside the jurisdiction of their respective countries. It is exactly the emerging characteristic of fusion centers and NSA activities. Please name an "extant liberal democracy" which has had such massive surveillance capabilities and applied them in such a way.
especially against your own citizens. Do "fusion center" and "Suspicious Activity Reports" generated by Palantir software ring a bell?
If you remember history, the most amount of intelligence gathered and acted upon in USSR, East Germany were against their own people, while it was supposedly under the great goal of counter intelligence against [foreign] enemy spies, agents, collaborators. Fusion centers with modern equipment and software is KGB & Stasi wet dream.
i kind of see it here. The evolution speed depends on the speed of generating of changes and on the speed of selection of the generated changes.
Wrt. the speed of generating of changes. The more complex a system (i.e. types and number of actors/components and relationships between them) - the more diverse set of small gradual changes/variations to components/relationships/behaviors can happen while the system will still be functioning. In particular it is applicable to biological systems, ie. single cells, colonies, multicell organisms and various groups/societies of it. For example, in general, 2 different species of cells can produce more diverse set of natural variations than 1 species even if the total number of cells is the same in both cases. An example at different scale - one science - philosophy of Ancient Greeks has become a multitude of sciences through the same process of branching/specialization and the speed of this process is proportional to the number of branching/specializing sciences. Following the same principle - there is no way US tax code (or the law in general :) will become simpler anytime in the future :)
"Fungus-growing ants practice agriculture and have been doing so for the past 50 million years according to research published in the Jan. 17 issue of Science. These ants not only grow fungus gardens underground for food but also have adapted to handling parasitic "weeds" that infect their crops."
an exponential process (of life complexity in this case) looks the same at any scale. The Earth has existed for 4B years, life is ~3B years, life as a cell with nucleus ~2B (yea, 1B years to develop nucleus :)
Or in other words, they judged performance of camera vs. eyes by using human eyes. It would be interesting if they send the images to, for example, OCR.
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/09/09/5718823/california-public-p...
" The average retirement payout for new retirees in California's biggest public pension system doubled between 1999 and 2012, according to CalPERS data, and initial monthly payments for one group nearly tripled in that period.
State and local cops and firefighters benefited the most.
In the 14 years covered by the data analyzed by The Sacramento Bee, average first-month pensions to state police and firefighters went from $1,770 to $4,978. California Highway Patrol officers' first-month retirement payments doubled from $3,633 to $7,418, and local government safety employees' pensions went from $3,296 to $6,867. "
yes, man, have you read about mid 19th century auto laws in England?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Act
"The 1865 act required all road locomotives, which included automobiles, to travel at a maximum of 4 mph (6 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3 km/h) in towns and have a crew of three travel, one of whom should carry a red flag walking 60 yards (55 m) ahead of each vehicle. "
"In addition to any concerns about the state of the roads, by the 1860s, there was concern that the widespread use of traction engines, such as road locomotives and agricultural engines, would endanger the safety of the public. It was feared that engines and their trailers might cause fatal accidents, scare horses, block narrow lanes, and disturb the locals by operating at night. "
that would explain why she went down without talking to FBI/etc and taking down all the DAs with (or even instead of :) her (as this just couldn't have happened at that scale without all the DAs involvement)
Took one for the team, and will land softly somewhere after the time on the "farm" (again with such cover it wouldn't be general prison population which she helped to populate).
http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2021804212_mentally...
"The state of Nevada and its primary psychiatric hospital “intentionally and wrongfully” foisted the cost of caring for indigent mentally ill people onto California cities and counties by issuing patients bus tickets out of town without making proper arrangements for their care, a lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco charges."
>The rest of it sounds like they botched making this system scalable
these systems just don't scale. In a BigCo with local replication to regional sites it takes noticeable time for such systems to perform. Trying to build such a website - well, it is a government procurement, though i don't think this is a worse one around (Halliburton's and the likes' cost+ in Iraq/Afganistan definitely bigger :).
>normally a single table with fields like
It is "normal" from another world :) The simple way you described would be done by some startup, and they would horizontally partition it when time come to scale. It is not the way the "Enterprise" things are done.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.4688v1.pdf
"In these systems excitons initiated by the incoming photons should travel really fast throughout a chain of chromophores in order to reach the reaction center where they are converted to chemical energy."
>loss less and super fast way for photons to traverse a random network^1.
My understanding is it isn't exactly loss less. It is a trade-off. The "natural" QM way of simultaneous multi-path travel is the super fast way of finding the reaction center. The issue is that many of these multi-paths may interfere and as result some degree of "entrapment" happens significantly delaying the arrival at the reaction center (Anderson localization - on a lattice draw all possible ways from A to B, including loops, etc... and whenever paths pass through the same edge with different direction double the edge time on each path and given lattice complex enough the propagation would almost stall - very-very rough illustration). To minimize the delay, the nature seems to came up with workaround - [slightly] breaking the phases on different paths and it seems that coherence is still preserved so we still have multi-path simultaneity while the above mentioned Anderson localization is decreased because of phase mismatch. This phase breaking is result of interaction which causes some energy loss/dissipation.
Huge up-and-coming developing regions - pretty much anything outside of US and Europe - will vacuum anything that tech can produce. The correction of tech industry from Western world to the rest of the world may be a little bit uncomfortable for those who miss it, i mean it is time to learn Chinese and Spanish this time not Java :)