Well the segment is actually "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" so it becomes even more clear.
Hmm, I often wonder if it shouldn't be changed to include the word "both" between "bear" and "arms".
By the Goatse Guy?
- the morning after a major Curry Binge...
Nothing to do with Apple. Nice try, hater.
Grow a sense of humour; or are you so insecure that anything that suggests that somebody hasn't prostrated themself in humble adulation is taken to mean that they are 'haters'? You wouldn't last long as part of an engineering team with that sort of sensitivities; we all get teased for aspects of what we do, in a friendly way - it's part of belonging. Perhaps it is way of saying "We know you understand because you are one of us".
If you want my opinion without any hint of humour, then it is like this: I think the Apple Watch is a kitchy little gadget that doesn't add much value to one's life.
- Is it an impressive, technological achievement? Well, in a modern context, not really - it is just a gadget on par with many others, and it will be dated in another year from now.
- Is it beautiful? Not to my eyes, but then I appreciate function over form, and I don't find women more sexy in high heels either, just to pick something at random.
- So, what is the point of owning an Apple Watch? Beats me, really.
Whether the Apple Watch is going to be a success remains to be seen, I think. It tries to latch on to the same instincts that has made fashion or reality TV a commercial success: the instinct to follow the crowd without having to think about anything essential. No, I'm not a neck-beard, but probably only because I have taught myself to shave with an old-fashioned straight razor, which I find is a satisfying skill.
The expression 'MacJob' used to mean a crap job; so this MacWatch....
so the crime he was committing was making money for himself instead of for Goldman Sachs.
No, the crime was that he was exploiting a weakness in the system. This is equivalent to the closed door; even if a door is locked with a flimsy lock or perhaps not locked at all - if you know that you are not allowed to go in there, you will be committing a criminal act if you enter uninvited. Or if you find a bag of cash by the road-side, or if you discover that you can get unlimited cash out of a cash-machine; if you take the money, you commit a crime. This guy knew what he was doing and that he shouldn't.
I don't have much sympathy for big finance; they too belong behind bars, for preference in a zoo.
Bigger than 28 billion light years because the universe is expanding. After the light we see now from the distant past leaves, the object that emitted it continues to move away from us.
Good point - although, what that means is only that we can, theoretically, see the objects that were, back then, going to be observable, but are now further away than the maximum distance, over which we could have received a light signal. (Wow, how about that for a mouthful of grammar?). I suppose that still qualifies as observable.
Also, thank you for not pointing out the small error of 9 orders of magnitude
Hey, what's a few billion light years between friends?
It had never occurred to me to consider that life might cause erosion.
No, I think that is something nobody really appreciated in the past; it is only in the last ~10 years that I have started reading an increasing number of articles about this, but it seems that life has been a very major factor in shaping the environment of our planet. There has been a number of great 'events' throughout Earths history - not just "the great oxygenation" if that is the name, but several others, one being (from memory) when life first colonized dry land and caused the release of iron into the sea by erosion, which apparently laid down all the major iron deposits. Perhaps it isn't so surprising - after all, most life exists by breaking chemical bonds and extracting the energy.
Plant life is pretty famous, surely, for countering erosion by stopping soil getting washed away
But plant life large enough to stop erosion is fairly recent (less than 1/2 byo) and constitutes only a small proportion of the actual biomass on the planet, it is only on the surface. Compare that to the fact that we keep finding life everywhere, from deep within the crust to the top of the atmosphere; there is such a huge amount of living things munching away at the chemistry of the planet.
I mean, really now. What's the point of this article?
Who knows, but the point of speculating is to think through different, possible scenarios - the very foundation of prediction, I'd say. Since we don't know all the parameters that are going to shape tomorrow, we have to think through what might happen - what if the car breaks down, what if that cheque is delayed etc - so we can be prepared for things and make contingency plans. In my opinion this is the very thing that makes intelligence an evolutionary advantage: the ability to plan ahead and make reasonable predictions.
Correct, we already know how things turned out on Earth, but if we at any time in the future were to go to planets outside our star system, it would help prepare us better, if we could make even just an educated guess about what we might find when we arrived. I don't know - I think it is common sense.
The scale of zoom visualizations now goes well past the limits of the observable Universe, with no signs of loss of complexity at all.
I have deperately tried to interpret some insight into this 'discovery' - and failed; this may be because of my lack of understanding, of course, but I don't think so. Mathematically, the set of complex numbers is infinite - uncountably so, in fact (Cantor's diagonal argument):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
The observable universe is limited by the speed of light, so it will be less than ~28 ly across (we can at most see as far as light has traveled since the big bang), and intuitively infinite must be bigger than something of limited size. It is a misleading argument, though; infinity is a strange thing, and comparing the sizes of infinite sets has to be done with care (as Cantor's argument demonstrates). For one thing, we don't really know that the universe is a continuum in any of the senses defined in mathematics - there are speculations that there is a "smallest size" of distance and time "because of quantum" (I'm being deliberately wooly-mouthed because I don't know what I'm talking about here). If that is the case, then any infinite set will have more elements than there are bits of universe that we can observe (total volume of observable universe / volume of.the smallest element = finite number)
If we are talking about continua, on the other hand, then we don't really know, I think. A Mandelbrot set is a subset of the complex numbers, so is at most of the same cardinality as that one. Incidentally and perhaps surprisingly, there are exactly as many complex numbers as there are real numbers, and there are as many real number between 0 and 1 as there are between +/- infinity, courtesy Cantor again. The universe, on the other hand may or may not be fully describable as some sort of N-dimensional, smooth manifold (manifold: a winkly version of space, so to speak); a smooth manifold will again have the same cardinality as [0,1], and if the universe can not be fitted into one of those, it is anybody's guess, I think. There are sets larger than the real numbers.
As an aside note: why have I ignored the idea of 'size' as in distances or volumes? Because it makes no sense to talk about metrics, when one of the sets does not have a defined method of measuring distances in meters or any other physical distance. Assigning a physical unit to an abstract set would be arbitrary.
This is a great idea, and as we hear on BBC, there are already existing tunnels all over the world, dug by Tibetans:
You have completely lost me
Something about your post suggests that you were lost even before you started reading. The number of question marks, for one thing.
So what the fuck are you trying to prove?
Prove? I was making a comment - relating some of my own observations and the thoughts I had in that connection. It seems to have triggered a fit of violent rage in you; do you feel that you are religiously devoted to Google and that any hint of criticism against your Deity means that people are going all out to get you?
So - is Google evil? Could be - they are certainly not good in the moral sense; they are a business, and it would be naive to think that their first, second and third priorities were anything other than making profit. I am not against business, I'm just not stupid.
Is Google a monopoly? When something 95% of all searches happen through Google, then, yes. When you are in a position to hinder others from entering the market and compete, certainly. Admittedly they don't hold a monopoly in the smartphone market, for now, but I am sure they will be happy to be a monopoly if at all possible, and it is not unrealistic to expect that they can.
That's *one* IoT... but how does that relate to my lightbulbs that track me around the house or my garage door opener that lets me open it remotely from my Apple Watch after seeing who's standing outside?
Well, as I keep saying, the IoT is not really about whether you fridge or garage door are on the internet; these are just gimmicks to entertain you and lure you into thinking that it is 'cool' and therefore somehow OK. And I'm not sure there is all that much intent to spy on people, in most cases - it is more that these devices are becoming easy and obscenely cheap to produce, and it is very easy to persuade yourself to thinking "what's the harm?" in incorporating them into all kinds of every day objects - paper documents 'for security', wrapping 'to track goods throughout production', etc etc. In many cases they are meant to be no more than a "better barcode", and there is no malice behind; but computers being so much more than just passive markers means that they can be used for a host of things that they were never intended for, and that is the big worry, in my opinion. It is certainly something we have to apply some thought to - it is technically possible to produce mote computers that include capabilities like networking, microphone, possibly camera and other environment sensors. There are scenarios in which these things may be beneficial, but the potential for abuse is also great.
Every time I read about this EU nonsense with Android, I think about Nokia and Symbian. Maybe the EU is chapped because all the good smart phone OSs are developed in the US?
Are all good smartphone OSes developed in the US? Perhaps - but I don't think that is the issue here. I haven't read the case, or the summary, or the article about the summary, or the summary of that one; but I got a smartphone recently - a Samsung Ace 3 with Android. My impression is that the concept has huge promise, but that it is set up to disappoint massively, because although it is so-called open-source, you are not likely to be set free from the tie-in. This particular phone comes without Google Play (and as Google say: 'if it isn't installed from the start, you are not supposed to have it'), and all I can find on Samsung's equivalent is ad- and spyware. I have a suspicion the same holds for Google Play, but I don't know. Even if you download Google Play from elsehwere, it will not be allowed to run - it gets killed instantly.
To my mind, this is very close to being abuse of monopoly - 'collusion to abuse a monopoly' if there is such a concept. Oh, I'm sure it is all legal, in the lawyer sense of the word, meaning that if you get away with it, it must have been legal; I don't think it should be legal, and it certainly isn't moral. They are misappropriating the open source concept and unless we speak out against it, we let them demean the good standing of the open source movement.
Then lets avoid picking on Scientology and revoke tax exempt status for all churches.
Not quite. It has been well documented and publicized over many years that Scientology is a deliberate fraud, and that they operate like a criminal organisation, with bullying of opponents and mind-control of their members. They should not be recognized as a religious institution at all, whether some members actually believe in the drivel they preach or not, and they should not be granted tax excemption. Tax excemption should be given only in return for documented charity expenses in any case and charity status should only be given on strict, independently audited criteria.
MESSAGE ACKNOWLEDGED -- The Pershing II missiles have been launched.
