No, it’s called disagreement.

There is no clearly defined upper limit on what the population should be, or even how to determine what it should be. Yes, there are issues with the human population causing environmental impacts. One solution (the trivial one) is to reduce these by reducing the human population. But by how and how much? Who arbitrates this? When does it stop? Just venting at the impacts of population numbers on the environment moves us no closer to a solution. The logical extrapolation of this trivial approach given no clearly definable metric for success is diabolical. Humanity can always reduce its impact by reducing its population size. This gets us nowhere (literally :-). There are other solutions to consider (e.g., technological (e.g., more efficiency) or cultural (e.g., don’t buy so much)).

Bear in mind that just like the Chinese are seeing negative consequences to the the one child policy, attempts to reduce humanity’s impacts on the environment by reducing population numbers will also have unanticipated negative consequences, over and above any intended (if they materialise) positive consequences.

The world’s population is shrinking in the developed and most of the developing world, and there are huge economic down sides with no clear solutions.

Be careful what you wish for.

True. I also can't read a summary properly. I suspect not too many people know what a Surface Pro X is given that it is an Arm box running Windows...

Both benchmarks were running X86 code. Their performance was very close. However, the A12Z (an ARM processor) was emulating x86; the Surface Pro X was running x86 natively.The point is that the once non-emulated ARM64 code is available for Geekbench (it sort of is with iOS, but not for Mac OS), it can be expected to be noticeably (significantly?) faster.

Importantly, in this developer-only version, performance of emulated X86 on Apple ARM hardware is already very respectable. It it reasonable to expect it to be substantially faster once consumer hardware is released with a current-generation Apple ARM chip, rather than the two year old A12X/Z.

This bodes well for those concerned that their x86-compiled code won't run well. It probably will run just fine for most people, and perhaps even better if you are upgrading from an older Mac.

Now I would be curious to see how WINE performs on these boxes...

Itâ(TM)s amazing how people love getting on the Apple-bashing bandwagon. The Google Home Max is $49 more expensive! Get a sense of perspective. Do you think that Google is also ripping people off? The HomePod is a wonderful product for those that want it. If it is not what you want, so be it. It does not make it a bad product. If you donâ(TM)t want its features, donâ(TM)t pay for them. Why should the rest of us care?

Agreed. Furthermore, why does every damn poster post about implantables? The term "medical device" covers a broad range of products.

For example, when you visit your GP and get your blood tested, your blood is sent off to a lab where the machine used to conduct those tests is also a medical device, regulated by the FDA (in the US at least, but the FDA has influence in many other jurisdictions). Many of those devices by the way run Windows. Yes, Windows. Usually at least one embedded system too, to handle hard real-time requirements, but the HMI is often Windows-based. And they are network connected. To the lab network, but they are connected nevertheless.

There does need to be an upgrade mechanism for them (and there usually is). However, automatic (or even manual) Windows Update is not that. What if an update interferes with the correct operation of the device? What if e.g. some test results start coming back negative when they should be positive, because of an update? Sure, the device being maliciously compromised is also a risk, but updates cannot just be applied with the hope that the device still operates correctly.

This is not as straight-forward a nut to crack as simply applying O/S vendor-supplied patches. Testing needs to be performed first. Whilst needing this testing is a good thing, maintaining a long-term ability to monitor available updates and then approving them for release substantially increases the cost of ownership of those devices. And only the original device manufacturer can perform those activities.

Having said that, the article refers to the ability to have updates applied, but I did not see a requirement to actually apply updates. I can guess what is likely to happen.

One final point - all medical devices have to undergo a hazard assessment. For some devices, the hazard assessment might have determined that it is safer to burn the software onto a ROM rather than have it on a writeable medium such as FLASH. What happens there? Is ROM no longer an option for medical device firmware?!

When specifying that you want "full self-driving capability" on the Tesla website, there is a disclaimer that you cannot use the car commercially for autonomous ride hailing. Tesla is planning a "Tesla Network", which is the only way that they will authorise commercial ride-sharing/hailing activities (details to be provided next year). I think that this is the first time that a car company has mentioned restrictions like this. They probably won't be the last.

"Means trade of goods and services. The existance of a market." No, it doesn't. You've just described all economies. Capitalism is an economic system that allows the investing of privately-owned capital in enterprises for the purposes of providing such goods or services, usually (but not always) with the intention of making a profit. A more formal definition is "private ownership of the means of production". There are other systems of course, for example communal ownership of the means of production. The best-known is communism (which is more than just an economic system).

I suspect that you're thinking of a pebble-bed reactor.

We had an HP150 during the 1980s. It ran MS-DOS 2.11, with an Intel 8088, but was not IBM PC compatible. The touch screen worked quite well, and substituted for a mouse (which the system didn't have - at least, ours didn't). However, since the infrared beams were in front of the screen, it was possible to 'touch' the screen without actually making contact. The actual contact point was a few millimetres off the surface of the screen, but varied in height due to the curve of the CRT. The mechanism was good for keeping fingerprints off the screen, but I can't see it being that good for attempting to touch a screen with your finger hovering nearby in a moving vehicle. A slight bump in the road and you will touch the wrong button without even appearing to make contact with anything. With physical buttons, you can feel for the button and then press it only once your finger is on it. I suspect that this is more attractive to the manufacturer than the driver, since it allows a large number of these to be made and used in many different models, with the buttons being a software not a hardware choice. Lastly, the HP150 system (and so supposedly this one too, although I have not RTFA) was not multi-touch capable, since the locations of two fingers couldn't be unambiguously determined.Place two fingers on the screen on opposite corners of a rectangular area, and the system couldn't determine if the fingers were in fact on the other two corners of the rectangle. The same beams would be interrupted.

Sounds fair. By the way, have you ever heard of quantum mechanics?

The problem with this reasoning is, you have no choice BUT to "speculate". At some point, Bitcoins must have a value relative to fiat currencies, either implicitly or explicitly, in order to be used as a "medium for exchange". Otherwise, they aren't anything. The value is either explicit (how many dollars a Bitcoin exchange will give you for a bitcoin) or implicit (how many dollars it costs to buy X vs. how many bitcoins it costs to by X). It doesn't matter which it is (in reality, it is both, and in a way they are the same thing). With a reducing supply of bitcoins, they remain a depreciating "currency". This is fatal for an economy based on such a currency, as I stated above. Of course there is infrastructure surrounding Bitcoin which allows it to be used as a "medium for exchange", i.e. a "payment network". That is only part of it, and is not the relevant part. The other, relevant part is its supply (generation). This is what is broken, whether deliberate or not.

Bitcoin is in fact a clever Ponzi scheme, in that the founders can profit without even being identified. (It makes sense that they don't want to be identified now, doesn't it?)

Bitcoin's fundamental problem, and why it has all the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme (if it walks like a duck...) is that it is a deflationary currency by design due to the deliberate reduction in the supply of bit coins over time and the consequent artificial scarcity. No, being able to divide bitcoins into smaller parts does not solve this problem! It remains deflationary. One can assume one of two things about the designer(s) of Bitcoin:

a. He/she/they did not understand economics well enough; or

b. He/she/they did understand economics well enough.

If (a), then the dangers of a deflationary currency (which encourages hoarding and not spending / investing) were unknown to him/her/them. If (b), then these consequences were understood and were therefore considered desirable.

Assumption (a) makes this an accidental Ponzi scheme, but a Ponzi scheme nevertheless. Assumption (b) makes this a deliberate Ponzi scheme. Either way, the net result is the same. The original miners (which will have included the founders) make a whole lot of money. Late entrants provide them the money and in so doing lose theirs.

Bitcoin cannot be used as an alternative currency because it is deflationary. End of story. If you think it can be, then please provide your new theory of economics, and we can all go back onto the gold standard.

I suggest getting out of Bitcoin now.