kozyel - Slashdot User

Comment Corporations more important than Country Leaders.. (Score 1) 23

by kozyel on Saturday September 09, 2023 @04:51AM (#63834404) Attached to: OpenAI Chief Sam Altman Becomes the First To Get Indonesia's 'Golden Visa'

Dystopian writers have been predicting that corporates will become bigger / more important than actual countries for decades .. is this another signpost along that road?

Comment All very cool, but (Score 1) 80

by kozyel on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @10:20PM (#60224822) Attached to: Mars Is About To Have Its 'Wright Brothers Moment'

If you want to test and fly a helico-pter at an equivalent of 100,000 feet, why not just release it from a weather balloon at that altitude here?

Call me old and grumpy — this idea that we could somehow someday have all the technology, expertise and experience to explore other planets is misguided and a distraction (at best) or a lethal diversion from what really matters, looking after the one we are currently on. Do we really expect that another planet can support us, and will have a benign "ecosystem" to not kill us in days/weeks or even centuries/millennia?

All the countless intertwined systems from bacteria through invertebrates to reptiles & mammals etc... all of which have co-evolved and existed with us, either uncoupled, parasitic or in symbiosis, do we really have the hubris to think that we can create this ourselves, or will magically find a non-lethal match in a goldilocks zone?

TLDR?

why are we doing this on Mars?

Submission + - Microsoft's Attempt To Convert Users From Windows XP Backfires (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @12:25AM

MojoKid writes: For the past few months, Microsoft has been loudly and insistently banging a drum. All support and service for Windows XP and Office 2003 shuts down on April 8 — no more security updates, no more fixes. In early February, faced with a slight uptick in users on the decrepit operating system the month before, Microsoft hit on an idea: Why not recruit tech-savvy friends and family to tell old holdouts to get off XP? The response to this earnest effort was a torrent of abuse from Windows 8 users who aren't exactly thrilled with the operating system. Microsoft has come under serious fire for some significant missteps in this process, including a total lack of actual upgrade options. What Microsoft calls an upgrade involves completely wiping the PC and reinstalling a fresh OS copy on it — or ideally, buying a new device. Microsoft has misjudged how strong its relationship is with consumers and failed to acknowledge its own shortcomings. Not providing an upgrade utility is one example — but so is the general lack of attractive upgrade prices or even the most basic understanding of why users haven't upgraded. Microsoft's right to kill XP is unquestioned, but the company appears to have no insight into why its customers continue to use the OS. The fact that it only recently made a file migration tool available is evidence that Redmond hasn't actually investigated the problem.

Comment Re:Hang on... (Score 2, Interesting) 728

by kozyel on Friday November 05, 2010 @11:56PM (#34145114) Attached to: Considering a Fair Penalty For Illegal File-sharing

Not too sure which threaded reply to attached this too, but how about:

tax == flat_rate x (Govt_min_income_threshold + Luxury_threshold) where Govt_min_income_threshold == Social Security Benefit (or equivalent basic unemployment benefit)
Luxury_threshold = 10k
and flat_rate = Business Tax Rate (30%?)

Should mean those on a minimal income pay no tax, and those who have a high disposable income pay their fair share of tax.

Why Time Flies By As You Get Older 252

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 02, 2010 @11:03PM from the like-a-banana dept.

Ant notes a piece up on WBUR Boston addressing theories to explain the universal human experience that time seems to pass faster as you get older. Here's the 9-minute audio (MP3). Several explanations are tried out: that brains lay down more information for novel experiences; that the "clock" for nerve impulses in aging brains runs slower; and that each interval of time represents a diminishing fraction of life as we age.

Towards a Wiki For Formally Verified Mathematics 299

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 30, 2008 @06:14PM from the preparing-the-ground-for-our-robot-overlords dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Cameron Freer, an instructor in pure mathematics at MIT, is working on an intriguing project called vdash.org (video from O'Reilly Ignite Boston 4): a math wiki which only allows true theorems to be added! Based on Isabelle, a free-software theorem prover, the wiki will state all of known mathematics in a machine-readable language and verify all theorems for correctness, thus providing a knowledge base for interactive proof assistants. In addition to its benefits for education and research, such a project could reveal undiscovered connections between fields of mathematics, thus advancing some fields with no further work being necessary."

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