hebdo

Consider this: a) at some point our energy budget will exceed total Sun radiation reaching Earth, and b) indefinite "re-usage" of energy is impossible (entropy).

The point was that exponential growth is probably impossible, not just any growth.

The most serious objection to the propositions in the article is refuted at the beginning, when they agree that our future will be tied to one planet - "I assume you’re happy to confine our conversation to Earth". There are good reasons to expect that this will be invalidated somewhen in the next 400 years.

Well, technically speaking any multiplayer game is a distributed database, except that more inconsistency is tolerated ("lag"). But all of the classic results, such as CAP or FLP, apply here as well. And given how hard even the simple distributed protocols are (eg. Paxos) it should not be a surprise that writing a good networking stack for a multiplayer game is also hard.

You mean like the "Google tax"?

The point was that it is probably much less CPU intensive to decode such a stream in 1080p than to render it from a compressed 1k of Javascript.

It is so easy to forget how did the term Public Relations come into wide use.

> Due to negative implications surrounding the word propaganda because of its use by the Germans in World War I, he promoted the term "Public Relations".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#Life_and_influe...

For more I recommend the BBC documentary "The Century of the Self".

Now you will also see the uplink usage go up, potentially much higher, since Windows 10 is torrenting updates from client machines without asking the user.

Not quite sure what is your point here. The amount of megabytes transferred each month does not have to be any particular fixed number to become a burden for the user, or the ISP. We can see that at least in one case (and probably many more) such a cost can exceed $200. All of this without user's consent.

Microsoft, please get your stuff together. Hire some privacy aware people.

This seems to be one of the real costs of upgrading to the latest version of Windows. In this case your mom has to pay the bills, but in general I'm curious how long will it take for ISPs to launch a solid campaign against Microsoft, like they did with Netflix.

Awesome! Kind of similar to the Viterbi algorithm, except that Kalman is on-line, while Viterbi works on the entire observed sequence at once, after it is fully known.

Yes, for example. Any resource you can think of.

Be creative: unbounded exponential growth would mean, for instance, that at some point in the future the global yearly energy consumption would be higher than what E=mc^2 suggests for m=mass of the earth.

Given that any resouce you can think of is bounded, no, it is impossible.

Especially if you realize how quickly is the public sector growing in many (most) countries.

Not to mention centralized efforts, such as QE, which are literally aimed at jobs creation, regardless of their value.

Yes, but the underlying mechanism - the deletion in the CCR5 receptor coding fragment - is a known source of HIV immunity in humans.

The bigger problem here is that bone marrow transplant is by itself more dangerous than an antiretroviral-controlled HIV infection. Not to mention that CCR5 deletions are quite rare.

It is worth to remember that there is a way to completely cure HIV, but it is very dangerous, requires a very specific bone marrow match, and does not erradicate all subtypes of the virus. Still, it is interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematopoietic_stem_cell_transp...

By error source you mean false positive source? Because according to the analysis doc the rules 1 and 6 have way higher false positive rates.

Shouldn't new year be every year?

You have a valid point. It is, indeed, possible and often quite easy to misclassify abuse as criticism. However, I disagree with this part:

> Considering consequences, it's probably even more important to be able to take criticism on doing active harm to others than to take criticism on the importance of garbage collection.

All three major operating systems, this is Windows, Mac OS and Linux, all have or had leaders (Gates, Jobs, Torvalds) that on numerous occasions proved themselves to be harsh and very open about their criticism. One might want to say - they were/are class-A assholes. What we want to believe is one thing, but the recent history of major operating systems disagrees with your point of view.

Exactly. It is not abuse to honestly review a patch or an idea, and block its progress pointing out serious deficiencies. This is just a way to assert quality, and apparently it is a very effective way - we do trust Linux.

You are not the code you write. Accept the critical comments and improve.

Quite different. To achieve the effects of "Incremental" you would need lazy evaluation coupled with a caching layer, so that successive calls to pure functions with same arguments are not re-computed. This optimization technique is in a sense similar to Common Subexpression Elimination.

Fortran is the language of high performance computations because it forces programmers to use static memory layout, and has real arrays. It is easier to emit (SSE-)vectorized assembly from Fortran code than from C. You can of course achieve the same effects in C as you can in Fortran, but by default it requires more knowledge. For example not many people are aware of the "restrict" C keyword, which is absolutely necessary to write vectorizable code.

JavaScript is incomparably slower than Fortran. Also, Fortran has been fast since day 0.

Edit: I've just found out that "restrict" has been added in C99. Which means that even in the 90s there was no good support for parallel/vectorized code in the C standard.

Tell that to people doing machine learning!

> Only in films.

Are you trying to say that the current Germany is not the direct descendant of the Nazi Germany? Then how did it come into existence? Is it a brand new nation conjured out of thin air after the Yalta and Potsdam conferences?

Pay attention please that I did not say that it is the same nation, but that it is the direct descendant. Surely the majority of living Germans had nothing to do with NSDAP, because they were born after 1945.

It is a common thing in many legal systems in Europe. Nazi/Soviet/Other victims and their descendants consider it defamation to deny various genocides or to promote particular symbols. The law you have mentioned is essetially a short-cut for legal defense against slander, and also an honorable and a fair way close the sad chapter of WWII.

This is on a certain level very similar to positive discrimination regulations in the US. One could say - declare a law that states it is illegal to discriminate basing on race, gender or sexual orientation. The problem is that such a law is too weak - it does not serve its purpose in practice. Similarly, the generic and good anti-defamation law needs support in the most extreme cases.

Thanks! I will run my own experiments in R on this data.

The x direction explains 70.1% of the variance. y direction explains 8.5%.

> In our case, three initial left-singular vectors contribute 70.1%, 8.5%, and 3.6% of the total variance of R, respectively.

Interesting. So what is, in your opinion, the percentage of earnings an average Chinese spends on maintaining/extending his "Guanxi" and on supporting his parents/presents for relatives?

I am asking about these two specifically because they make the biggest difference between the "western" culture and the Chinese culture. The other items on your list also appear in the lives of the citizens of many European/European based countries.

Wait, what. I've lived in Beijing in 2013. You can live off 3000RMB/month = 500USD/month. That's far from being rich, but also not barely survivable. Everything was cheap for me, and I'm from Poland.

I think most Europeans do know that, even if only at some subconscious level. The rest is just propaganda, which is strong these days in every country.

But to be fair, the risk is not minuscule - for example the murder rate is 4-5 times higher in the US than it is in Europe. The only two times in my life I was close to being beaten up was during my few months visit to California.

A relevant read: Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html