NFC can be used for more things than just payments. You could get your monthly bus card sent to your phone instead of needing to carry a separate card. When entering the subway/bus/traingates, put your phone near the reader.
Since it works offline, it can also be of value to businesses. For instance, if you have a secure service station, you could send the rights to open the door lock to a technicians phone over the air, and set the credentials to be valid for a limited time (say a day).
No, but a lot of things with regards to our current expected behaviour of genders is in fact social, not biological. A lot of 18th century male behaviour would today be regarded as effeminate. Red was once the color of choice for baby boys, and blue for girls.
>Artificially boosting the career success of women just causes misery on the long run for men
Hang on, did anyone propose affirmative action here or something? All the blog talked about was trying to praise girls for their smarts rather than their looks. If this is enough to cause misery for you, I think you have self-esteem issues. (Edit: Oops, that was needlessly confrontational and personal. Apologies for last sentence.)
>I thought that the girl in your story was very smart, and even if people had treated her like a pretty doll for her entire life she would still be the same. Intelligent, critical and capable.
Perhaps, but as mentioned in the article, some girls as young as 5 think they are "too fat" and try to go on a diet. It is clearly an issue for some.
It's a blog post, not a research paper. If course it will use anecdotes. Do you have any counter examples to show an exceptional bias in their "hand-picking"?
>"So, when Clojure calls a function, it either
already has the instance in its entirety (a lambda) or it finds it by dereferencing a binding. Since all functions are instances that implement IFn, the implementation can then call invokeinterface, which is very efficient. "
Perhaps, but from my understanding with InvokeDynamic, for a function that ends up with for instance adding two numbers, we can guarantee the types even though the code is dynamic. This means the JVM can perform optimizations like inlining. This invokeinterface call could then be replaced with an "iadd" bytecode at the call site, which in turn can get JITed, and so on.
>if [a JVM thread] reads a field of an object, and another thread writes to the same field of the same object, then the program will see either the old value, or the new value, but not something else entirely
Nitpick: unless the field in questions is a "long" or "double". In those cases the operation becomes two bytecodes and you can in fact see something else entirely if you are unlucky. At least it used to be like that.
An interesting read is "Remembering Satan", about a small community torn apart by accusations of sexual abuse and satanic rituals. Many people confessed, some were convicted, no evidence was ever produced.
On one hand, other Android based phone manufacturers are clearly going to face an uphill struggle if Google are going to release new versions of the OS on their own devices first.
On the other hand, it will hopefully provide some protection against being sued by Apple+Microsoft.
It was in a rented apartment, so it could soon be someone else's kitchen. Currently he had small amounts of radioactive matter, but what what if had gotten hold of more? Radiation goes through walls, no matter who owns them.
I think this happened sometimes during the last 15 years. I was surprised when I came to the US and was exposed to Fox news, I was surprised that they were using the word incorrectly all the time. "The forces were decimated in a surprise attack..."
If enough people use it that way, it becomes the correct usage, of course. It is how languages (d)evolve.
That is a false dichotomy - lots of people suggest we rely on science and technology, that is not what many people dislike about Lomborg. Well, it is not what I dislike about him anyway, I can't speak for everyone.
Arguing against him is not arguing against science. Actually, it is my respect for science that makes me wary of him. He always seem to suggest simple populist solutions to complex problems.
It is a powerful speech to be sure, but it also contains some of the things I didn't like about the book and her philosophy. For instance - cultist thinking:
>Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.
Again and again she exhorts people to feel disgust and hatred for people with different opinions, and to shun them. This is the black&white and us&them thinking common in religious cults.
> To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.
Those I've met who love money the most are those who have experienced deprivation. Money represents safety to them. It has very little to do with the creativity, intelligence or passion in creating. And in fact, since some of them (now I speak in the general sense, not people I know) believe their survival depends on it, they are willing to do all sorts of stuff to get hold of it.
>It does actually have to be so, especially for developing nations like China and India
No, it doesn't actually have to be so. Knowledge and technology transfer, more efficient markets, and alternative energy sources combined can ensure continued growth without increased emissions. It is fascinating that some free-market proponents believe in the amazing ability of human imagination and drive to surmount any dificulty (as I do). But as soon as we make any attempt to include environmental externalities when calculating the cost of something, the whole market will appearently collapse and billions die!
>thousands of Swedens and their (frankly) mediocre efforts
It is of course impossible for Sweden to offset the emissions of everyone else. The point is that everyone else can learn from Sweden and do the same.
A 9% decrease in carbon emissions over 20 years combined wth healthy growth and high living standards? What would you consider not mediocre?
>destroying the planet that there really is very little we can do to stop it without encroaching on the human rights of every person on the planet.
So destroying the planet is not encroaching on their rights in any way then?
>claiming that the only possible solution is to pretty much destroy our way of life.
That is what many climate warming deniers like to claim will happen. Doesn't have to be so, Sweden for instance has increased its wealth steadily while at the same time reduced its environmental impact.
>I certainly prefer the Myhrvold approach, of thinking outside the box and challenging others to react, than the Gore fear-mongering.
What Al Gore does is also challenging people to react.
Agreed, but as Aaronontheweb said, take a look at Fallout New Vegas. Several of the people involved with the original Fallouts now work AT Obsidian, and it seems they want to bring a lot of the old feel back. Just to take a single example, Stimpacks will be very rare now, and will slowly give back hitpoints - they won't give you +100hp in the middle of a gunfight. Radiation will be a lot more lethal too.