Cowicide's comments

>the USA is one of the top spenders per student in the world.

People keep saying this, but they leave out the fact that it's not spent equally in all places. In poor neighborhoods, the schools there do NOT get the same amount of funding as they do in wealthier American nieghborhoods.

A friend of mine taught in a poor nieghborhood. She and I had to buy books and supplies for the kids because the damn school was so underfunded.

Could this be done with jpeg and gif compression?

For example, could Adobe's apps export jpegs laced with patterns within the compressed pixels that could be traced back to the owner of the app?

And, has anyone checked for this behavior?

I'll be impressed when Netflix finally opens up enough to allow it to work with Kodi without having to jump through mindless Chrome hoops to make Netflix (barely) work with it.

Then again, Kodi already works great with pirated movies, maybe I should stop paying Netflix and just use what works minus all the needless hassle?

>The attitude of the managers involved was wrong.

That's a very corporate shill way of putting it. Their actions were murderous. They let people DIE.

Do you not GET THIS somehow or are you attempting to gloss over this issue?

>If your small business produced vehicles on the scale of GM, I would be very very surprised!

Please don't be disingenuous with artful dodging. You're not smart enough to get away with that with me, sorry. I'm VERY OBVIOUSLY not discussing an issue of complexity, I was discussing an issue of ethics and morality.

It's an issue where GM knew they were killing people and did nothing about it for a long time because it wasn't profitable.

No wonder the GM corporate culture is so twisted. You're trying to turn this around as an attack on my supposedly "simple" business instead of owning up to the fact you work for a scummy corporation that killed people in the name of the almighty buck.

You may not want to face that fact and instead go running to another wikipedia link on humorous adages in hopes of distraction, but I'm not falling for it, guy.

People are dead because of your company's lack of ethics. GET IT?

If your goal here is to be public relations for GM, you're failing miserably and I suggest you move along. You're just making me resent GM even more. If you were my PR person, I'd fire you for incompetence.

But, that's how I run MY business anyway.

>GM has been part of many morally questionable practices. I think GM was on a terrible course from the mid 1970's to the early 2000's

Yeah, erm.. about that timeline.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/02/18/gm-cobal...

I think it's safe to say GM didn't exactly clean up its act after the early 2000's. If I did that same thing with my small business, I'd probably be charged with manslaughter by gross negligence... or perhaps outright murder since I knowingly allowed innocent people to die in order to rake in more cash.

> If it was, I wouldn't work here.

k

I find it interesting when there's research that doesn't happen to be funded (indirectly or otherwise) by industry, it often ends up exposing potential dangers that all the other studies somehow missed completely.

Then again, there's much less incentive to use industry-friendly, stunted methodologies when one doesn't have industry footing the bill directly or by proxy.

And, on that note:

"... Most US research on glyphosate, Benbrook added, has focused on the chemical in isolation. But in the real world, glyphosate is mixed with other chemicals, called surfactants and adjuvants, that enhance their weed-slaying power. Importantly, some of the research used in the WHO assessment came from outside the US and looked at real-world herbicide formulations. ... "

source:

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/03/monsanto-her...

On OS X Mavericks 10.9.5 with Safari 7.1.3, it didn't do anything but show a beachball after hitting refresh, but I was able to close the tab without trouble or any detectable negative effect on my browser, etc.

That would be very nice, could you put it up on GitHub when you get a chance?

Do note that current plugins for Quick Look video do nothing more than be able to display static thumbnails of various video formats even if you have Perian installed. Unlike with Snow Leopard and Perian in the past, you won't see the actual video and audio run in Quick Look with AVI, MKV, etc formats.. That's where the libVLC can come in, I hope.

More info:

https://github.com/Marginal/QLVideo/issues/3

AFAIK, there's been problems with building new plugins when it comes to video codecs since these Apple changes:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/technotes/tn2300/_in...

Here's more info on the change Apple made here with details on the issues it has caused with Quick Look:

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/114578/quick-look-s...

See the post at the bottom of the link above. In a nutshell, things like Perian that used to allow Quick Look (not to be confused with the QuickTime Player) to preview a bunch of video formats got hosed when Apple switched over to "AV Foundation" or something.

Considering how many less video formats work with Quick Look after "upgrading" from Snow Leopard to Mavericks, I personally consider it "depreciated" at least in principle.

Quite a lot of Mac users (especially those that work with a lot of video formats) have been waiting for something to fix this Quick Look issue for some years now.

The best you can do at the moment is install this to see thumbnails in Quick Look for some video formats:

https://github.com/Marginal/QLVideo

more info on the issue:

https://github.com/Marginal/QLVideo/issues/3

Would there be a way to implement libVLC as a replacement for Quick Look in Mavericks and Yosemite? That would be fantastic!

Right now (as you may know) Apple depreciated Quick Look and it no longer works with far too many video formats even if one has the old version of QuickTime installed with Perian.

>My grudge, if I have any at all, is not with Chomsky or his politics, but rather with the Myth of Magical Numbers, which has so entrenched itself that even mathematicians have fallen prey to it in one form or another for centuries, if not millennia.

I see your point, but I'm not sure Chomsky was espousing anything magical (as in pseudo-science) by saying the Fibonacci sequence is found in nature and isn't well understood why. Present company excepted, perhaps.

I also try to keep in mind that the term "magical" is often rather amorphously applied.

Some call pseudo-science "magical" due to ignorance.

Some call some science "magical" due to ignorance.

However, some call certain science "magical" not due to ignorance, but as a respectful nod towards the vast complexities involved that we still don't know (and perhaps never will) that surround the complex "nature"[0] of science.

If you haven't already read it, I think this is a pretty interesting take on it (in a sense):

http://www.amazon.com/New-Kind-Science-Stephen-Wolfram/dp/15...

Series of followups 10 years later:

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/05/its-been-10-years-wha...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3R3LBjDek (Love And Rockets - "No New Tale To Tell")

Whoops, you must have written your response and submitted as I was typing mine. Thank you for saying this far more succinctly and intelligently than I could have (or tried to).

>Living organisms likely exploit this property of self-similarity for easy scaling.

Do note your usage of the term "likely". You don't know exactly why, just like no one else really does.

You're making a likely supposition, not a statement of fact. We have theories as to why and how the Fibonacci sequences are found in nature as you've posited, but that doesn't mean it's well-understood nor some sort of old and tired closed case.

>pseudo-mystical notions

I don't see Chomsky espousing pseudo-mystical notions. He simply said it's found all over nature and it's not well understood why. By your insulting tone, I would surmise you have a grudge with Chomsky that goes well beyond anything to do with Fibonacci numbers.

Are you a neo-libertarian, perhaps?

>We understand why the Golden Ratio shows up all over the place, especially in biology: it doesn't.

I don't think Chomsky meant for you to take "all over the place" so --literally--. It's a commonly understood expression that's not meant to be taken so literally unless one perhaps has a pedantic axe to grind.

The respected mathematician Arthur T. Benjamin would disagree with you that it's not an interesting fact when it shows up in nature:

http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_the_magic_of_fibona...

Chomsky didn't say anything terribly problematic about Fibonacci numbers. You're frankly going to have to find a better example to discount his conclusions on other topics which you have no understanding (as you said).

> it's the logarithmic spiral that's common, and it's a due to logarithmic spirals being a necessary characteristic of certain structures that exhibit self-similarity.

Yes, but why? Do you have the answer to that?

You've basically posited the same thing that Chomsky said when he said:

"There is something about the physical world that forces certain kinds of structures to emerge under particular conditions."

>What you'll actually find is not a series of systems all approximating the same Golden Spiral

Correct, but one will also find otherwise. Also, often it's an approximation that's often not meant to be taken --literally--. It's just noting similarities in patterns that anyone (including laypersons) can observe and there's nothing wrong with doing that.

If Chomsky was writing a piece on Fibonacci numbers, I might agree with you that he didn't go into enough depth on the topic. But, it appears you missed his greater point while focusing on trite details and being too literal.

> It would be unusual for them to shut this down entirely.

Right, but what they have done is shut down development on certain platforms. For example, they'll continue to develop Sunrise for Windows Phone, Windows OS but not for Android and/or make it unusable on Android, Mac, iOS, etc. by degrading the code.

They have a solid history of doing this. There's also a solid history of people telling me not to worry about it and being proven wrong over time. Again, color me skeptical.

What people hear MS will do and what MS says it will do doesn't really mean too much to me. It's the actions that count.

I remember when lots of people told me how great it was going to be when MS bought Virtual PC for Mac (from Connectix) back in the day...

After MS touched the code, it was the first (and only) app to ever give my Mac a kernel panic. Then, it got even "greater" when MS discontinued Virtual PC for Mac entirely. MS bought it and killed a great app for Mac.

Will Sunrise avoid getting borged and ruined by MS? I hope not, but I'm not counting on it, either.

Grass-fed steak has about twice as many omega-3s as a typical grain-fed steak. And since grass-fed cattle are typically leaner, almost all cuts of grass-fed beef have less total fat than beef from corn-raised cattle.

Of course, Beef Magazine will refute those numbers with industry-sponsored "studies", but I tend to take them with a grain of salt (just like my steak).

Well, if one is to rely on anecdotal evidence only... there's been no studies to back it up. There's also this:

http://www.naturalhealth365.com/ketogenic_diet/cancer_part_1...

I really like the way they've implemented tab previews. I can hover at over the tab and it'll show its thumbnail or I can drag the menubar down under the tab bar and all the tab thumbnails show at once. It makes more sense to me than the way Apple implements it in Safari.

I agree with some of what you're saying, but you left out tidal energy sources which are a factor especially once you consider the preponderance of people that live near coastlines.

Some examples:

Tidal tech here and now:

http://energy.gov/articles/maine-project-launches-first-grid...

http://www.theday.com/article/20130331/NWS01/303319909/-1/NW...

Near future:

http://oregonwave.org/

More:

The U.S. Navy has committed to get half of its energy from renewable sources by the year 2020. One element of that strategy will be looking to extract energy from tides, currents and waves:

http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/24/u-s-navy-awards-8-...

I also think you failed to mention that nuclear is too expensive. That's why places like France (who have had success with nuclear in the past) are transitioning towards alternative energy (like offshore wind) instead of building new nuclear plants.

http://cleantechnica.com/2012/03/26/nuclear-power-too-expens...

More sources of evidence that show why nuclear is too expensive:

http://v1.apebble.com/static/clean/CSI_Nuclear_Power_Fact_Sh...

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/society-and-culture/n...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2012/03/29/exelons-n...

http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global...

http://www.psr.org/resources/nuclear-power-factsheet.html

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We really don't need to build new nuclear plants to transition and we should work to responsibly phase them out over time. Here's results from a Stanford researcher whose study shows the world can be powered by alternative energy in 20-40 years:

http://scienceblog.com/65427/the-world-can-be-powered-by-alt...

More:

Mark Z. Jacobson - Energy Policy

http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnP...

Here's for New York (with more numbers):

http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/NewYo...

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/march/new-york-energy-031...

Jacobson doesn't just throw numbers around, he makes some very salient points along with strategies as well.

We should also factor in advances in decentralized battery storage that are bound to offset current baseload issues. For example, breakthroughs in graphene production, etc.:

http://delta.tudelft.nl/article/making-graphene-affordable/2...