“Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.

“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.

“Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”

“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”

“As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid–First Millennium A.R.”

“Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”

Stephenson, Neal. Anathem (pp. 895-896). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Even if Germany replaces the lost grid power with a different source, the need for petrochemical resource influx is still enormous based upon the structure of Germany's heavy industry and manufacturing ecosystem. The oil and natural gas is an input into manufacturing plants that produce plastics and chemicals that are feed-stock for more advanced products. The lack of power is only a part of the issue why the German industrial machine is well and truly screwed.

Does any astronomer use film these days? For raw sensor data: just filter out any light sources (pixel clusters) that are moving faster than a given delta. The sensor data is already run through tons of post-processing to ferret out items of interest. Just add in some pre-processing to remove items of no interest. For photon sensor based observation that is accumulated by software: this is an imminently solvable problem. The biggest concern is that any pre-processing not filter out data that is relevant, and only removes the "noise" that is present in the data set. It's not like planes and meteors don't already intrude upon these data sets.

This sounds an awful lot like stodgy old men who have been using the same software for years and are extremely put out that they might have to do something slightly different due to changing circumstances. (Something I see a lot of in IT contracting.)

Only accurate in given (simple) circumstances. How hard can it be to just google this for the basics?

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

There is no hard and fast rule of ownership in all cases. If there were we wouldn't need a vast global legal system and an entire industry of lawyers making their living on figuring out who owns what.

Oh, I don't know, try the Amish, or the Hutterites, and perhaps even Mormons who don't want their kid's brains full of deviltry. There are plenty of sub-groups within the USA that don't shove a screen into their kid's hands every times they cry because they're bored.

"The 3,500 graves represent roughly 3.5% of London's 100,000 victims of the Great Plague"

If there were 100,000 victims, then 3,500 graves is *exactly* 3.5% of the total.

Perhaps the author meant to say "The 3,500 graves represent 3.5% of London's estimated 100,000 victims of the Great Plague."

Matthew 5:17

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."

He's speaking about Jewish Law, not Roman Law, and he's speaking about Jewish prophets. Unless you completely ignore what he's saying, he's explicitly stating that Jewish Law is still in effect, and that his teaching are *in addition* to what his Father has already laid out. Note that The Father/Son thing isn't really accurate, either, because the Trinity is One, so it's really his own law via his other manifestation.

The *only* piece of Jewish law that he specifically overrides is performing sacrifices, as he states that he is the final ultimate sacrifice from now until Judgement Day.

So if you're a fundamentalist Christian (for example, a Calvinist) you adhere to the Ten Commandments because that's just as important as the direct word of Jesus, because it's the same god commanding them. This extends to the other lessons of the Bible. Being gay will get your whole town obliterated, so don't do it.

You cannot claim Christianity and then only use select passages to back your specific interpretation. Either you believe the *whole* book is the inspired message of your deity, or you're just engaging in a self-affirming tautology.

So you are 100% incorrect, unless you wish to parse words like the pharisees that Jesus so notably denounces.

I know the pronoun likely is attached to the nearest noun, but I can't tell if Russell Thornton was traumatized and therefore built the tracker, or if the child was traumatized. Really, from the structure of that sentence it really seems like it is Russell who was traumatized.

Effects are cumulative, not discrete. And in many cases the combinations are likely more problematic than the individual effects of a given toxic chemical, which you can think of as the inverse of a cocktail of medications. If several medications combined can cure a problem that the individual medications cannot, then doesn't it stand to reason that the wider the variety of harmful chemicals your cells are exposed to, the greater the chance that the induced damage will overcome the cell's ability to cope, or the body's ability to properly regulate and repair itself? By your logic these people may as well start smoking, because they're already exposed to so much environmental latent pollution. (Yes, I'm being hyperbolic here, but not unduly so.)

In my town of less that 100K people I can easily see any movie in glorious Doubly (it's in Doubly!) Digital THX brain-surround. No problem. However, most larger musicians don't play a date anywhere near me. So comparing lost movie revenue due to digital piracy to lost concert revenue due to pirated music is a specious argument. They really aren't parallel, except in the loosest thinking.

The crux of the problem is that "original sin" (by which we are all equally born sinners and require divine grace for salvation) stems from Genesis. It also posits a paradox in that the fruit of the three of knowledge was eaten by Adam & Even, who at that point did not have the knowledge necessary to understand the implications of the action. God commanded them to not eat of the tree, which was pointless since they would have to have the knowledge imparted by the tree for that act to be a sin in the first place.

So, what we have is entrapment. Entrapment where the prime mover created the beings to be entrapped in the first place, since God foresaw everything with his omniscience. So it's not even entrapment... just the capricious designs of a venal, jealous entity. I'm not sure how you get from there to the "I love you all" declarations of Jesus. And, no, the claim of inscrutability are not a refuge from simple logic. We are told that we must use our judgement to avoid temptation and sin, yet that same evaluative logic cannot be brought to bear upon the foundational tenets of the faith... because it is verboten and your judgement is not sufficient.

If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out. What happens if you discover that your whole faith offends you?

That's extremely light computer use... it smells like how much executives use their machines. In this case, yes, an iPad is fine for them.

However, for any job that requires any substantial amount of slightly more advanced behavior -- say, editing documents with lots of cut & paste, selection & replacement, and so forth -- the iPad is going to lose to the workstation that has a mouse. Having to touch the screen means that you've taken yourself way out of the normal ergonomic comfort zone of the keyboard-mouse section of the desk. I find that even typing email replies gets onerous on an iPad if you're saying very much or interlacing your comments in with the original email.

Furthermore, there's usually some ancient custom line-of-business apps that have been carried along for years. This could be an Oracle app, or some vendor's work solution, or something similar. These apps are most likely going to not work at all on an iPad. In my case we're now looking at using a Citrix client to get people to the business apps they need, which is of course a poor solution at best because you now have something running on your iPad that doesn't integrate with the normal interface behavior you'd expect on an iPad.

But, really, the killer is the lack of a mouse and a cursor on the screen. They've been clever about designing around this issue, but it's a very poor environment for doing serious work.

The iPad is a platform of possibilities, but replacing the corporate workstation is not one of them.

Somewhere Lazarus Long isn't rolling over in his grave.

I've bumped into a couple old black and white movies that have been properly re-mastered: they re-scan the original prints at HD resolution. In these cases the answer is, yes, HD does make a difference. Would you rather have a blurred print of a masterpiece, or a close-to-original-as-possible copy? Most would say, "Meh..", but if you care it's nice to be able to get the best (to date) representation.

Except that XKCD gets the topic completely wrong by talking about horizontal resolution in that comic, where 1080P is the vertical resolution. And the benefit of HDTV is that HD source material displayed on it is, you know, HD. Just because there are legions of people who really don't care about quality doesn't mean that everyone shouldn't care about quality.