Why not? WoW, for instance, could be a fantastic environment for online meetings & as a help desk/corporate hot spot. For example, a dungeon instance could be the place where all the attendees for a meeting could be allowed in & interact with each other while/after the event was over. The help desk would likely grab regular users as they would have a being of a sort to interact with. This could be done on a company-by-company level, or there could be many companies available in this way, with fast travel between them. It could be a double bonus if the visitors to the site could go on small quests while they wait, with some sort of reward system built in.
It's actually got quite a few nifty features, but my team ended up not really using it. I particularly liked the "walking into a room automatically joins you to the audio channel" bit for meetings, but it's ultimately a bit of a gimmick.
This is only to repeat what has been said by many, numerous times, but —
1. The point of search was no longer to provide requested data, but to generate clicks for Google's ad service.
2. Generating clicks for Google's ad service required that exact text search, boolean searches, & everything else useful had to be excised because giving what was asked for reduced engagement.
3. Ads had to be stuck on the top half of the results page, & the second half of the search results, for more clicks to be earned, had to be filled with garbage sites that did not provide what was sought. This encouraged the proliferation of scrapers & bot-generated text sites. Hand-in-hand with this was the elimination of long-tail results, as digging into results might give useful results.
4. It appears that a decision was made at some point to curate & direct answers toward particular results. While much has been made about certain political leanings being almost disappeared by this move, it appears to be much more likely that this was a result of returning results which generated more ad revenue & clicks (which may say more about the sorts of sites Google runs ads on than anything else).
5. In parallel with the dominance of ad-revenue mining, data mining became a major purpose of receiving search requests. Thus the requests for location information on every search, tied in with the drive to personalize results not for the purpose of giving good results, but to give identified users results they were more likely to interact with to both interact with Google ads & give Google more data to suck down & use.
If we could get them to revert back to the 2006-era search engine, where more than just major sites & bot farms are indexed, we would have something useful. But that's not going to happen.
Compact — SE/30. Amazingly expandable & powerful, while at the same time almost being portable given its size. Perhaps an era equivalent, except for having a monitor, for the new Minis.
Desktop — IIci. Probably the best-looking of the 80s Macs, while at the same time large enough to give plenty of room for expansion.
Both of these had long lives thanks to upgrades, & both would be fun & good-looking revivals.
Interesting, & not necessarily in a good way. This method could well presage unprecedented numbers of attempts at eminent domain takings or other means of forcing people out of their properties.
Which government agency would use eminent domain to take land and start mining? We have historical precedence with the oil industry using various scanning methods in a similar manner, but it was the oil companies who went to the landowners to acquire the rights to extract. Then the government would buy the (usable) product from them.
Local government condemned a bunch of perfectly fine homes in Wisconsin, by declaring them blighted, to make room for a Foxconn plant which never really panned out. Where there is greed there is a way.
National security (by identifying and processing rare earth metals and materials domestically) is vastly more important to society than a few dozen homes somewhere.
Globally price-competitive domestic electric car production is a national security concern only if we are willing to accept a rather short time horizon and a rather narrow definition of security in our analysis.
This kind of article can perhaps be understood as an attempt to turn a federal organization's sails into the prevailing political winds, so to speak, at a time when funding seems insecure. I say this as someone who strongly supports most of the survey's mission. It would be ideal if national power brokers recognized the value of water science, geology, ecology, etc, on their own terms.
And of course you would not mind owners of extraction company leaving all the profits to people who got kicked out of their home. After all they should be happy just fulfilling your "national security" goal.
> Mineral rights are automatically included as a part of the land in a property conveyance, unless and until the ownership gets separated at some point by an owner/seller.
> Since sellers of land can convey only property that they own, each sale of the land after the minerals are separated automatically includes only the land. Deeds to the land made after the first separation of the minerals will not refer to the fact that the mineral rights are not included.
> in most cases, you cannot determine whether you own the rights to the minerals under your land just by looking at your deed. Owners are sometimes surprised to find out someone else owns the rights to the minerals under their land
> U.S. laws regulating mining and mineral rights typically prohibit mineral owners from damaging or interfering with the use of any homes or other improvements on the land when extracting minerals. As a result, mineral owners do not typically attempt mineral extraction in highly populated areas. This means that if you live in a city, or an area with many houses on small plots of land, you probably won't need to worry about whether or not you own any minerals that might be under you
GBG has that dream-like Kafkaesque frustration of having a concrete objective, but not be able to achieve it, even though it should be simple and tangible.
However, in GBG it is all meta: the game is unspecified, the objective is unspecified, the adorable miraculous winning play is unspecified. It is meta-Kafka, which is incredibly doubly frustrating...
SPOLIER ALERT: then, slowly, awkwardly, painfully, a realization creeps over you - GBG is life.
Not sure how I feel about the on-going vanishing of efforts to create The Glass Bead Game as a computer interface/programming methodology.
I want it to be something workable which helps folks in their use of computers, but the more I work with node programming interfaces and so forth, the more I worry that the fact that there is no universally agreed-upon answer to the question:
>What does an algorithm look like?
and that such systems are strongly-bounded complexity-wise by screen size, that they simply aren't workable beyond small/toy problems and educational usage, i.e., Blockly.
Narcissus and Goldmund is great. It feels like he's re-approaching themes from Siddhartha, but that notion of paths taken is worth exploring again and again.
Agreed! There is definitely overlap between the three books but my recollection of Siddhartha and N&G is that Hesse dwelled more into how hedonic pleasure corrodes the soul. On a side note, you'll get along well with Doestevesky's Brothers Karamazov if you found N&G affecting.
in addition to this, ever since the sequoia update I've been getting security failure errors on reddit which sometimes, & sometimes do not, go away with a page reload
I think, ironically, the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017" has gutted tech jobs and R&D in a profound way.
> The TCJA amended I.R.C. §174 such that, beginning in 2022, firms that invest in R&D are no longer able to currently deduct their R&D expenses. Rather, they must amortize their costs over five years, starting with the midpoint of the taxable year in which the expense is paid or incurred. For costs attributable to research conducted outside the U.S., such costs must be amortized over 15 years. This will be the first time since 1954 that companies will have to amortize their R&D costs, rather than immediately deduct those expenses.
The act actually took us back by many decades in terms of R&D incentives, and devastated US competitiveness vs China by disincentivizing R&D across the board.
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