Notes on Giving Away my First $100,000 For my 42nd birthday, Mrs. MM let me give away all this money. Here’s a little quiz: Suppose you are living an extremely happy life – all your material needs and wants are met, and there is still money to spare. a) Try to think of even more stuff you could buy for yourself with that extra money? b) Try to find more efficient things to do with the surplus? For many people, this might seem like a trick question. I mean sure, you might already have a Honda, but you obviously still want a Tesla, right? For me, the point of full satisfaction is also pretty high – not just basic food but fancy stuff from around the world. Since I hit my consumption ceiling a little earlier than a proper rich person, I have been thinking about option (b) above for a number of years now. Effective Altruism is an attempt to answer one simple question: where can our surplus money do the largest amount of good? Watch: Peter Singer’s moving TED Talk explaining the ideas behind Effective Altruism in about 17 minutes.
Canal+ changes direction to reverse decline September 20, 2016 Canal+ is cutting the price of its premium channel, introducing subscriptions with no fixed commitment and abandoning the practice of controlling the subscriptions sold by ISPs – enabling the latter to market its channels as part of a bundled offering – in a concerted drive to reverse the decline in its domestic base and increase pay TV penetration. Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada told French daily Le Figaro that the pay TV broadcaster would offer its premium channel for €20 a month – as against the current €40 – for viewing online, on tablets and on smartphones without an ongoing commitment as part of its plan to extend its base and appeal to younger consumers. Saada said that Canal+ would propose a more “modular and more accessible” offering in October based on genres such as cinema, sport and kids content to appeal to individual tastes. Saada also told Le Figaro that Canal+ would introduce a new “ultra-sophisticated” set-top box early in 2017.
Buddhism and Mantras: The Concept of Fate in Buddhism Fate is often said to prevail in everyone's life in many different religions in the world. Also known as "God's Will" or "Heaven-will", it is believed to be predestined by an omnipotent creator or universal force and is not up to an individual to control his/her own fate. What Buddhism says of Fate? Fate in Buddhism, is but a wrong view. Our life and its event are not controlled by an external force (e.g. From a Buddhist perspective, a person's life and events is and will never be the result of a powerful God etc. Events in life is also subjected to the uprisings and ceasations of many conditions, where without some conditions, things would not have happened in a particular way. It would be a mistake to blame an entity (e.g. a God) for all unfortunate events in a person's life. As such, why can your destiny be predicted accurately through divination or fortune telling? In China, the concept of "Destiny" (命运）is viewed as an important aspect of people's live. How can i change my Destiny?
A future without screens – Medium How VR is rapidly changing the way we interact with technology It’s unfortunate to think, but you probably know the nooks and crannies of Facebook better than your childhood bedroom. Our adoption of technology into our daily routine has turned what used to be a stroll to the end of the driveway to pick up the paper, to a roll to the edge of the bed and a groggy press of a button. But just as the shift towards the digital world of social media and screens was a huge depart from newspapers and post-dinner radio shows, this ‘new normal’ is on the brink of another seismic shift. If technologists and futurists are at all right, very soon we’ll have retreated from the end of the driveway, to the edge of the bed, to a pair of goggles. The online world we’ve become so comfortable with is moving from separate screens to virtual space — a change that’s about more than just how technology looks, but how we actually interact with it. How will we interact with this new dimension?
Werner Herzog: 'My fake selves have some unifying sensory organ' | Film The man sitting opposite could be a pugnacious newcomer pitching for a job. He lays out his credentials just in case I don’t know and recounts scenes from his films which I already know off by heart. He claims he performs a magic with cinema which no one else can. They should put him in a straitjacket, his work is that wild. Building to a climax, he says: “I want to throw my arm around your shoulder and take you to the realm of complete poetry and fantasy.” It’s tempting to cast Werner Herzog as the last of cinema’s old-style swashbucklers; the sort of intrepid adventurer who makes movies in the way other men might go prospecting for gold or sail off in search of the Northwest Passage. His latest documentary, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, sends Herzog travelling to the lawless frontier of the virtual world. Off camera, too, the man has an authoritative snap that verges on the comic. Herzog insists he has nothing against the internet, per se. “Yes,” he says.
On a testé « Allo », l’application de messagerie de Google dopée à l’intelligence artificielle LE MONDE | • Mis à jour le | Par Morgane Tual WhatsApp, Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Twitter… Alors que nous croulons sous les applications de messageries – sans compter les textos –, Google vient, mercredi 21 septembre, d’en sortir une nouvelle, baptisée « Allo ». Pour se démarquer de ses nombreuses concurrentes (parmi lesquelles un de ses propres produits, à savoir Hangouts) Google mise sur l’intelligence artificielle. Cette dernière, appelée « Assistant », s’invite dans les conversations de l’utilisateur, pour lui faciliter la tâche en lui proposant des réponses toutes faites - uniquement en anglais pour l’instant, mais d’autres langues devraient suivre. « Je ne sais pas combien d’aéroports il y a à Berlin », dit par exemple votre interlocuteur. Lire aussi : Google crée une voix presque humaine Suggestions d’informations Mais Assistant peut aussi devenir un interlocuteur à part, avec lequel vous pouvez échanger dans Allo. - « Qui est le PDG de Facebook ?
Questions about ex-BCI scientist may cast doubt on convictions Dozens, if not hundreds, of criminal convictions in Ohio could be in jeopardy because a longtime forensic scientist at the state crime lab now stands accused of slanting evidence to help cops and prosecutors build their cases. The credibility of G. Michele Yezzo, who worked at the Ohio attorney general’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation for more than three decades, has been challenged in two cases in which men were convicted of aggravated murder. One has been freed from prison because of her now-suspect work. A review of her personnel records by The Dispatch shows that colleagues and supervisors raised questions about Yezzo time and again while she tested evidence and testified in an uncounted number of murder, rape and other criminal cases in the state. >> Scientist’s work records show litany of problems but praise from cops >> Timeline: Forensic Scientist's career DeWine said they found no issues with her work. Forensic scientists quit because of her erratic behavior. Grave doubts
Nielsen: Too Early To Gauge Future of Cord Cutting | Media & Entertainment Services Alliance By Jeff Berman As the number of skinny bundles and other over-the-top (OTT) services continue to proliferate, it’s too soon to say whether cord cutting and cord shaving by consumers will stabilize any time soon, according to Megan Clarken, president of product leadership at Nielsen. “One thing that clients aren’t blaming us for is cord cutting – not yet,” she said with a laugh at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference in New York on Sept. 22. The number of U.S. TV viewers cutting or shaving the cord continued to grow, she said. Leichtman Research Group said in August that the 11 largest pay TV providers in the U.S. — representing about 95% of the market — lost about 665,000 net video subscribers in the second quarter of 2016, compared to a loss of about 545,000 subscribers in the same quarter of 2015. Nielsen, meanwhile, continues to make strides in its ability to measure TV content regardless of where it’s being viewed and when.
Welcome to the pyramid at the end of the world In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history. The long shadow cast by nuclear weapons and the Cold War is not as far in the past as we might like to think… Should you find yourself with time on your hands, you might board a plane in New York, fly five hours to Fargo, rent a car and drive 280 miles to Nekoma, North Dakota (population 49), where you will find this: According to various people on the Internet, the Pyramid on the Prairie was built by the Illuminati. It was modeled on an ancient Mayan burial temple. Only the last is true and not completely. If tensions between the U.S. and Russia had continued to escalate in the 1970s, fifteen of these uncanny structures would have dotted the country, forming the largest defensive nuclear complex in the world. A forgotten relic of the nuclear arms race might seem just a strange curio from the distant past. For forty years it stood decaying.
Bientôt autant de lectures de presse numérique que papier LE MONDE ECONOMIE | • Mis à jour le | Par Capucine Cogné La presse numérique poursuit son essor. L’étude ONE d’AudiPresse, publiée jeudi 22 septembre pour la période juillet-septembre, révèle que la lecture digitale représente désormais 49 % du total de la consommation de presse en France. Entre les visites sur les sites, les applications de presse et la lecture en version PDF, la presse numérique continue donc à se développer rapidement. La presse française reste puissante : 97,6 % de Français déclarent lire la presse chaque mois, quel que soit le support, soit 50,8 millions de lecteurs. Le numérique apporte en moyenne 86 lecteurs supplémentaires pour 100 lecteurs de print, avec 71 % des Français qui lisent au moins une marque de presse en version numérique. La lecture numérique se fait encore à 47 % à partir d’un ordinateur. Lire aussi : Presse : 45 % des lectures sont numériques Grâce aux mobiles et tablettes
The Western media's parallel world We need to be careful as we enter into a brave new world, conspicuous by the discarded foundations that humanity toiled centuries to build. We have callously discarded the sword of truth and justice to the annals of history and instead, have cheaply replaced them with a world ruled, by those who can scream the longest and loudest. This new world seems to run parallel to the world we live in and the one, we are expected to comply and acquiesce. This new world is steered and shepherded by the Mainstream Media (MSM) and, where policy is decided in the Court of Public Opinion. It is fuelled, inspired and controlled by unelected jackals, whose only goal is subservience to their masters and, the propagation of false information, designed to grow their ever expanding bottom line. Civil society in almost every nation of the world, embraces a general consensus; that individuals have the right to a fair trial, to face their accusers, and be considered innocent until proven guilty.