No one wants to use email anymore. When I talk with clients, one of the first things they ask for is do I have Skype, ICQ or MSN.
Yeah who would want to use email, that you have to actually look for when you want to read it, when they can be continuously pestered in real-time by instant messaging...
'If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word.'"
I see... emails which can be of arbitrary length, have attachments, inline images, links etc. cannot replace the spoken word - but a severely restricted text message sent from a phone can?
Mmmm memory hog? How much does an extra 4GB cost these days? $30? And frankly beyond a certain basic cost for the JVM big memory usage is often the result of poor programming.
That's pretty much my policy for both my mobile and home phones. In addition unless a message is from someone I know I usually wait until I am home and pick up the voice mail using my home phone - no charges for getting the messages that way. And if a number keeps calling and not leaving messages, or worse hanging up as voice mail starts so there is a 1 sec empty message, then I block the number.
I'm always amazed at how many people seem unable to resist answering a ringing phone... the damn thing is there for my convenience not for random callers.
I'm not going to get to the end of my life and think, "Gee, I wish I had spent more time outdoors", either.
Really? The outside world is a fascinating, insanely varied place that really does have to be experienced first hand to be appreciated. It's an enormous amazing world, universe... I can't get the idea that someone would voluntarily miss experiencing most of it and feel happy about that.
Well...my dad started exercising and eating healthy after putting on weight and being diagnosed diabetic in his 50's. He didn't do that to have a long life. He did it to be healthy enough to go out and do the things he wanted to do (walking tours in Nepal for example) and because he didn't want to end up spending the last part of his life as an invalid or in a care facility because his body slowly failed him.
He died of his 3rd heart attack while moving furniture up a flight of stairs - from conversations with him this is pretty much what he wanted, to do what he wanted to do until he keeled over and died. Exercise was what enabled that... he could have stretched out his life by doing less stressful things but it wouldn't have been the life he wanted to lead.
In the pre-surveillance society you might not have had an expectation of privacy in public areas but you also knew the odds were against being observed by authorities. It was a situation of balance in which people generally had a moderate amount of de facto privacy.
Now we are talking about a situation where there will be zero chance of privacy because any place not specifically denoted as "private" will be 100% monitored.
I think the two situations are significantly different and so I do not consider people complaining about this as an invasion of privacy to be taking an extremist position. However 24/7 surveillance of any place not specifically designated "private" is something I do find extremist along with those that defend it.
Not quite the perfect analogy but close enough. Seems to me that these questions should all have been answered before a single piece of hardware was ordered.
So it's a druggie... doesn't mean it hasn't successfully impersonated a "human"....
What level of human is an AI required to successfully impersonate? 2 year old? 5 year old? 10 year old? 20 year old? 40 year old?
And out of that age group does it have to successfully impersonate a member of the most intelligent 10%? The least intelligent 10%? Someone suffering extreme PMS? (my wife told me to say that last one, really, honestly)
My dog successfully impersonates a 2 year old human... or maybe it is the other way around - after all the dog is a far more successful independent organism able to hunt, make sound judgements (within its natural environment), organize others of its kind...
That makes as much sense as requiring electricians to get degrees in electrical engineering.
Where I live it is in fact quicker to get an EE degree than to become a electrician licensed to do residential wiring. So maybe it would make more sense just to send people to get EE degrees instead.
Yep, no reason it couldn't be used this way. The question is will they be used that way? It is a lot easier to accidentally f?!k up with a hand held laser than a gun and the fact that no significant consequences may occur the 1st few times it is misused, including discovery, will lead to dangerous attitudes. I think if you start firing off random shots at the sides of house, cars etc. then you will get noticed, and stopped, pretty quickly but the same isn't nearly as likely with a laser. You might also note my reference to teenagers and drunken idiots.
Proper eye protection would include goggles for all persons within the maximum dangerous range of the laser as drunken idiots and teenagers (and drunken teenage idiots) will be waving them around and bouncing them off shiny surfaces.
Relaxed economic requirements and cancelling Saturday delivery won't help. Canada once had a postal system just as good as that of the US, including Saturday delivery and cheap postage rates.
CanadaPost was allowed the same things USPS wants and also allowed to degrade service levels. It hasn't helped . It is a joke - and an expensive one at that. Here it can take days for a first class letter to cross the city and I can generally ship something faster, cheaper and with less chance is it getting lost by using Fedex Ground rather than by parcel post.
Mmmmm so the average middle class person who thinks "Hey I should start a ground to space industry." will have just as good a chance as the wealthy person with the same idea? I don't think so. After a certain point wealth is not about buying personal possessions it is about power.
Ummm I don't think it was nearly as bad as all that.
Most Intel based machines that would be classed as a "PC" ran CPM. When x86 machines stated to show up it splintered a bit but SCP-DOS largely replaced CPM during the very short period until MIcrosoft co-opted it and renamed it MS-DOS.
The Apple machines of the period of course ran their own OS, just as they do today.
And the Motorola based machines (e.g. Atari, Amiga) also ran their own OS's... no modern day equivalent comes to mind as there don't seem to be any Motorola based PC's now.
What stopped broad software compatibility was not lack of a universal OS (we don't exactly have that today) but wildly different hardware peripherals for each, and even within each, microprocessor family.
Uuuh yeah and do you remember that those were works of fiction you were reading? Calling the grandparent a pussy isn't much of a substitute for a convincing explanation of why the GP's comments might be "wrong".
And the moderators who marked the GP as flamebait while the parent, which is a direct ad hominem attack, is modded "insightful"... wtf??? Is everyone on drugs today??? God forbid there might be some rational discussion of the risks involved. Sheeesh.
Your entire 1st paragraph appears to agree with me - well except for your obvious misunderstanding of what I applied the word "opinion" to... and excepting the irrelevant cataloguing of a plethora of substances not relevant to this discussion
. But you do claim that Plutonium has a very short half-life. Hmmm Plutonium has a half-life up to 24,100 years but of course the half-life of the Plutonium used in RTG's is 88 years - so on average more than half the Plutonium will be around for the entire lifetime of someone born as it is ejected into the atmosphere. Strange you didn't supply the figure but instead just claimed it was "very short".
Your 2nd paragraph is invalid because you make a false claim about what I said.
The 3rd paragraph is the most interesting as it shows the mindset operating here - your claim that I "think it is unsafe because you just have a feeling well that is your right" is simply bizarre. I never said I thought it was unsafe. As far as your comment on opinions goes in general you are apparently parroting what I said to you - not very creative and really a waste of everybody's time.
Why add "I kind of remember"? Because I remembered the study being discussed but it was decades ago and human memory does play tricks and think it is good to acknowledge that in some way. Perhaps I should have taken the approach of presenting opinions as fact but I wasn't comfortable with that - YMMV.
As for your final two sentences you might want to try and remember that just because someone posts a response to a post you make they aren't necessarily talking to you or have any desire to talk to you. Unless of course you are convinced that nobody else reads your posts.
Your entire outrage with my post appears founded on two things. First that I qualified my remembrance of a NASA study - but you admit that the study I remembered was very likely done so on that point the outrage is just bizarre and unfounded. So your real outrage must be the that I said "reactor" instead of "radioactive materials" but as I pointed out that isn't really relevant since the topic was radioactive materials being carried on launch vehicles. Yet there is all this bile and anger from you...
As I've said elsewhere it is hardly useful to polarize discussion but that is exactly what you do - it is pointless, destructive to rational conversation and a gigantic waste of time.
The only real goal that overly aggressive polarizing responses can have is to silence discussion. I've given these responses to your comments all the time they merit, far more in fact, so you will get no more from me. Please do have the last word whilst remembering that silence is not assent but just a prioritizing of my time.
While your posting in particular might not be all that inciteful it seems this is one of those topics where the immediate response of many is to try and denigrate opposing opinions before they are even voiced. It is rarely helpful to humanity in general to needlessly polarize discussions. It would be refreshing if the default reaction was that even if the opinions and concerns of others might be different than one's own that does not necessarily make them either wrong, unreasonable or unworthy of being addressed in a respectful, or at least civil, manner. Think of it as/. Version 2.
Ummm I'm not the one who has a problem with what I wrote, you are and I have pretty much zero interest in convincing you of anything.
But if you can find ANY proof of a reactor flying on Apollo I would love to see it because there is none because it never happened.
Perhaps they considered it too dangerous "The NERVA/Rover programs were cancelled, however, in 1973, for a variety of reasons including environmental concerns" And did I say it might not have been Apollo? Yes, yes I did. So demanding proof it was Apollo is kind of pointless.
You do not have to sing my tune but don't get upset when you post something that is totally in error and where no fact checking was done at all.
Was I upset? I don't think so - that seemed to be you. As for your description. of what I posted - hey everybody gets an opinion including you. But since you are so focussed on it being a reactor let's remember that the original point of this was the danger of flying radioactive material on rockets - it doesn't have to be a reactor to present the same problem.
Here is my final question for you? Did you find any documentation that any of my facts and sources are false?
Perhaps you should have started with another question, such as: do I care enough about what you post to be bothered checking all your claims?
Maybe I'll have more to say about this later. My immediate response is this:
Do all rockets explode in exactly the same way and have exactly the same effect on their contents?
I think your apparent faith that all useful information is contained on the internet is wrong.
If Nasa did the study, as you say you have "no doubt" about, then they must have figured there was some possibility of non-trivial danger that wasn't vanishingly close to 0.
There was no fear - where the heck did you get that - if you were full of fear that is you - other people might read that and rather than be filled with fear might be led to exploring and finding something useful.
Perhaps it wasn't Apollo that I was remembering so your search on Apollo isn't the be all and end all of the possibly relevant information.
Try not to be so quick to try and shut down anyone who isn't singing your tune or investing the energy you think they should be, or documenting things the way you think they should be, or is putting forth partial information because they think that is better than no information because you don't like it. For example I know more than one person who would just laugh at you for citing Wikipedia as a reliable source of information.
It would be difficult here too... I havve tested locally and when I am first in line when the light goes green you cannot get a green at the next light by driving the speed limit - for the most part it seems that 1.5x the speed limit works and so does about 60-70% of the speed limit. This is the majority of lights I have encountered in years of city driving. There are a very small number of sections of road where the lights are synchronized and if you drive the limit you can go through 6 or 7 green lights in a row before meeting a red. Personally I think they can do it but choose not to... the city seems anti-car.
Slashdot Mirror
There are 343,492 Canadians in Silicon Valley?
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/110622/dq110622a-eng.htm
Yeah who would want to use email, that you have to actually look for when you want to read it, when they can be continuously pestered in real-time by instant messaging...
'If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word.'"
I see... emails which can be of arbitrary length, have attachments, inline images, links etc. cannot replace the spoken word - but a severely restricted text message sent from a phone can?
Mmmm memory hog? How much does an extra 4GB cost these days? $30? And frankly beyond a certain basic cost for the JVM big memory usage is often the result of poor programming.
Don't you mean business women "using the state as the consumer and pulling strings to get their products shackled onto the public."?
That's pretty much my policy for both my mobile and home phones. In addition unless a message is from someone I know I usually wait until I am home and pick up the voice mail using my home phone - no charges for getting the messages that way. And if a number keeps calling and not leaving messages, or worse hanging up as voice mail starts so there is a 1 sec empty message, then I block the number.
I'm always amazed at how many people seem unable to resist answering a ringing phone... the damn thing is there for my convenience not for random callers.
Really? The outside world is a fascinating, insanely varied place that really does have to be experienced first hand to be appreciated. It's an enormous amazing world, universe... I can't get the idea that someone would voluntarily miss experiencing most of it and feel happy about that.
Well...my dad started exercising and eating healthy after putting on weight and being diagnosed diabetic in his 50's. He didn't do that to have a long life. He did it to be healthy enough to go out and do the things he wanted to do (walking tours in Nepal for example) and because he didn't want to end up spending the last part of his life as an invalid or in a care facility because his body slowly failed him.
He died of his 3rd heart attack while moving furniture up a flight of stairs - from conversations with him this is pretty much what he wanted, to do what he wanted to do until he keeled over and died. Exercise was what enabled that... he could have stretched out his life by doing less stressful things but it wouldn't have been the life he wanted to lead.
In the pre-surveillance society you might not have had an expectation of privacy in public areas but you also knew the odds were against being observed by authorities. It was a situation of balance in which people generally had a moderate amount of de facto privacy.
Now we are talking about a situation where there will be zero chance of privacy because any place not specifically denoted as "private" will be 100% monitored.
I think the two situations are significantly different and so I do not consider people complaining about this as an invasion of privacy to be taking an extremist position. However 24/7 surveillance of any place not specifically designated "private" is something I do find extremist along with those that defend it.
Not quite the perfect analogy but close enough. Seems to me that these questions should all have been answered before a single piece of hardware was ordered.
So it's a druggie... doesn't mean it hasn't successfully impersonated a "human"....
What level of human is an AI required to successfully impersonate? 2 year old? 5 year old? 10 year old? 20 year old? 40 year old?
And out of that age group does it have to successfully impersonate a member of the most intelligent 10%? The least intelligent 10%? Someone suffering extreme PMS? (my wife told me to say that last one, really, honestly)
My dog successfully impersonates a 2 year old human... or maybe it is the other way around - after all the dog is a far more successful independent organism able to hunt, make sound judgements (within its natural environment), organize others of its kind...
Where I live it is in fact quicker to get an EE degree than to become a electrician licensed to do residential wiring. So maybe it would make more sense just to send people to get EE degrees instead.
Seems like the proposed psychoacousticteledildonics, as described by Ted Nelson in the 70's, would be an example of prior art.
Yep, no reason it couldn't be used this way. The question is will they be used that way? It is a lot easier to accidentally f?!k up with a hand held laser than a gun and the fact that no significant consequences may occur the 1st few times it is misused, including discovery, will lead to dangerous attitudes. I think if you start firing off random shots at the sides of house, cars etc. then you will get noticed, and stopped, pretty quickly but the same isn't nearly as likely with a laser. You might also note my reference to teenagers and drunken idiots.
Proper eye protection would include goggles for all persons within the maximum dangerous range of the laser as drunken idiots and teenagers (and drunken teenage idiots) will be waving them around and bouncing them off shiny surfaces.
Relaxed economic requirements and cancelling Saturday delivery won't help. Canada once had a postal system just as good as that of the US, including Saturday delivery and cheap postage rates.
CanadaPost was allowed the same things USPS wants and also allowed to degrade service levels. It hasn't helped . It is a joke - and an expensive one at that. Here it can take days for a first class letter to cross the city and I can generally ship something faster, cheaper and with less chance is it getting lost by using Fedex Ground rather than by parcel post.
Mmmmm so the average middle class person who thinks "Hey I should start a ground to space industry." will have just as good a chance as the wealthy person with the same idea? I don't think so. After a certain point wealth is not about buying personal possessions it is about power.
Ummm I don't think it was nearly as bad as all that.
Most Intel based machines that would be classed as a "PC" ran CPM. When x86 machines stated to show up it splintered a bit but SCP-DOS largely replaced CPM during the very short period until MIcrosoft co-opted it and renamed it MS-DOS.
The Apple machines of the period of course ran their own OS, just as they do today.
And the Motorola based machines (e.g. Atari, Amiga) also ran their own OS's... no modern day equivalent comes to mind as there don't seem to be any Motorola based PC's now.
What stopped broad software compatibility was not lack of a universal OS (we don't exactly have that today) but wildly different hardware peripherals for each, and even within each, microprocessor family.
Uuuh yeah and do you remember that those were works of fiction you were reading? Calling the grandparent a pussy isn't much of a substitute for a convincing explanation of why the GP's comments might be "wrong".
And the moderators who marked the GP as flamebait while the parent, which is a direct ad hominem attack, is modded "insightful"... wtf??? Is everyone on drugs today??? God forbid there might be some rational discussion of the risks involved. Sheeesh.
Your entire 1st paragraph appears to agree with me - well except for your obvious misunderstanding of what I applied the word "opinion" to... and excepting the irrelevant cataloguing of a plethora of substances not relevant to this discussion
. But you do claim that Plutonium has a very short half-life. Hmmm Plutonium has a half-life up to 24,100 years but of course the half-life of the Plutonium used in RTG's is 88 years - so on average more than half the Plutonium will be around for the entire lifetime of someone born as it is ejected into the atmosphere. Strange you didn't supply the figure but instead just claimed it was "very short".
Your 2nd paragraph is invalid because you make a false claim about what I said. The 3rd paragraph is the most interesting as it shows the mindset operating here - your claim that I "think it is unsafe because you just have a feeling well that is your right" is simply bizarre. I never said I thought it was unsafe. As far as your comment on opinions goes in general you are apparently parroting what I said to you - not very creative and really a waste of everybody's time.
Why add "I kind of remember"? Because I remembered the study being discussed but it was decades ago and human memory does play tricks and think it is good to acknowledge that in some way. Perhaps I should have taken the approach of presenting opinions as fact but I wasn't comfortable with that - YMMV.
As for your final two sentences you might want to try and remember that just because someone posts a response to a post you make they aren't necessarily talking to you or have any desire to talk to you. Unless of course you are convinced that nobody else reads your posts.
Your entire outrage with my post appears founded on two things. First that I qualified my remembrance of a NASA study - but you admit that the study I remembered was very likely done so on that point the outrage is just bizarre and unfounded. So your real outrage must be the that I said "reactor" instead of "radioactive materials" but as I pointed out that isn't really relevant since the topic was radioactive materials being carried on launch vehicles. Yet there is all this bile and anger from you...
As I've said elsewhere it is hardly useful to polarize discussion but that is exactly what you do - it is pointless, destructive to rational conversation and a gigantic waste of time.
The only real goal that overly aggressive polarizing responses can have is to silence discussion. I've given these responses to your comments all the time they merit, far more in fact, so you will get no more from me. Please do have the last word whilst remembering that silence is not assent but just a prioritizing of my time.
Good luck with your optimism, though. :-)
LOL thanks! :)
While your posting in particular might not be all that inciteful it seems this is one of those topics where the immediate response of many is to try and denigrate opposing opinions before they are even voiced. It is rarely helpful to humanity in general to needlessly polarize discussions. It would be refreshing if the default reaction was that even if the opinions and concerns of others might be different than one's own that does not necessarily make them either wrong, unreasonable or unworthy of being addressed in a respectful, or at least civil, manner. Think of it as /. Version 2.
Ummm I'm not the one who has a problem with what I wrote, you are and I have pretty much zero interest in convincing you of anything.
Perhaps they considered it too dangerous "The NERVA/Rover programs were cancelled, however, in 1973, for a variety of reasons including environmental concerns" And did I say it might not have been Apollo? Yes, yes I did. So demanding proof it was Apollo is kind of pointless.
Was I upset? I don't think so - that seemed to be you. As for your description. of what I posted - hey everybody gets an opinion including you. But since you are so focussed on it being a reactor let's remember that the original point of this was the danger of flying radioactive material on rockets - it doesn't have to be a reactor to present the same problem.
Perhaps you should have started with another question, such as: do I care enough about what you post to be bothered checking all your claims?
Maybe I'll have more to say about this later. My immediate response is this:
Do all rockets explode in exactly the same way and have exactly the same effect on their contents?
I think your apparent faith that all useful information is contained on the internet is wrong.
If Nasa did the study, as you say you have "no doubt" about, then they must have figured there was some possibility of non-trivial danger that wasn't vanishingly close to 0.
There was no fear - where the heck did you get that - if you were full of fear that is you - other people might read that and rather than be filled with fear might be led to exploring and finding something useful.
Perhaps it wasn't Apollo that I was remembering so your search on Apollo isn't the be all and end all of the possibly relevant information.
Try not to be so quick to try and shut down anyone who isn't singing your tune or investing the energy you think they should be, or documenting things the way you think they should be, or is putting forth partial information because they think that is better than no information because you don't like it. For example I know more than one person who would just laugh at you for citing Wikipedia as a reliable source of information.
It would be difficult here too... I havve tested locally and when I am first in line when the light goes green you cannot get a green at the next light by driving the speed limit - for the most part it seems that 1.5x the speed limit works and so does about 60-70% of the speed limit. This is the majority of lights I have encountered in years of city driving. There are a very small number of sections of road where the lights are synchronized and if you drive the limit you can go through 6 or 7 green lights in a row before meeting a red. Personally I think they can do it but choose not to... the city seems anti-car.