And I don't just mean that the leaks provide me with entertainment -- that kind of transparency into international shenanigans might have serious impact on where things go. Was North Korea aware of how China was presenting the situation to the US? Is China being honest with us? Will this bring the issue to a head? Is a war for reunification inevitable? Is it the best path? Is that more or less likely now? What will US public perception be of China after this?
I think this is a worthwhile experiment. I would not be all that surprised if such brutal transparency had fewer negative effects than the ridiculous hand-waving, double-talking, all-too-clever international politics that we are so accustomed to, so defensive of, but which have thus far failed us miserably. I'll reserve judgement on this for a few years, but I'll be glued to my front row seat.
It's a shame when people rewrite history so casually. The idea that you call the health care plan "Obamacare" when he didn't put it together and basically dropped the ball on it is completely absurd. Then, in an effort to work with Republicans the plan was whittled down to almost nothing, yet you still call it "Obamacare" and claim nobody talked to the Republicans.
Sorry, but I was paying attention, and I saw a perfectly reasonable and popular health care bill relentlessly torpedoed by the right, and that is the damaged bill we have now. Which, by the way, is still better than nothing and that will be obvious in 20 years as it is tweaked -- like every successful social policy of the past century. You know, the stuff that brought us to the top of the list of developed countries after WWII.
Your notion that this administration is the most partisan is merely a reflection of the fact that sometime since the early nineties when Newt shut down Congress, Republican leaders have simply decided "my way or the highway" on everything. Democrats under Bush were far more reasonable than the Republicans have been in decades now, which is why Bush was able to "work across the aisle".
It may be worth calling attention to the fact, which seems to slip your mind, that under Clinton's leadership we saw one of the greatest decades of growth this country has ever experienced. And under Bush we saw one of the worst. And under Obama we are slowly recovering. Doesn't any of those plain facts make you wonder about the Republican plan?
I would be surprised if you've got significant experience. You sound like I did 12 years ago when I didn't understand. I had the same complaints you do. I patted myself on the back as I wrote several different storage systems for various projects. And every one of those systems was useful for no more than the toy problems I was involved in at the time. Once I had to make things that lasted in the real world, I saw the light.
For any non-trivial, multi-user persistent data storage, a database is usually the correct view, whether it came up in 1960 or not. The notion of information and the way things interrelate has not changed significantly since then, and is unlikely to in the near future. Those old timers did their homework. I eventually realized that they understood the topic far better than I did.
Yes, there are special cases where you can get an angle of advantage by skipping a traditional database, but you lose an enormous amount of power too. If the trade off is worth it, then great. Usually it's not. Usually you will eventually have to amend the structures, import and export data, distribute it to different teams, integrate with existing systems, provide reporting tools, etc, etc, etc and you'll wish to hell you had just had it all in an database.
It's not a design trade off because, as you point out, a dielectric coating would almost surely have avoided this problem without reducing reception to 3GS levels. Even if we're talking aesthetic tradeoffs, there has got to be a clear coating they could have used that would have avoided this.
The external antenna was a clever idea but they didn't do it quite right. They'll probably get it right in the next revision. Such is the bleeding edge.
But as you point out, it's not like it ruins the iPhone 4. It is still an overall better phone than the previous models. It's just that it would have been so easy to make it even better without any fancy tech that it's a little embarrassing for a perfectionist company like Apple.
Yes, all phones have areas where hand placement will attenuate the signal.
The iPhone has that _plus_ a whole new problem, caused by the uninsulated antennas. Great PR today by Jobs, but the people who know can see through it: yes all smart phones have reception issues, but the iPhone 4 introduced a new one. It's a serious gaffe on their part. The fact that the bumper fixes it proves that exposed antennas are a bad hardware design. The reason not everyone gets the same problem probably has to do with variable skin capacitance. My hands sweat a bit, and I've death gripped several iPhones 4 into submission. My own iPhone 3G does not behave that way.
I'm not trying to play "gotcha" with Apple, and it would unfortunately be business suicide to admit the gaffe clearly because we're such a society of ridiculers... so they've pretty much done the right thing. But there is a real problem with the exposed antenna design and it's too bad they (and many of we) can't admit it.
and they don't care (not emotionally invested) because they couldn't do the job if they cared
There are volunteer doctors working in horrible conditions that disprove your assertion. Just because you couldn't do the job if you cared doesn't mean nobody else can. I would assert that the vast majority of doctors care about their patients a great deal.
The aim is to seek laws of physics that are absolute, inviolable, and a complete description of space, time, and mass-energy.
I may be stretching beyond my capacity here, but isn't that a pipe dream? Won't any laws of physics will be mathematical formulae? And I thought it was accepted that no significantly powerful mathematical system can be both complete and consistent. It seems to me that a physics laws would be subject to that same limitation. The search for ever finer models is wonderful, important, and really the basis of all human progress -- but at some point I accepted that we'll never get to the bottom. It's an infinite regress.
If I am misunderstanding the situation, I'd love to know how.
I predict this will be a mixed bag for them at best. Far as I can tell, when the value in your nation is material resources, the people get treated like shit. Only a handful of people are needed to run the operations and they don't need much education so they're easily replaceable. The rest are just an annoyance.
The only time people's lives significantly improve is when the value is the people's minds -- because then you can't kill them to take it, or ignore their needs and treat them like slaves.
Sorry, but there's no such thing. I'm too sleepy to figure out where your logical mistake is, but there is no way that wealth is generated from thin air. It's got to represent productive capacity or resources or something... otherwise it's speculative and part of an unsustainable inflationary bubble, not wealth.
"using a mercury switch to implement a pivoting display is obvious"
It is. But you know I wouldn't be surprised if Pivot or someone else got a patent on that anyway. In my interactions with the USPTO, it seems that even if they think the idea is stupid, if they can't find a published example of someone doing the same thing already, they grant the patent.
I'm almost at the point where I think dropping patents entirely would be better than having them, considering that we can't seem to get anywhere near the ideal of protecting novel inventions and encouraging growth of the public domain. The current patent game is a complete and total mockery of what it was intended to be.
Yeah, there's some real questions in there. I am going to guess you've read Hofstadter's GEB, from the sounds of it. If you haven't, you really should.
My opinion on the matter is that both the AI's author and the original composer are doing creative work. The degree to which "credit" would be assigned to either depends on a lot of factors. Near one extreme we have a record player, which does alter the original work ever so slightly. While we appreciate record player, we don't generally credit it for its contribution to the original work. What about an EQ setup, though? Or a dynamic sonic maximizer? Or a person who does a remix? Or the AI you describe... how different from the original is its output? Since musical notions were invented long before any musician we've heard of, should we consider modern musicians highly developed systems for taking musical input (their influences) and producing new derivative works? I would argue "yes", though a musician can seem strikingly original even with all the influences going in.
I tend to think we are more than just math engines. On our lowest level that might be it, but the brain doesn't make sense if you just look at neurons. Math is an amazing modeling system, but it is not complete. Our brains (at the higher levels) are multi-paradigm -- we may use math when it works but will find other more approximate modeling systems when it doesn't. I would grant that a complex enough AI could do the same thing. But we're not there yet. Not even close.
Reading this article earlier today, about conquering resistant infections in Norway. Sounds like they've basically figured it out. What are the chances that we can get that kind of smarts imported into the US?
An interesting point. Do you generally find that people who are 80 years old (and still have reasonable health) are far more clear minded and productive than younger folks?
Perhaps that's just an issue of impending death? Or maybe it is an inherent limitation of building multiple models of the world over the years that contradict each other?
In any case, I do think you have a point. But I wonder if there is better progress to be had in extending existing human lives or building AI.
It very well might be never, as there seems to be an enormous misunderstanding of what intelligence is, and how it can be used.
Consider a computer that is as just as powerful as the human mind -- orders of magnitude more powerful than any computer today. What do you do with it? You have to teach it. And we _suck_ at teaching. We have 6 billion human-level super computers on the world right now, with another 300,000 arriving daily, and we have no idea what to do with them. What is one more, made of silicon, going to offer us?
Intelligence isn't just some simple value like tensile strength. It's about modeling and remodeling the world, drawing distinctions between similar things, seeing similarities where things are distinct, assigning values... things that are not straightforward and measurable. Anything simpler than that has already been achieved by current computers. For useful intelligence beyond that, there's usually not even clear right and wrong answers, only different results because of different models and values. Crank up the processing power by a factor of 10 (i.e. the power of an efficiently communicating ten human team) and you still don't have anything useful unless it has a very accurate model of the world. And why would it have a better model than a well chosen group of humans?
I don't know, I'm kind of disappointed by what seems like significant naivety in AI research. I know there is some impressive work being done, but it seems like a lot of the talk in articles like this is a bunch of sci-fi induced Pavlovian foolishness.
Based on the difficulty NASA has in securing funding, I feel that most of humanity doesn't find space exploration to be particularly compelling. You're right about economics being anything that people value... and on that metric alone I think it would ultimately fail. But when I originally said it wasn't economically feasible I meant it in a more profound way: I do not think we are logistically capable of pulling together the resources to colonize a planet outside this solar system, even if we wanted to.
I more or less agree with your post, but there's an interesting and common assumption embedded there: that advanced civilizations have a say in whether they survive or not. I think we place far too much faith in our ability (and alien species ability) to manage long term changes. We've only got a few thousand years under our belt, and some relatively small changes in the earth's orbit or whatever can render our whole planet uninhabitable by most measures. Look around: we can hardly keep things going even with the world being given as a nearly perfect place for us.
If we found out tomorrow (or even in 1000 years) that this planet was going to die soon, I find it almost impossible to believe that we'd get our collective shit together enough to colonize some other world. Not even Venus or Mars, let alone an as yet undiscovered planet orbiting Proxima Centauri or beyond. Really, it doesn't surprise me at all that there are no visitors from the other struggling worlds out there. It's hard enough just to last a few millennia.
It's one thing to find an earth-sized planet. It's another to find one with a useful atmosphere, a protective magnetosphere, and numerous other physical and biological characteristics that we take for granted. It always puzzles me how we seem to think that we are apart from the environment, when in fact humans have extremely limited success even drifting outside a narrow band of habitats on this very planet. We're basically only able to live because we co-evolved with this planet. Plopping us anywhere else is enormously complicated and carries unclear benefits.
And if someone brings up terraforming, I'll just point you to our difficulties in even agreeing on what to do about the climate of our own nearly perfect planet which I'd like to see resolved before we talk seriously about fixing up another one.
I have a feeling you are vastly underestimating the cost of travel and colonization and vastly overestimating the value of other worlds.
As an example: what value would we get out of colonizing the moon. Or Venus or Mars? I've read a lot of good sci-fi too, but if your'e honest about it the answer is: not much. We can't even bring ourselves to build reasonable colonies underwater on earth, or at the south pole -- environments that are orders of magnitude easier to reach and tame.
We are far more adapted to this planet, indeed, very specific parts of this planet, than we like to realize. The same is likely true of other evolved lifeforms in the universe. The energy and material costs of getting to and from our nearest neighbor star, and the timescales involved, would outweigh any resource advantage acquired there. It's not a fair extrapolation from our success in spreading the human race across this planet -- technology is not going to allow us to circumvent the speed of light.
I find it interesting that anyone would choose to believe that we are unique amongst a billion billion worlds than to believe that we and our limitations are common. Given that there's no actual evidence either way, of course.
And this is a possible answer to the Fermi paradox. Well, after you accept that interstellar travel is not economically feasible.
Broadcast is not a great communication strategy. On-demand point-to-point communication takes over most things. Advanced civilizations go silent from the outside within a blink of them transmitting their first broadcast signals. There's no reason to think that we'll ever put serious effort into sending signals into the black given all the other things on our plate. And there's no reason to think that any other civilization would have such extra resources either.
I'm so tired of hearing this. Please, please, please: man up and point out to me a stable first-world country that is doing things as you think they should be done. Where has a lack of central regulation yielded anything other than subsistence farming and warlords? Where has a modern national infrastructure been built without government intervention? Where has the vast majority of the populous been made literate without public schools? Where has crime and poverty been kept to minimal levels without any government social programs?
As far as I know, it hasn't happened. Your ideals are based on a pipe dream just as foolish as communism: that left to their own devices the free market will get people to willingly build the cathedral of society we all take for granted today. If you have an example of this, please point it out and I'll modify my views. If you can't find an example, will you modify yours?
Isn't that exactly the _opposite_ of what this theory states?
The author specifies that efficiency in fact spurs _more_ economic growth. Unsurprising, since our entire society from the dawn of crop cultivation has been based on our ability to get things done more efficiently, thus freeing up time and energy for other work and discoveries. So if you want to grow the economy, work on... economy.
What is somewhat surprising is that the efficiencies gained seem to be immediately taken up by new forms of consumption, so there is never any decrease in resource usage, just a growth in what we accomplish with our endless accelerating depletion of those resources.
An interesting and somewhat troubling thought. In the end we are likely not above nature and a painful equilibrium will be found.
I've done SOX compliance work and it is completely ridiculous to claim that as the reason for the upgrade charge. There are plenty of ways that it could have been accounted for properly. SOX is about having confidence that the numbers presented haven't been fabricated or tampered with. It has nothing to do with the business decisions themselves.
Ignoramuses not letting go indeed.
If Apple wanted to charge for it, that's their prerogative. Blaming it on SOX was a weasel move.
Slashdot Mirror
I cannot figure out how the public benefits from this release of information
I don't know off hand either, but reading stuff like this is fascinating:
Wikileaks cables reveal China 'ready to abandon North Korea'
And I don't just mean that the leaks provide me with entertainment -- that kind of transparency into international shenanigans might have serious impact on where things go. Was North Korea aware of how China was presenting the situation to the US? Is China being honest with us? Will this bring the issue to a head? Is a war for reunification inevitable? Is it the best path? Is that more or less likely now? What will US public perception be of China after this?
I think this is a worthwhile experiment. I would not be all that surprised if such brutal transparency had fewer negative effects than the ridiculous hand-waving, double-talking, all-too-clever international politics that we are so accustomed to, so defensive of, but which have thus far failed us miserably. I'll reserve judgement on this for a few years, but I'll be glued to my front row seat.
Cheers.
It's a shame when people rewrite history so casually. The idea that you call the health care plan "Obamacare" when he didn't put it together and basically dropped the ball on it is completely absurd. Then, in an effort to work with Republicans the plan was whittled down to almost nothing, yet you still call it "Obamacare" and claim nobody talked to the Republicans.
Sorry, but I was paying attention, and I saw a perfectly reasonable and popular health care bill relentlessly torpedoed by the right, and that is the damaged bill we have now. Which, by the way, is still better than nothing and that will be obvious in 20 years as it is tweaked -- like every successful social policy of the past century. You know, the stuff that brought us to the top of the list of developed countries after WWII.
Your notion that this administration is the most partisan is merely a reflection of the fact that sometime since the early nineties when Newt shut down Congress, Republican leaders have simply decided "my way or the highway" on everything. Democrats under Bush were far more reasonable than the Republicans have been in decades now, which is why Bush was able to "work across the aisle".
It may be worth calling attention to the fact, which seems to slip your mind, that under Clinton's leadership we saw one of the greatest decades of growth this country has ever experienced. And under Bush we saw one of the worst. And under Obama we are slowly recovering. Doesn't any of those plain facts make you wonder about the Republican plan?
I would be surprised if you've got significant experience. You sound like I did 12 years ago when I didn't understand. I had the same complaints you do. I patted myself on the back as I wrote several different storage systems for various projects. And every one of those systems was useful for no more than the toy problems I was involved in at the time. Once I had to make things that lasted in the real world, I saw the light.
For any non-trivial, multi-user persistent data storage, a database is usually the correct view, whether it came up in 1960 or not. The notion of information and the way things interrelate has not changed significantly since then, and is unlikely to in the near future. Those old timers did their homework. I eventually realized that they understood the topic far better than I did.
Yes, there are special cases where you can get an angle of advantage by skipping a traditional database, but you lose an enormous amount of power too. If the trade off is worth it, then great. Usually it's not. Usually you will eventually have to amend the structures, import and export data, distribute it to different teams, integrate with existing systems, provide reporting tools, etc, etc, etc and you'll wish to hell you had just had it all in an database.
Good luck.
It's not a design trade off because, as you point out, a dielectric coating would almost surely have avoided this problem without reducing reception to 3GS levels. Even if we're talking aesthetic tradeoffs, there has got to be a clear coating they could have used that would have avoided this.
The external antenna was a clever idea but they didn't do it quite right. They'll probably get it right in the next revision. Such is the bleeding edge.
But as you point out, it's not like it ruins the iPhone 4. It is still an overall better phone than the previous models. It's just that it would have been so easy to make it even better without any fancy tech that it's a little embarrassing for a perfectionist company like Apple.
Cheers.
Yes, all phones have areas where hand placement will attenuate the signal.
The iPhone has that _plus_ a whole new problem, caused by the uninsulated antennas. Great PR today by Jobs, but the people who know can see through it: yes all smart phones have reception issues, but the iPhone 4 introduced a new one. It's a serious gaffe on their part. The fact that the bumper fixes it proves that exposed antennas are a bad hardware design. The reason not everyone gets the same problem probably has to do with variable skin capacitance. My hands sweat a bit, and I've death gripped several iPhones 4 into submission. My own iPhone 3G does not behave that way.
I'm not trying to play "gotcha" with Apple, and it would unfortunately be business suicide to admit the gaffe clearly because we're such a society of ridiculers... so they've pretty much done the right thing. But there is a real problem with the exposed antenna design and it's too bad they (and many of we) can't admit it.
Cheers.
and they don't care (not emotionally invested) because they couldn't do the job if they cared
There are volunteer doctors working in horrible conditions that disprove your assertion. Just because you couldn't do the job if you cared doesn't mean nobody else can. I would assert that the vast majority of doctors care about their patients a great deal.
Cheers.
The aim is to seek laws of physics that are absolute, inviolable, and a complete description of space, time, and mass-energy.
I may be stretching beyond my capacity here, but isn't that a pipe dream? Won't any laws of physics will be mathematical formulae? And I thought it was accepted that no significantly powerful mathematical system can be both complete and consistent. It seems to me that a physics laws would be subject to that same limitation. The search for ever finer models is wonderful, important, and really the basis of all human progress -- but at some point I accepted that we'll never get to the bottom. It's an infinite regress.
If I am misunderstanding the situation, I'd love to know how.
Cheers.
I predict this will be a mixed bag for them at best. Far as I can tell, when the value in your nation is material resources, the people get treated like shit. Only a handful of people are needed to run the operations and they don't need much education so they're easily replaceable. The rest are just an annoyance.
The only time people's lives significantly improve is when the value is the people's minds -- because then you can't kill them to take it, or ignore their needs and treat them like slaves.
Good luck Afghanistan. Hope I'm wrong.
"$5 of wealth was generated from thin air."
Sorry, but there's no such thing. I'm too sleepy to figure out where your logical mistake is, but there is no way that wealth is generated from thin air. It's got to represent productive capacity or resources or something... otherwise it's speculative and part of an unsustainable inflationary bubble, not wealth.
Cheers
"using a mercury switch to implement a pivoting display is obvious"
It is. But you know I wouldn't be surprised if Pivot or someone else got a patent on that anyway. In my interactions with the USPTO, it seems that even if they think the idea is stupid, if they can't find a published example of someone doing the same thing already, they grant the patent.
I'm almost at the point where I think dropping patents entirely would be better than having them, considering that we can't seem to get anywhere near the ideal of protecting novel inventions and encouraging growth of the public domain. The current patent game is a complete and total mockery of what it was intended to be.
Yeah, there's some real questions in there. I am going to guess you've read Hofstadter's GEB, from the sounds of it. If you haven't, you really should.
My opinion on the matter is that both the AI's author and the original composer are doing creative work. The degree to which "credit" would be assigned to either depends on a lot of factors. Near one extreme we have a record player, which does alter the original work ever so slightly. While we appreciate record player, we don't generally credit it for its contribution to the original work. What about an EQ setup, though? Or a dynamic sonic maximizer? Or a person who does a remix? Or the AI you describe... how different from the original is its output? Since musical notions were invented long before any musician we've heard of, should we consider modern musicians highly developed systems for taking musical input (their influences) and producing new derivative works? I would argue "yes", though a musician can seem strikingly original even with all the influences going in.
I tend to think we are more than just math engines. On our lowest level that might be it, but the brain doesn't make sense if you just look at neurons. Math is an amazing modeling system, but it is not complete. Our brains (at the higher levels) are multi-paradigm -- we may use math when it works but will find other more approximate modeling systems when it doesn't. I would grant that a complex enough AI could do the same thing. But we're not there yet. Not even close.
I guess random musings are contagious :)
Reading this article earlier today, about conquering resistant infections in Norway. Sounds like they've basically figured it out. What are the chances that we can get that kind of smarts imported into the US?
Cheers.
An interesting point. Do you generally find that people who are 80 years old (and still have reasonable health) are far more clear minded and productive than younger folks?
Perhaps that's just an issue of impending death? Or maybe it is an inherent limitation of building multiple models of the world over the years that contradict each other?
In any case, I do think you have a point. But I wonder if there is better progress to be had in extending existing human lives or building AI.
Cheers.
It very well might be never, as there seems to be an enormous misunderstanding of what intelligence is, and how it can be used.
Consider a computer that is as just as powerful as the human mind -- orders of magnitude more powerful than any computer today. What do you do with it? You have to teach it. And we _suck_ at teaching. We have 6 billion human-level super computers on the world right now, with another 300,000 arriving daily, and we have no idea what to do with them. What is one more, made of silicon, going to offer us?
Intelligence isn't just some simple value like tensile strength. It's about modeling and remodeling the world, drawing distinctions between similar things, seeing similarities where things are distinct, assigning values... things that are not straightforward and measurable. Anything simpler than that has already been achieved by current computers. For useful intelligence beyond that, there's usually not even clear right and wrong answers, only different results because of different models and values. Crank up the processing power by a factor of 10 (i.e. the power of an efficiently communicating ten human team) and you still don't have anything useful unless it has a very accurate model of the world. And why would it have a better model than a well chosen group of humans?
I don't know, I'm kind of disappointed by what seems like significant naivety in AI research. I know there is some impressive work being done, but it seems like a lot of the talk in articles like this is a bunch of sci-fi induced Pavlovian foolishness.
Not to call out Woz, but I'm not so sure he knows what he's talking about:
Wozniak said. "Well, I have many models of Prius that got recalled, but I have a new model that didn't get recalled.
As far as I can tell, no model of Prius was recalled. The list of recalled vehicles is in this release.
What's up with that?
Based on the difficulty NASA has in securing funding, I feel that most of humanity doesn't find space exploration to be particularly compelling. You're right about economics being anything that people value... and on that metric alone I think it would ultimately fail. But when I originally said it wasn't economically feasible I meant it in a more profound way: I do not think we are logistically capable of pulling together the resources to colonize a planet outside this solar system, even if we wanted to.
Cheers.
I more or less agree with your post, but there's an interesting and common assumption embedded there: that advanced civilizations have a say in whether they survive or not. I think we place far too much faith in our ability (and alien species ability) to manage long term changes. We've only got a few thousand years under our belt, and some relatively small changes in the earth's orbit or whatever can render our whole planet uninhabitable by most measures. Look around: we can hardly keep things going even with the world being given as a nearly perfect place for us.
If we found out tomorrow (or even in 1000 years) that this planet was going to die soon, I find it almost impossible to believe that we'd get our collective shit together enough to colonize some other world. Not even Venus or Mars, let alone an as yet undiscovered planet orbiting Proxima Centauri or beyond. Really, it doesn't surprise me at all that there are no visitors from the other struggling worlds out there. It's hard enough just to last a few millennia.
Cheers.
It's one thing to find an earth-sized planet. It's another to find one with a useful atmosphere, a protective magnetosphere, and numerous other physical and biological characteristics that we take for granted. It always puzzles me how we seem to think that we are apart from the environment, when in fact humans have extremely limited success even drifting outside a narrow band of habitats on this very planet. We're basically only able to live because we co-evolved with this planet. Plopping us anywhere else is enormously complicated and carries unclear benefits.
And if someone brings up terraforming, I'll just point you to our difficulties in even agreeing on what to do about the climate of our own nearly perfect planet which I'd like to see resolved before we talk seriously about fixing up another one.
Cheers.
I have a feeling you are vastly underestimating the cost of travel and colonization and vastly overestimating the value of other worlds.
As an example: what value would we get out of colonizing the moon. Or Venus or Mars? I've read a lot of good sci-fi too, but if your'e honest about it the answer is: not much. We can't even bring ourselves to build reasonable colonies underwater on earth, or at the south pole -- environments that are orders of magnitude easier to reach and tame.
We are far more adapted to this planet, indeed, very specific parts of this planet, than we like to realize. The same is likely true of other evolved lifeforms in the universe. The energy and material costs of getting to and from our nearest neighbor star, and the timescales involved, would outweigh any resource advantage acquired there. It's not a fair extrapolation from our success in spreading the human race across this planet -- technology is not going to allow us to circumvent the speed of light.
I find it interesting that anyone would choose to believe that we are unique amongst a billion billion worlds than to believe that we and our limitations are common. Given that there's no actual evidence either way, of course.
Cheers.
And this is a possible answer to the Fermi paradox. Well, after you accept that interstellar travel is not economically feasible.
Broadcast is not a great communication strategy. On-demand point-to-point communication takes over most things. Advanced civilizations go silent from the outside within a blink of them transmitting their first broadcast signals. There's no reason to think that we'll ever put serious effort into sending signals into the black given all the other things on our plate. And there's no reason to think that any other civilization would have such extra resources either.
Cheers.
One man's junk is another man's favorite video of the week.
Also note that the addition/removal of a million videos you don't like doesn't have any effect at all on the number of videos you like.
Content filtering is a bad idea.
Cheers.
Heh, thanks for the spelling correction :)
I'm so tired of hearing this. Please, please, please: man up and point out to me a stable first-world country that is doing things as you think they should be done. Where has a lack of central regulation yielded anything other than subsistence farming and warlords? Where has a modern national infrastructure been built without government intervention? Where has the vast majority of the populous been made literate without public schools? Where has crime and poverty been kept to minimal levels without any government social programs?
As far as I know, it hasn't happened. Your ideals are based on a pipe dream just as foolish as communism: that left to their own devices the free market will get people to willingly build the cathedral of society we all take for granted today. If you have an example of this, please point it out and I'll modify my views. If you can't find an example, will you modify yours?
Isn't that exactly the _opposite_ of what this theory states?
The author specifies that efficiency in fact spurs _more_ economic growth. Unsurprising, since our entire society from the dawn of crop cultivation has been based on our ability to get things done more efficiently, thus freeing up time and energy for other work and discoveries. So if you want to grow the economy, work on... economy.
What is somewhat surprising is that the efficiencies gained seem to be immediately taken up by new forms of consumption, so there is never any decrease in resource usage, just a growth in what we accomplish with our endless accelerating depletion of those resources.
An interesting and somewhat troubling thought. In the end we are likely not above nature and a painful equilibrium will be found.
I've done SOX compliance work and it is completely ridiculous to claim that as the reason for the upgrade charge. There are plenty of ways that it could have been accounted for properly. SOX is about having confidence that the numbers presented haven't been fabricated or tampered with. It has nothing to do with the business decisions themselves.
Ignoramuses not letting go indeed.
If Apple wanted to charge for it, that's their prerogative. Blaming it on SOX was a weasel move.