providing an operating system which users can use to revive their old computers, but bringing this to the age of modern computing
Pick one. You can't have both.
Sure you can. You can support oldish hardware without supporting really really old stuff. A raspberry pi is faster and has more memory than a 486. It makes no sense for anyone to support really really old desktop hardware. The cost of the electricity alone to run a 486 desktop for a year could buy a faster more energy efficient computer. There is some cutoff where continuing to support really old systems causes more problems than it fixes.
I would rather see UBI than make-work, because so long as the salaries for real jobs are significantly higher than UBI, people will be motivated to take them. Just characterize UBI as 'unemployment comp for life."
True UBI is not unemployment. It is given to everyone, even those who currently have a job. With a true UBI, salaries for real jobs will always be higher than UBI because you still get to keep your UBI even if you have a job. If say UBI was $300/week then someone could double their income if they found a job also paying $300/week.
Neither medicare nor social security are paid with income tax. They are both paid with their own separate payroll tax. Medicaid is already mostly administered by the state and the federal government shouldn't be collecting any money and giving it back to the states. Other than military spending, which could be significantly cut, most of the other stuff that the federal government does could easily be done by the individual states. We currently spend 4 times as much on our military as the next closest country (China). That would be a good place to start. If we cut our military budget in half we would still be spending more money than any other country.
We're just paying a 3% fee to a 3rd party to make the payments for us.
There is an easy fix for this. Require the end user to pay the 3% fee. A few places do it but I believe it's against the rules of most major credit card companies. If more places gave a discount for cash, a lot more people would pay with cash. As it stands now, with credit card rewards, there is effectively a 1% or so discount for using a credit card.
Interestingly enough, most of those things you mentioned with the exception of the military are paid by local taxes not federal income tax. Most people like where their local taxes go. I would love to see federal income tax reduced by 90% and if there are some things that still need to be done, let the local governments do it. The local governments usually end up doing it anyways with block grants, etc... Block grants and the federal government collecting too much money and giving it back to the states with strings should be illegal.
You could still have a run on the banks in a cashless society. It would look more like a run on the stores where people would buy large amounts of food, jewelry, or whatever else they thought would be useful or easy to sell/barter/trade.
No it's not. You can easily buy as many gold coins as you want. But using them as a medium of exchange is problematic as they are considered an asset so buying/selling them counts as a taxable transaction just like buying stocks.
Assuming that solely for the sake of argument, what guarantees do we have it will be "done right"? Will this stay the case? How do you propose to ensure and transparently show that this is indeed the case? And so on. Do tell.
This isn't predicting people, this is predicting locations. Even if it got so good that it knows there is going to be a robbery at the convenient store on 9th street at 9pm (which it can't), the cop isn't going to arrest someone until they see the crime being committed. This is similar to a tip being called in saying "I think there is going to be a gang fight at the pier at 9pm". The cop doesn't go down there and start arresting people. If there is a crowd, they might disperse the crowd and tell them to go home but they still aren't arresting people until an actual crime is committed.
But what are the opportunity costs of people having to bear the burden of living under a predictive model?
If done right, there is very little negative. The cops are already driving around patrolling and if we assume that a person is less likely to commit a crime if they see a cop drive by then by telling the cops where to patrol reduces crimes, reduces arrests, and everyone benefits. Most crimes whether it is vandalism, rape, speeding, or even theft are crimes of opportunities. You aren't going to try to steal a person's phone if that person is watching you. You aren't going to speed if you see a cop. By strategically placing cops in the most opportune locations at a given time you should be able to reduce the number of crimes committed and the number of arrests that have to be made. The same logic can be said for street lights, call boxes, etc... strategic placement of resources helps reduce crime.
That's not how a lineup usually works. For a lineup the cops put in their suspect(s) and then fill out the numbers with other people that could broadly fit the description.
And that's basically all facial recognition is good for. It can give you the 10 faces that most closely match the suspect's general facial features but it's still up to the witness, cop, judge, etc... to decide if it is indeed an exact match. If a person is not otherwise a suspect they shouldn't automatically become a suspect just because they look roughly similar to someone on a surveillance camera based on some fuzzy match done by a computer. You could possibly convict someone based on a surveillance camera alone but it should probably take multiple human experts to confirm that not some fuzzy computer algorithm.
When you consider the large crowds in the public spaces where this system is likely to be deployed, a 5% false positive rate would result in unmanageable numbers to verify. -E.g. Times Square sees 300,000 people a day movement, resulting in 15,000 false positives a day. Even a 1% false positive rate would be too high, especially considering the cost in civil liberties involved to those falsely flagged.
They aren't going to arrest 15000 people a day so there is no "cost in civil liberties involved to those falsely flagged" nor are they going to arrest 1000 people but it could help them quickly look at those 1000 people from a distance versus having to do the impossible job of trying to look at all 300k people. A large false positive is actually probably a good thing. If the false positive is too small like say only 0.01% then the cops might be tempted to arrest all 30 of those people without doing due diligence.
The mere fact that innocent citizens show up on the radar at ALL for police trying to solve a crime is very troublesome.
You want to absolutely minimize false positives.
I disagree. I think you should set up the AI to always produce false positives and probably hide the percentage of the match as well. Just like a lineup it should always return the top 10 results sorted randomly regardless of how closely they match. That way the cops don't start relying on it as something that it isn't.
Good point. They save on 50km of cable. Plus ping needs to go both ways. Forgot about that.
It's not the cabling. It's the 20 kilometers for a balloon versus the 35 THOUSAND kilometers for geostationary orbit. The ping time is 3 orders of magnitude smaller for a balloon versus satellite. Wires would still be faster than the balloons but over rough or sparsely populated areas, the balloons definitely have a niche and unlike satellite have actual usable ping times.
If I were a wild animal, I would much rather be killed by a human than by other wild animals. People at least have enough empathy to try to make the kill as swiftly and painlessly as possible.
Killed? Sure. But I would choose any wild animal over an animal in an industrial facility. Cramped conditions, sometimes with no sunlight or even room to turn around and killed before even an adult. That's no enjoyable life at all. Now where I live we still have a lot of beef cattle that spend a year or two at pasture before being killed. Their life is still short but relatively pleasant. The pigs and chickens aren't as fortunate.
20km has a major advantage over satellites. Geosynchronous orbit is over 35k km and you have to go there and back both ways so roundtrip ping times are horrible. For reference, the circumference of a the earth is only 40k km so you can connect any two points on earth with less than 20k km of cable versus the 70k km needed for a geostationary connection.
But you are conflating Platforms with App Stores. So, your post is meaningless.
Try again.
That's because the number of supported apps is what creates all the lock in. People don't even care that much about backwards compatibility as can be see the huge number of people jumping back and forth between Apple and Android. What they do care about is if the apps they use or something similar is available on the new phone. If you created a completely new OS and launched it day one with the same number of apps as android and ios then plenty of people would be willing to try it. But it doesn't matter how good the phone is if it doesn't support angry birds, facebook, fortnite, and all the other apps people want.
If "fertilizer" is the problem for coral reefs then why can't we fertilize them ourselves?
I was thinking something similar. I've heard a lot recently about too much fertilizer runoff killing the coral reefs. Maybe the bird droppings are somehow different than farm fertilizer and human waste but I don't think so. Before modern fertilizer, "mining" bird dung and bat dung was a common way to get fertilizer for farmers.
Because Apple isn't in a monopolistic position. Apple has quite a small marketshare, but Google have an effective monopoly (and an actual monopoly for non-premium devices). It's not about whether Apple is doing anything better or worse, it's about whether Google has an effective monopoly or not. If the situation were reversed (iOS being on 90% of devices), then the EU would be going after Apple.
The correct term is duopoly. Apple could double their market share tomorrow if they opened IOS to third party manufacturers but it would hurt their profit margins. Apple is doing just fine. As an article posted a few days ago, Apple has managed to make the iphone a luxury item and can command a premium. Just like any other luxury brand, it has no desire to flood the market with cheap versions of itself even if doing so could give it 50% market share.
and as far as Samsung is concerned Apple bundling doesn't affect them in the slightest.
Of course it does. Apple commands huge profit margins because it is the only alternative to Android. Samsung can't get near those profit margins because it has to compete with all the other manufacturers. If samsung could license and build an IOS phone then not only would samsung have an expanded market but Apple would no longer have a monopoly on IOS and would lose their huge profit margins. Apple's market share suffers a little because it can't offer the huge selection of hardware that Android's large number of manufacturers do but it makes up for it by being the only other shop in town. It's like a town with 25 motel 6s and 1 holiday inn. The holiday inn is going to get a certain number of people almost regardless of price because there are going to be people who don't like motel 6. As long a the town is restricted to only 2 chains, the owner of the holiday inn would be stupid to let someone else build a holiday inn and compete with them.
Users are locked in, and breaking that lock is extremely difficult.
Nonsense.
People switch heir Mobile platforms in BOTH directions ALL the time.
Both as in only two. The lock is all the apps on the 2 major app stores. That being said, there is really a third one. Amazon is doing pretty well. Amazon did it by being sourcecode/binary compatible with android. It is much easier to get developers on your platform if they don't have to write a whole new app to support it. You need to either go the route of Microsoft and create a cross platform development system or make your new OS really really easy for developers to port their existing apps to. Most developers are not going to have a problem supporting a third OS even with very few users as long as it is still cost effective.
In case of Android, Google gives OS with restrictions to manufacturers leading to unfair practices.
What is it with all this faulty reason? Google gives OS with restrictions to manufacturers. Apple restricts manufacturers from even using their OS. How exactly is Google's less restrictive model somehow more unfair? Would you rather they also not allow third party manufacturers?
The problem is that Android is (as I wrote) now the only realistic alternative for mobile phone manufacturers. Is it in the interest of consumers that Google gets more power than they already have? Was it good that Microsoft ruled the PC platform for 20 years?
If you want to decrease the market share of Android, probably the quickest way to do this would be to force iOS to allow other manufacturers to create hardware for their device.
Apple has no incentive to allow this because they currently have insanely high profit margins.
I guess the crux of the matter here is the fact that android is a open software with other device manufacturers can license and build a resellable mobile device with. Where as apple is the only manufacturer out that making (Apple owned) iOS mobile devices. There's no competition and hence you can't say they are not "playing fair" with others.
I'm sure there are plenty of manufacturers that would love to create hardware that runs iOS. The reason Apple has no competition is because they refuse to allow any competition by locking out competition. Google is playing much more fair than Apple. They allow anyone to use their core OS even Amazon one of their primary competitors.
Because Apple is a closed ecosystem owned and controlled by apple. Apple doesn't let others make hardware for their software.
Where as Android is open source and has plenty of hardware from a a number of different companies, including Samsung, htc, Sony, Motorola, etc.
That's the difference. Google is locking out other companies and businesses from using software that they are allowed to provide.
Apple is completely closed and controlled by Apple and won't even let other companies use their software or create hardware for their platform and somehow you think Google is locking other companies out? Would you rather Google become a closed ecosystem and ban other manufacturers from using their software? Your argument makes no sense. You are basically saying that because Google is more open it has to be even more open while Apple is completely closed so that's ok.
Nothing.
The EU are trying to avoid a Microsoft Windows situation on mobile phones. With Android being the only realistic OS available outside of Apple, it seems like a smart move to avoid another monopoly.
But Apple is 10 times worse. There is no alternative app store at all for Apple. Android has some minor hoops but it's fairly simple to download apps from Amazon or several of the other third party android app stores. There is no way to replace siri with google or alexa. There is no way to change the default map program, the default email program, or the default anything. Android isn't without its flaws but it even lets you replace the desktop manager. It is infinitely more flexible and open than Apple.
Why go after Google first when Apple is by far the bigger offender?
Slashdot Mirror
providing an operating system which users can use to revive their old computers, but bringing this to the age of modern computing
Pick one. You can't have both.
Sure you can. You can support oldish hardware without supporting really really old stuff. A raspberry pi is faster and has more memory than a 486. It makes no sense for anyone to support really really old desktop hardware. The cost of the electricity alone to run a 486 desktop for a year could buy a faster more energy efficient computer. There is some cutoff where continuing to support really old systems causes more problems than it fixes.
I would rather see UBI than make-work, because so long as the salaries for real jobs are significantly higher than UBI, people will be motivated to take them. Just characterize UBI as 'unemployment comp for life."
True UBI is not unemployment. It is given to everyone, even those who currently have a job. With a true UBI, salaries for real jobs will always be higher than UBI because you still get to keep your UBI even if you have a job. If say UBI was $300/week then someone could double their income if they found a job also paying $300/week.
I would love to see federal income tax reduced by 90% and if there are some things that still need to be done, let the local governments do it.
Look at this graph of federal government spending, and say what exactly are you going to cut? Even if you cut military spending to bare bones, you wouldn't succeed in closing the annual deficit. If you cut social security, you will be voted out of office. If you cut Medicare, you will be voted out of office. So what exactly are you planning on doing?
Neither medicare nor social security are paid with income tax. They are both paid with their own separate payroll tax. Medicaid is already mostly administered by the state and the federal government shouldn't be collecting any money and giving it back to the states. Other than military spending, which could be significantly cut, most of the other stuff that the federal government does could easily be done by the individual states. We currently spend 4 times as much on our military as the next closest country (China). That would be a good place to start. If we cut our military budget in half we would still be spending more money than any other country.
We're just paying a 3% fee to a 3rd party to make the payments for us.
There is an easy fix for this. Require the end user to pay the 3% fee. A few places do it but I believe it's against the rules of most major credit card companies. If more places gave a discount for cash, a lot more people would pay with cash. As it stands now, with credit card rewards, there is effectively a 1% or so discount for using a credit card.
Interestingly enough, most of those things you mentioned with the exception of the military are paid by local taxes not federal income tax. Most people like where their local taxes go. I would love to see federal income tax reduced by 90% and if there are some things that still need to be done, let the local governments do it. The local governments usually end up doing it anyways with block grants, etc... Block grants and the federal government collecting too much money and giving it back to the states with strings should be illegal.
You could still have a run on the banks in a cashless society. It would look more like a run on the stores where people would buy large amounts of food, jewelry, or whatever else they thought would be useful or easy to sell/barter/trade.
No it's not. You can easily buy as many gold coins as you want. But using them as a medium of exchange is problematic as they are considered an asset so buying/selling them counts as a taxable transaction just like buying stocks.
Assuming that solely for the sake of argument, what guarantees do we have it will be "done right"? Will this stay the case? How do you propose to ensure and transparently show that this is indeed the case? And so on. Do tell.
This isn't predicting people, this is predicting locations. Even if it got so good that it knows there is going to be a robbery at the convenient store on 9th street at 9pm (which it can't), the cop isn't going to arrest someone until they see the crime being committed. This is similar to a tip being called in saying "I think there is going to be a gang fight at the pier at 9pm". The cop doesn't go down there and start arresting people. If there is a crowd, they might disperse the crowd and tell them to go home but they still aren't arresting people until an actual crime is committed.
But what are the opportunity costs of people having to bear the burden of living under a predictive model?
If done right, there is very little negative. The cops are already driving around patrolling and if we assume that a person is less likely to commit a crime if they see a cop drive by then by telling the cops where to patrol reduces crimes, reduces arrests, and everyone benefits.
Most crimes whether it is vandalism, rape, speeding, or even theft are crimes of opportunities. You aren't going to try to steal a person's phone if that person is watching you. You aren't going to speed if you see a cop. By strategically placing cops in the most opportune locations at a given time you should be able to reduce the number of crimes committed and the number of arrests that have to be made. The same logic can be said for street lights, call boxes, etc... strategic placement of resources helps reduce crime.
That's not how a lineup usually works. For a lineup the cops put in their suspect(s) and then fill out the numbers with other people that could broadly fit the description.
And that's basically all facial recognition is good for. It can give you the 10 faces that most closely match the suspect's general facial features but it's still up to the witness, cop, judge, etc... to decide if it is indeed an exact match. If a person is not otherwise a suspect they shouldn't automatically become a suspect just because they look roughly similar to someone on a surveillance camera based on some fuzzy match done by a computer. You could possibly convict someone based on a surveillance camera alone but it should probably take multiple human experts to confirm that not some fuzzy computer algorithm.
When you consider the large crowds in the public spaces where this system is likely to be deployed, a 5% false positive rate would result in unmanageable numbers to verify. -E.g. Times Square sees 300,000 people a day movement, resulting in 15,000 false positives a day. Even a 1% false positive rate would be too high, especially considering the cost in civil liberties involved to those falsely flagged.
They aren't going to arrest 15000 people a day so there is no "cost in civil liberties involved to those falsely flagged" nor are they going to arrest 1000 people but it could help them quickly look at those 1000 people from a distance versus having to do the impossible job of trying to look at all 300k people. A large false positive is actually probably a good thing. If the false positive is too small like say only 0.01% then the cops might be tempted to arrest all 30 of those people without doing due diligence.
The mere fact that innocent citizens show up on the radar at ALL for police trying to solve a crime is very troublesome.
You want to absolutely minimize false positives.
I disagree. I think you should set up the AI to always produce false positives and probably hide the percentage of the match as well. Just like a lineup it should always return the top 10 results sorted randomly regardless of how closely they match. That way the cops don't start relying on it as something that it isn't.
Good point. They save on 50km of cable. Plus ping needs to go both ways. Forgot about that.
It's not the cabling. It's the 20 kilometers for a balloon versus the 35 THOUSAND kilometers for geostationary orbit. The ping time is 3 orders of magnitude smaller for a balloon versus satellite. Wires would still be faster than the balloons but over rough or sparsely populated areas, the balloons definitely have a niche and unlike satellite have actual usable ping times.
If I were a wild animal, I would much rather be killed by a human than by other wild animals. People at least have enough empathy to try to make the kill as swiftly and painlessly as possible.
Killed? Sure. But I would choose any wild animal over an animal in an industrial facility. Cramped conditions, sometimes with no sunlight or even room to turn around and killed before even an adult. That's no enjoyable life at all. Now where I live we still have a lot of beef cattle that spend a year or two at pasture before being killed. Their life is still short but relatively pleasant. The pigs and chickens aren't as fortunate.
20km has a major advantage over satellites. Geosynchronous orbit is over 35k km and you have to go there and back both ways so roundtrip ping times are horrible. For reference, the circumference of a the earth is only 40k km so you can connect any two points on earth with less than 20k km of cable versus the 70k km needed for a geostationary connection.
But you are conflating Platforms with App Stores. So, your post is meaningless.
Try again.
That's because the number of supported apps is what creates all the lock in.
People don't even care that much about backwards compatibility as can be see the huge number of people jumping back and forth between Apple and Android.
What they do care about is if the apps they use or something similar is available on the new phone.
If you created a completely new OS and launched it day one with the same number of apps as android and ios then plenty of people would be willing to try it.
But it doesn't matter how good the phone is if it doesn't support angry birds, facebook, fortnite, and all the other apps people want.
If "fertilizer" is the problem for coral reefs then why can't we fertilize them ourselves?
I was thinking something similar. I've heard a lot recently about too much fertilizer runoff killing the coral reefs. Maybe the bird droppings are somehow different than farm fertilizer and human waste but I don't think so. Before modern fertilizer, "mining" bird dung and bat dung was a common way to get fertilizer for farmers.
Because Apple isn't in a monopolistic position. Apple has quite a small marketshare, but Google have an effective monopoly (and an actual monopoly for non-premium devices). It's not about whether Apple is doing anything better or worse, it's about whether Google has an effective monopoly or not. If the situation were reversed (iOS being on 90% of devices), then the EU would be going after Apple.
The correct term is duopoly. Apple could double their market share tomorrow if they opened IOS to third party manufacturers but it would hurt their profit margins. Apple is doing just fine. As an article posted a few days ago, Apple has managed to make the iphone a luxury item and can command a premium. Just like any other luxury brand, it has no desire to flood the market with cheap versions of itself even if doing so could give it 50% market share.
and as far as Samsung is concerned Apple bundling doesn't affect them in the slightest.
Of course it does. Apple commands huge profit margins because it is the only alternative to Android. Samsung can't get near those profit margins because it has to compete with all the other manufacturers. If samsung could license and build an IOS phone then not only would samsung have an expanded market but Apple would no longer have a monopoly on IOS and would lose their huge profit margins. Apple's market share suffers a little because it can't offer the huge selection of hardware that Android's large number of manufacturers do but it makes up for it by being the only other shop in town. It's like a town with 25 motel 6s and 1 holiday inn. The holiday inn is going to get a certain number of people almost regardless of price because there are going to be people who don't like motel 6. As long a the town is restricted to only 2 chains, the owner of the holiday inn would be stupid to let someone else build a holiday inn and compete with them.
Users are locked in, and breaking that lock is extremely difficult.
Nonsense.
People switch heir Mobile platforms in BOTH directions ALL the time.
Both as in only two. The lock is all the apps on the 2 major app stores. That being said, there is really a third one. Amazon is doing pretty well. Amazon did it by being sourcecode/binary compatible with android. It is much easier to get developers on your platform if they don't have to write a whole new app to support it. You need to either go the route of Microsoft and create a cross platform development system or make your new OS really really easy for developers to port their existing apps to. Most developers are not going to have a problem supporting a third OS even with very few users as long as it is still cost effective.
Because Apple manufactures ite own phone.
In case of Android, Google gives OS with restrictions to manufacturers leading to unfair practices.
What is it with all this faulty reason? Google gives OS with restrictions to manufacturers. Apple restricts manufacturers from even using their OS.
How exactly is Google's less restrictive model somehow more unfair? Would you rather they also not allow third party manufacturers?
The problem is that Android is (as I wrote) now the only realistic alternative for mobile phone manufacturers.
Is it in the interest of consumers that Google gets more power than they already have?
Was it good that Microsoft ruled the PC platform for 20 years?
If you want to decrease the market share of Android, probably the quickest way to do this would be to force iOS to allow other manufacturers to create hardware for their device.
Apple has no incentive to allow this because they currently have insanely high profit margins.
I guess the crux of the matter here is the fact that android is a open software with other device manufacturers can license and build a resellable mobile device with. Where as apple is the only manufacturer out that making (Apple owned) iOS mobile devices. There's no competition and hence you can't say they are not "playing fair" with others.
I'm sure there are plenty of manufacturers that would love to create hardware that runs iOS. The reason Apple has no competition is because they refuse to allow any competition by locking out competition. Google is playing much more fair than Apple. They allow anyone to use their core OS even Amazon one of their primary competitors.
Because Apple is a closed ecosystem owned and controlled by apple. Apple doesn't let others make hardware for their software.
Where as Android is open source and has plenty of hardware from a a number of different companies, including Samsung, htc, Sony, Motorola, etc.
That's the difference. Google is locking out other companies and businesses from using software that they are allowed to provide.
Apple is completely closed and controlled by Apple and won't even let other companies use their software or create hardware for their platform and somehow you think Google is locking other companies out?
Would you rather Google become a closed ecosystem and ban other manufacturers from using their software?
Your argument makes no sense. You are basically saying that because Google is more open it has to be even more open while Apple is completely closed so that's ok.
Nothing.
The EU are trying to avoid a Microsoft Windows situation on mobile phones.
With Android being the only realistic OS available outside of Apple, it seems like a smart move to avoid another monopoly.
But Apple is 10 times worse. There is no alternative app store at all for Apple. Android has some minor hoops but it's fairly simple to download apps from Amazon or several of the other third party android app stores. There is no way to replace siri with google or alexa. There is no way to change the default map program, the default email program, or the default anything. Android isn't without its flaws but it even lets you replace the desktop manager. It is infinitely more flexible and open than Apple.
Why go after Google first when Apple is by far the bigger offender?