THere's no rush to mine seti data. it doesn't matter if we detect alien signals now or in 20 years. so just store it and then mine it all in a single day with quantum processors in 20 years.
Or just wait for the cryptocurrency market to either collapse, get more efficient, or move over to ASIC and all those cheap no longer needed GPUs flood the market.
Hydrogen is the most basic element, the most abundant element in space, and the precession frequency of neutral hydrogen atoms (1.42ishGHz) is a radio frequency that propagates reasonably well. The hope is if that idea makes sense to us, it will make sense to an alien race who might be looking for a frequency to send on that others will think to listen to. Hydrogen line times pi is another one.
But we aren't actually sending out that frequency either. What if everyone is listening and no one is transmitting?
Well I'd also argue there's a huge difference between preventing breakdowns and preventing malicious attacks. I mean if you yank out the network cable computers are very stable. Maintenance you can plan for, when somebody will find a bug in your code and release a 0-day exploit is pretty much impossible.
The day to day instability and annoyances of computers have very little to do with malicious attackers. The fact that every time you turn on your computer you have to update one or more apps. The fact that app X slowly leaks memory. The fact that sometimes the best way to keep a computer stable is to just regularly reboot it. The list goes on and on and while some of the updates might be because of the possibility of an attack very little is directly related to direct malicious attack on a person's home computer.
Good news, everyone! Automation will solve this. Not by doing the maid work directly, but by pigeoning the remaining humans into it.
Granted, this will only apply if you're one of the godhumans in the three remaining ultracorporations.
Yep, sadly, we seem to be heading back to the days where the few rich have 20+ servants/slaves, the small middle class have a couple servants/slaves and everyone else are the servants/slaves. Back to plantation days but where the means of production is not necessarily measured in acres.
In many cultures, outside America, your considered selfish if you don't hire staff like maids or gardeners. The US will probably be there soon... Why pay taxes for a social safety net and strong community when you can hire people to look down on and get the pleasure of lording your status over people.
The reason the USA doesn't have that is because in the USA the difference between the middle class and the minimum wage is not as drastic as many countries. Double the minimum wage puts you above the median income in the USA. A two income family where both people make double the minimum wage can live fairly comfortably in the USA but at the same time it would take over 25% of their combined income (50% of one person's income) to hire a full-time maid/gardener.
If you think the medical community is bad at diagnosing and treating known illnesses you should talk to the people who have unknown illnesses. It's amazing to me the number of people who have some problem that the doctors literally have no idea what is going on. They might have muscle weakness, fatigue, high white blood count, bloodshot eyes, etc... so the doctor knows that something is wrong but they have no idea what exactly is wrong. If you include mental illnesses instead of just illnesses with physical symptoms the number of illnesses that doctors have no clue about is even higher.
We have tech everywhere but nothing to control it. Whether it is controlling how much your kids are on their phones, how much you yourself are on your phone, or just getting all the different tech to work together, the software to manage our tech is severely lacking. Even something simple like technology able to limit kids to 10 hours a week of video games doesn't really exist.
There are a lot of big answers but here is a very small answer. I would like to buy a full size keyboard where the left and the right are not attached to each other. I had a small travel one for a while but it was laptop quality and has since been discontinued. It's such a simple item but it doesn't exist. There are likely thousands of similar items just waiting to be made.
Compare that to a car, for which the expectation is that you turn the key and it starts up and goes where you want, without first needing to be rebooted and patched and the firmware reflashed and the networking reconfigured every time.
Henry Ford gets a lot of credit for the assembly line but his other big break thru is equally important. He decided to standardize maintenance to set intervals. The 3 months or 3k miles isn't because everything needs that interval but because by standardizing on that interval you can minimize repairs. You now have a goal to make sure every part can last at least 3k miles between services and you line everything else up to also be some multiple of this. If you need a transmission flush or tires changed make sure you do it during one of the scheduled 3k mile services. Before this, every part had a different repair schedule and they were all out of sync so you had to take your car in constantly. That's where the computer industry is today.
A maid is not a solution for the majority of people. A maid generally only works if you pay them a significantly smaller per hour rate than you yourself make. Very few people would be willing to hire a maid if they had to pay the maid the same hourly rate that they make. A maid could possibly work by hiring them at your own rate if it's something they are faster at, better at, or something you don't want to do but most people hire a maid because a maid works cheaper than they do.
They treat it as a foregone conclusion that this person should have this right. But if him deleting his account and all associated code off github can impact other projects, I fail to see why he should have that right.
Github is a repo. Of course you should be able to delete projects, otherwise it would contain even more dead projects than it already does. You publish code and share it with the world. People download it and use it. You abandon it and delete the project. The problem is not you deleting it but the person depending on it to stay there. If I share something with you with an open source license then you are free to download a copy but if I decide to unpublisg then it's up to new users to snag it from someone who managed to download it before it disappeared.
If it's anonymous, anyone controversial will find him- or herself being "friended" by a lot of people who will by default dislike anything they do, simply because they hate him or her for what they represent.
Facebook shouldn't have this problem because you have to approve all friend requests. I have almost zero friends on facebook that I haven't met in person.
Ebay used to have positive and negative feedback. Negative feedback was used to blugeon sellers and buyers alike and they left the platform.
One big difference is that facebook should primarily be in-person friends.
Now, the idea itself isn't entirely without merit. "downvoting" should not be published. If you down-vote a comment or a story, or something, it should internally score the downvoted comment and downvoters to see if people are engaging in "mobbing" behavior (eg the same people downvoting the same stories on the same days) and zero-score those downvotes.
Another option would be to show the count of the downvotes and just not the names. That way a person could see that they are posting something their friends are disagreeing with and maybe change their behavior. You could also show the downvote totals to just the original poster.
The difference is facebook is (ostensibly) limited to the people with whom you are *friends*. With reddit, anyone can up/downvote you. Facebook doesn't have the anonymity. I doubt the impact would be remotely comparable.
Which is exactly why facebook should have anonymous dislikes and anonymous disagree buttons. Most people already live in an echo chamber but that echo chamber is magnified because very few people are willing to call their friends out when they post stuff they disagree with. By being allowed to anonymously disagree with a post you could signal to a friend that you really didn't like their racist or otherwise inflammatory post. They would know one of their friends disagreed with it which might give them pause but they wouldn't know which friend. It also might encourage people to prune their friend lists more often.
If you believe something that the rest of society disagrees with, that is the definition of extremist.
That's a terrible way of defining extremist. The rest of society once disagreed that the earth rotated around the sun and that slavery was wrong. There are always going to be fringe beliefs and some of those fringe believes can become mainstream and change the world. One of the problems with society today is the rampant thought police that try to suppress opinions they disagree with. Extremists should be defined not on their opinions but on their actions. If someone peacefully wants to say that we should bring back slavery or stop eating meat or that the earth is flat then we should allow them to say it.
In your troll universe, parents who already have careers never get laid off and lose their income.
Parents who already have degrees and careers tend to be able to recover quicker. The #1 reason for extreme poverty is out of wedlock children and having children young. That being said, there is likely some selection bias there. Many people who plan on going to college intentionally hold off on having children where people who have no plans to go to college have less incentive to wait to have children. Sure there are other reasons for poverty like health problems, etc... but that doesn't negate the fact that the #1 preventable way of staying out of poverty is delaying children until you are stable.
When I was back visiting in December, I sat down with my mother for half a day and worked up a spreadsheet of their bills for the last year to work out how offers from other electricity retailers would compare to their current provider. (Yes, pricing is that damn complicated!) We ended up finding a provider that would save them $300/year and I switched them over.
It's interesting that you even have a choice. I'm assuming they all share the same lines. In the US, as far as I know, pretty much everyone only has one choice and that is the local provider. The pricing is much simpler and is highly regulated and many are co-ops but the only choice is to use the local provider or to go off-grid.
Why would I provide my roof (and have holes drilled into it and everything else) so someone else can install solar panels on it and then sell me the electricity that is generated?
Where's the advantage for the homeowner over just telling this lot to go way and continuing to purchase power as today without all of that gear on the roof?
From the summary, it sounds like the homeowner gets a 30% discount on their monthly bill. The average electric bill in Australia is about $100usd so they are basically renting their roof for $30usd / month. A 30% discount sounds nice and he will likely get some people to say yes but it seems like a very small amount of money to deal with the hassle of having a 3rd party installing and then periodically maintaining something on your roof. There could be other benefits too though like not having to worry about brownouts, downed lines, etc...
Consumers weren't yet willing to sign up to multiple services to get media when music became available for legal, paid download. Now they are, so the studios are gearing up to be the distributors. Doubtless everyone is watching the mouse quite closely.
Most still aren't willing too. Sure, a few people will have hulu and netflix or some other combination but most people don't want to be subscribed to multiple services. I currently have netflix. Before that I used amazon prime. I see no reason to pay for more than one at once. Same for music and news. I would gladly pay $10 per month to have access to all the major news sites but I'm never going to pay $10 per month for the NYtimes and $10 per month for Washington Post, etc... Either their prices need to come down considerably or they all need to get together and have some sort of package where I can subscribe to a single service and have access to them all.
More importantly, Who is to say the automation is even coming from the same employer? If you make existing employers re-train everyone they lay off then you almost guarantee that new automation will come from new start ups that replace the existing employers.
Do you think money is only real when it is printed?
No, I didn't mean to imply that. I was saying that a bank can't loan out or create money it doesn't have. Only the federal government and/or federal reserve can. Even without a reserve requirement, the maximum a normal bank can loan out is 100% of the money it has on deposit which would in theory create a maximum 200% of the money because it has $1M on deposit and $1M loaned out. The only way it could go above 200% would be if it started borrowing money from elsewhere against its own assets.
$1 deposited, $0.90 in loans distributed, which gets deposited, and then $0.81 in loans is created, which gets deposited, and then $0.72 in loans is created, which gets deposited, and then $0.64 in loans is created, which gets deposited, and then $0.57 in loans is created,...
At this point, the bank had one real dollar deposited and used it to originate 5 different loans totalling $3.64, and it can keep going for some time.
Poof! Money creation!
In theory this could work but who borrows money and deposits it back in a bank? The people borrowing are not generally the same people doing the depositing.
Perhaps I misunderstand, but it sounds like you are missing the point of fractional reserve banking. That means the bank can loan out more than it receives in deposits, with only a fraction of the total outstanding actually in the vault. That's the reserve percentage mandated by the US government.
Fractional reserve means they only have to keep (reserve) a fraction of the deposits on hand. A bank still cannot print and loan money it doesn't have. The federal government and/or the federal reserve can but a normal bank can't. The fractional reserve system is what allows banks to give interest to people who deposit money with them. The alternative to a fractional reserve system is where 100% of the money is always in the bank. Now days, that would be the equivalence of a safety deposit box. The money is yours and the bank isn't allowed to touch it just store it and keep it safe. Fractional reserve started out when some unethical safe operators realized that when multiple people all asked them to store their money for them that the chances of them all asking for it back at once was pretty much zero so they started skimming off the bottom. Today it is legal and that skimming is split and some of the interest is given to the depositor. And again, you can always opt out of the fractional reserve system by using a safety deposit box instead but regardless the bank still never loans out more than the total deposits.
Slashdot Mirror
THere's no rush to mine seti data. it doesn't matter if we detect alien signals now or in 20 years. so just store it and then mine it all in a single day with quantum processors in 20 years.
Or just wait for the cryptocurrency market to either collapse, get more efficient, or move over to ASIC and all those cheap no longer needed GPUs flood the market.
Hydrogen is the most basic element, the most abundant element in space, and the precession frequency of neutral hydrogen atoms (1.42ishGHz) is a radio frequency that propagates reasonably well. The hope is if that idea makes sense to us, it will make sense to an alien race who might be looking for a frequency to send on that others will think to listen to. Hydrogen line times pi is another one.
But we aren't actually sending out that frequency either. What if everyone is listening and no one is transmitting?
Well I'd also argue there's a huge difference between preventing breakdowns and preventing malicious attacks. I mean if you yank out the network cable computers are very stable. Maintenance you can plan for, when somebody will find a bug in your code and release a 0-day exploit is pretty much impossible.
The day to day instability and annoyances of computers have very little to do with malicious attackers. The fact that every time you turn on your computer you have to update one or more apps. The fact that app X slowly leaks memory. The fact that sometimes the best way to keep a computer stable is to just regularly reboot it. The list goes on and on and while some of the updates might be because of the possibility of an attack very little is directly related to direct malicious attack on a person's home computer.
You just invented plywood!
Plywood is weaker than normal wood not stronger and definitely not stronger than steel.
Good news, everyone! Automation will solve this. Not by doing the maid work directly, but by pigeoning the remaining humans into it.
Granted, this will only apply if you're one of the godhumans in the three remaining ultracorporations.
Yep, sadly, we seem to be heading back to the days where the few rich have 20+ servants/slaves, the small middle class have a couple servants/slaves and everyone else are the servants/slaves. Back to plantation days but where the means of production is not necessarily measured in acres.
In many cultures, outside America, your considered selfish if you don't hire staff like maids or gardeners. The US will probably be there soon...
Why pay taxes for a social safety net and strong community when you can hire people to look down on and get the pleasure of lording your status over people.
The reason the USA doesn't have that is because in the USA the difference between the middle class and the minimum wage is not as drastic as many countries. Double the minimum wage puts you above the median income in the USA. A two income family where both people make double the minimum wage can live fairly comfortably in the USA but at the same time it would take over 25% of their combined income (50% of one person's income) to hire a full-time maid/gardener.
If you think the medical community is bad at diagnosing and treating known illnesses you should talk to the people who have unknown illnesses. It's amazing to me the number of people who have some problem that the doctors literally have no idea what is going on. They might have muscle weakness, fatigue, high white blood count, bloodshot eyes, etc... so the doctor knows that something is wrong but they have no idea what exactly is wrong. If you include mental illnesses instead of just illnesses with physical symptoms the number of illnesses that doctors have no clue about is even higher.
We have tech everywhere but nothing to control it. Whether it is controlling how much your kids are on their phones, how much you yourself are on your phone, or just getting all the different tech to work together, the software to manage our tech is severely lacking. Even something simple like technology able to limit kids to 10 hours a week of video games doesn't really exist.
There are a lot of big answers but here is a very small answer.
I would like to buy a full size keyboard where the left and the right are not attached to each other. I had a small travel one for a while but it was laptop quality and has since been discontinued. It's such a simple item but it doesn't exist. There are likely thousands of similar items just waiting to be made.
Compare that to a car, for which the expectation is that you turn the key and it starts up and goes where you want, without first needing to be rebooted and patched and the firmware reflashed and the networking reconfigured every time.
Henry Ford gets a lot of credit for the assembly line but his other big break thru is equally important. He decided to standardize maintenance to set intervals. The 3 months or 3k miles isn't because everything needs that interval but because by standardizing on that interval you can minimize repairs. You now have a goal to make sure every part can last at least 3k miles between services and you line everything else up to also be some multiple of this. If you need a transmission flush or tires changed make sure you do it during one of the scheduled 3k mile services. Before this, every part had a different repair schedule and they were all out of sync so you had to take your car in constantly. That's where the computer industry is today.
Hire a maid, it will solve half of your list.
A maid is not a solution for the majority of people. A maid generally only works if you pay them a significantly smaller per hour rate than you yourself make. Very few people would be willing to hire a maid if they had to pay the maid the same hourly rate that they make. A maid could possibly work by hiring them at your own rate if it's something they are faster at, better at, or something you don't want to do but most people hire a maid because a maid works cheaper than they do.
They treat it as a foregone conclusion that this person should have this right. But if him deleting his account and all associated code off github can impact other projects, I fail to see why he should have that right.
Github is a repo. Of course you should be able to delete projects, otherwise it would contain even more dead projects than it already does. You publish code and share it with the world. People download it and use it. You abandon it and delete the project. The problem is not you deleting it but the person depending on it to stay there. If I share something with you with an open source license then you are free to download a copy but if I decide to unpublisg then it's up to new users to snag it from someone who managed to download it before it disappeared.
If it's anonymous, anyone controversial will find him- or herself being "friended" by a lot of people who will by default dislike anything they do, simply because they hate him or her for what they represent.
Facebook shouldn't have this problem because you have to approve all friend requests. I have almost zero friends on facebook that I haven't met in person.
This won't work.
Ebay used to have positive and negative feedback. Negative feedback was used to blugeon sellers and buyers alike and they left the platform.
One big difference is that facebook should primarily be in-person friends.
Now, the idea itself isn't entirely without merit. "downvoting" should not be published. If you down-vote a comment or a story, or something, it should internally score the downvoted comment and downvoters to see if people are engaging in "mobbing" behavior (eg the same people downvoting the same stories on the same days) and zero-score those downvotes.
Another option would be to show the count of the downvotes and just not the names. That way a person could see that they are posting something their friends are disagreeing with and maybe change their behavior. You could also show the downvote totals to just the original poster.
The difference is facebook is (ostensibly) limited to the people with whom you are *friends*. With reddit, anyone can up/downvote you. Facebook doesn't have the anonymity. I doubt the impact would be remotely comparable.
Which is exactly why facebook should have anonymous dislikes and anonymous disagree buttons.
Most people already live in an echo chamber but that echo chamber is magnified because very few people
are willing to call their friends out when they post stuff they disagree with. By being allowed to
anonymously disagree with a post you could signal to a friend that you really didn't like their racist
or otherwise inflammatory post. They would know one of their friends disagreed with it which might give
them pause but they wouldn't know which friend. It also might encourage people to prune their
friend lists more often.
If you believe something that the rest of society disagrees with, that is the definition of extremist.
That's a terrible way of defining extremist. The rest of society once disagreed that the earth rotated around the sun and that slavery was wrong.
There are always going to be fringe beliefs and some of those fringe believes can become mainstream and change the world.
One of the problems with society today is the rampant thought police that try to suppress opinions they disagree with.
Extremists should be defined not on their opinions but on their actions. If someone peacefully wants to say that we should bring back slavery or stop eating meat or that the earth is flat then we should allow them to say it.
In your troll universe, parents who already have careers never get laid off and lose their income.
Parents who already have degrees and careers tend to be able to recover quicker. The #1 reason for extreme poverty is out of wedlock children and having children young. That being said, there is likely some selection bias there. Many people who plan on going to college intentionally hold off on having children where people who have no plans to go to college have less incentive to wait to have children. Sure there are other reasons for poverty like health problems, etc... but that doesn't negate the fact that the #1 preventable way of staying out of poverty is delaying children until you are stable.
When I was back visiting in December, I sat down with my mother for half a day and worked up a spreadsheet of their bills for the last year to work out how offers from other electricity retailers would compare to their current provider. (Yes, pricing is that damn complicated!) We ended up finding a provider that would save them $300/year and I switched them over.
It's interesting that you even have a choice. I'm assuming they all share the same lines. In the US, as far as I know, pretty much everyone only has one choice and that is the local provider. The pricing is much simpler and is highly regulated and many are co-ops but the only choice is to use the local provider or to go off-grid.
The average is about $1600aud per year which is about $1200usd per year or $100 per month: https://www.canstarblue.com.au...
The average in the USA is also about $100 per month: http://eyeonhousing.org/2015/0...
Why would I provide my roof (and have holes drilled into it and everything else) so someone else can install solar panels on it and then sell me the electricity that is generated?
Where's the advantage for the homeowner over just telling this lot to go way and continuing to purchase power as today without all of that gear on the roof?
From the summary, it sounds like the homeowner gets a 30% discount on their monthly bill. The average electric bill in Australia is about $100usd so they are basically renting their roof for $30usd / month. A 30% discount sounds nice and he will likely get some people to say yes but it seems like a very small amount of money to deal with the hassle of having a 3rd party installing and then periodically maintaining something on your roof. There could be other benefits too though like not having to worry about brownouts, downed lines, etc...
Consumers weren't yet willing to sign up to multiple services to get media when music became available for legal, paid download. Now they are, so the studios are gearing up to be the distributors. Doubtless everyone is watching the mouse quite closely.
Most still aren't willing too. Sure, a few people will have hulu and netflix or some other combination but most people don't want to be subscribed to multiple services. I currently have netflix. Before that I used amazon prime. I see no reason to pay for more than one at once. Same for music and news. I would gladly pay $10 per month to have access to all the major news sites but I'm never going to pay $10 per month for the NYtimes and $10 per month for Washington Post, etc... Either their prices need to come down considerably or they all need to get together and have some sort of package where I can subscribe to a single service and have access to them all.
More importantly, Who is to say the automation is even coming from the same employer? If you make existing employers re-train everyone they lay off then you almost guarantee that new automation will come from new start ups that replace the existing employers.
Do you think money is only real when it is printed?
No, I didn't mean to imply that. I was saying that a bank can't loan out or create money it doesn't have. Only the federal government and/or federal reserve can. Even without a reserve requirement, the maximum a normal bank can loan out is 100% of the money it has on deposit which would in theory create a maximum 200% of the money because it has $1M on deposit and $1M loaned out. The only way it could go above 200% would be if it started borrowing money from elsewhere against its own assets.
$1 deposited, $0.90 in loans distributed, which gets deposited, and then $0.81 in loans is created, which gets deposited, and then $0.72 in loans is created, which gets deposited, and then $0.64 in loans is created, which gets deposited, and then $0.57 in loans is created, ...
At this point, the bank had one real dollar deposited and used it to originate 5 different loans totalling $3.64, and it can keep going for some time.
Poof! Money creation!
In theory this could work but who borrows money and deposits it back in a bank? The people borrowing are not generally the same people doing the depositing.
Perhaps I misunderstand, but it sounds like you are missing the point of fractional reserve banking. That means the bank can loan out more than it receives in deposits, with only a fraction of the total outstanding actually in the vault. That's the reserve percentage mandated by the US government.
Fractional reserve means they only have to keep (reserve) a fraction of the deposits on hand. A bank still cannot print and loan money it doesn't have. The federal government and/or the federal reserve can but a normal bank can't.
The fractional reserve system is what allows banks to give interest to people who deposit money with them. The alternative to a fractional reserve system is where 100% of the money is always in the bank. Now days, that would be the equivalence of a safety deposit box. The money is yours and the bank isn't allowed to touch it just store it and keep it safe. Fractional reserve started out when some unethical safe operators realized that when multiple people all asked them to store their money for them that the chances of them all asking for it back at once was pretty much zero so they started skimming off the bottom. Today it is legal and that skimming is split and some of the interest is given to the depositor. And again, you can always opt out of the fractional reserve system by using a safety deposit box instead but regardless the bank still never loans out more than the total deposits.