It this is the situation, then why shouldn't the steps be 1. Public records to find the owners 2. Send certified letters letting them know they own it and you'd like to buy it 3. Buy it, since "they'd be getting money for something they didn't know they had" 4. Avoid assholeriness 5. Enjoy!!!
This is EXACTLY what he is doing. This "lawsuit" is notifying the 300 next of kin who might own property to make a claim. The lawsuit basically says that if noone steps forward in 21 days that the court will give the property free and clear to Zuckerberg. He's not being an asshole, he's following standard procedure in Hawaii. This is how it is always done there.
I care deeply about this because it's about someone wealthy from some social "platform"'s VC and stock-inflation value that decided to force natives out of their lands just because he has the money to do it. It proves he really hate everyone that isn't him, and uses everyone for his own personal gain.
From what I understand, only one person has been found so far and he's a professor that was willing to sell. We're talking 8 acres out of 700 and most of those 300 people who share it don't even know they own the land. He's not forcing anyone off any land. The lawsuit is to give people who might have ownership rights time to step forward and otherwise assume that they are all dead and proceed. This is standard procedure in hawaii. He's not doing anything that anyone else who buys land in hawaii doesn't have to do and what exactly are 300 people going to do with 8 acres. I'm sure Zuckerberg would be more than willing to give them the choice of any 8 acres on the edge of his tract if they really want it. This is all just propaganda to make him look like an evil rich guy.
Doesn't matter if they do live there or not. He's filed a lawsuit to take something he wants from someone else for his own comfort. That's pretty deplorable no matter how you slice it.
The purpose of the lawsuit is to locate the people who own the land so he can offer to buy it and if noone steps forward then to clear the title so that he owns it fair and square. He's not taking anything from anyone and noone is being forced to sell anything. This is standard procedure in hawaii where a plot of land has been passed down to descendants. Of the 700 acres, we are only talking about 8 acres of which 300 people potentially own the rights to. If he could, I'm sure Zuckerburg would be more than willing to give those 300 people 8 acres on the edge of his property in exchange for their fraction of an acre share but he just doesn't want someone owning half an acre in the middle of his plot. Again, this is standard procedure. The only reason this is news is because the media has made it out like it's a rich guy trying to take advantage of some non-existent natives.
Let the user pick a personalized name like they would for any child or pet.
Since it's only listening for specific "wake words" and this processing must be done on the device itself, I imagine it's easier for them to code a few specific wake words into the firmware (and perhaps not even possible to do much more; I'm not sure we know much about its hardware)--everything else you speak afterwards (and, so they say, only this speech) is sent to AWS or whatnot where there's a lot more processing power, which I imagine that allowing the user to configure an arbitrary word would also take.
I believe the way it works is that it looks for a couple phonemes and if those phonemes match it wakes up, makes sure it is a match and starts processing. If they can change it between 3 or 4 phoneme groups, it would seem like they could fairly easily allow you to choose which phonemes you want it to match. My guess is they don't do this for 2 reasons. The first is that people would be stupid and try to pick something like 'bob' or 'anne' without realizing that it is not complex enough for safe triggers. The second which relates to the first as well is marketing. It is good marketing to have someone constantly saying 'amazon' or 'alexa' over and over. 'Computer' is cute but it's also likely an attempt to corral that keyword the same way microsoft took the word windows.
You need to have a cutoff date at some point. Though I'd understand if they announce a short extension, if 6 months before the deadline it becomes clear that 1 team will be a month late.
Why would you need to have a cutoff? If you have a fully funded prize and you have people trying for the prize, why would you stop the contest before there is a winner? There are plenty of ongoing contests that are waiting for a winner. Some of them pay out the interest each year to the closest person, some just let the prize money build. It seems that if you really want a private company to go to the moon and if you think prize money will give them an incentive then instead of terminating the prize, they should keep increasing the prize money to attract more participants.
"computer, tape Agents of Shield for me, just the new ones" or "computer, put together a list of things I don't have to make my usual dinner party suflet" and have it actually work, consistently? Still a 'toy' usage but we don't even have that level of sophistication yet.
To be able to do arbitrary tasks with any level of accuracy, AI will have to get MUCH MUCH better than it is now. It can barely recognize the words you say. Being able to parse the sentence structure is too hard for current AI and you're talking about it looking in your cupboard and seeing what ingredients are missing. That's full blown android which we've been 30 years away from for the past 50 years with no real progress made not to mention just the robotics portion would be too expensive for most people.
I'm going to guess most of us have the light switch memorized so we'd hit it on and off even without looking or in the dark so changing to a voice activated system would likely slow you down.
The other issue with voice activation is that it is hit or miss. When was the last time you hit a light switch and it decided to not turn on because you didn't hit it just right? I use voice recognition a lot on my phone because it is easier to say "show me the 5 day forecast" than to try to navigate the menus. Most apps are going to be gimmicky. The ones that are quicker and easier than typing though will continue to gain usage. Google could encourage this by allowing users to sort by long term usage rates or at least factoring that into their sorting algorithms.
I've never understood it. Why would someone use Western Union to transfer money instead of a normal bank transfer?
I think the legitimate use for it is for emergencies. If you break down 1000 miles from home and need money to get home, you call your dad collect and have them send you money via western union. My dad was a truck driver and they always used comcheck which is a similar system where money could be transferred instantly. The other semi legitimate use is to send money more easily across international lines. Western union is kindof like hawala. The idea is that you can give person A at one location $100 and person A can call person B at another location to instantly release the money. There is no need to wait to have the money verified, physically transferred, etc... because person A trusts person B. Most of their regular customers seem to be this later category. It seems to be a lot of illegals and foreigners sending money abroad.
That would be the same as the people in California voting for a government that bans irrigation to protect the ground water levels.
You make it sound like this could never happen. I could easily see this happen. The percentage of farmers in California is small compared to city dwellers. What do the city dwellers care about irrigation. California recently passed something similar where they are basically going to cause all the dairy farmers to leave (https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/11/29/california-passes-a-new-climate-law-to-regulate-cow-farts/) and many of their other regulations have likewise hurt their own companies.
Actually, they regularly run into things like parked cars and windowless buildings. Did you have data to back up your claim, or were you just lying and hoping nobody would contradict you? The reason they hit the windows in houses, not the house, is that they hit the house, and you don't notice, but when they hit the window, you notice.
The reason they hit windows is because of the reflection and the transparency. A window sometimes works like a mirror and many times will reflect a second tree that they are trying to get to. They don't just randomly run into things they can see. Zoos have a solution for this. Instead of using glass which is both reflective and see thru, they use little very thin vertical wire which would probably be worse for the birds if the birds ran into it but the birds don't because they see it just fine.
Agreed. If I bought a car with a feature called "autopilot", I would think I would be comfortable taking a snooze (or watching a Harry Potter movie) while the car did the driving for me. I am really surprised they haven't dropped the name "autopilot" as it is totally misleading and something that has been pointed out repeatedly. I suspect that there are egos involved in the decision not to change the name.
Or, maybe, they think their software is close enough to achieve certification for totally taking over responsibility for driving the car that they think that can weather this storm and keep the name for the big roll out.
I agree completely. I'm actually surprised that they haven't been sued for false advertising instead just like the cell phone companies have for "unlimited". It should be called "Driver Assist" until the driver is allowed to nap. Yes, I know that a pilot isn't allowed to nap but that's not really the point. A pilot has had a lot more training AND is less likely to hit something if it does dose off AND usually has a second pilot as well.
And then it still doesn't make sense, because Mars will still be an inhospitable hell hole where nobody would want to live.
If we had autonomous robots that could build giant steel cities then there is nothing that says we couldn't make it hospitable. We would need a huge amount of energy to do it but if you had something along the lines of "Great Wolf Lodge" or "Mall of America", you could in theory create a place where people could live comfortably without ever going outside. This would not be all that different than the many people who rarely if ever leave the city they live and work in. But again, we are talking city scale construction (or at the very least mall size) and you would either have to ship a ton of equipment there or somehow bootstrap a modern factory starting with basically nothing.
And Economics 101. If you somehow managed to bring that much iron to the Earth, it would completely change price structures. Iron would become essentially free as a raw material, with only transportation and processing costs. People would develop all kinds of new applications for raw meteoric iron to take advantage of its low price, etc.
I seriously doubt it. Iron is already essentially free. It's around $100/ton (4 cents a pound) How much lower does it need to go? The cost of iron goods is pretty much already 99% based on the transportation and processing. Iron is already one of the cheapest raw materials there is.
I heard the accompanying video's talking head saying "...an asteroid with so much money, it could easily solve the worlds..." and then I shut it off.
Unless we can convert iron directly into food then it really doesn't solve any problems. Iron is already pretty cheap at only about 4 cents per pound and there is plenty of it to go around. If we could somehow get that iron to earth then the price of iron would approach zero but what exactly does this solve? It would likely lower the cost of skyscrapers and cars a little but probably not a lot. There is probably less than $100 worth of iron in a car so that is not a significant portion of the price of a car. The only use case I can think of for a huge amount of additional iron would be interstellar spacecrafts but it would take a ton of energy to melt it into ibeams, etc.. not to mention that something like an interstellar spacecraft is likely going to need electronics and a lot of other stuff that isn't made of iron. Really, there is very little in space that is going to solve the problems we have on earth. The resources we have on earth that people actually need are food, land, and finished goods none of which are found in space. The raw materials that go into making the finished goods are actually a minimal part of the final price.
What is this "need" that you speak of ? There's nothing in space that would be worth the insane expense of setting up an industry in the asteroid belt.
The only way mining in space makes sense is if we have fully autonomous robots where we can send 4 of them to mars and they can go collect materials, create a forge, and start building stuff. If we ever get to that point, these same robots will have already replaced 95% of the human jobs on earth.
I see a lesson in humility here by looking at how poor human scientists do at modelling-by-studying-defects in a general sense.
It suggests that models of the brain derived by seeing what effects damaged sections have on patient behavior may be worse than originally expected.
But just like any science, that's not the only thing they do. They compare different methods and models and come to a consensus. If you see that people who have damage to region X of the brain can't do Y and you see that region X of the brain is active in healthy people when they do Y then you have two points of data that point to the same conclusion. They do the same thing with carbon dating, quantum physics, gravity waves, etc... As long as the different measurements all agree then you assume that your assumptions are correct. If on the other hand you all of a sudden discover that a different method of calculating something doesn't agree with the former data then you have to study it and figure out why there is a difference. That's also why we do a lot of experiments where we are measuring something to see if it matches predicted values. We are assuming that it will so if we design an experiment and we don't get the expected results then that means that our assumptions might not be correct.
I am reasonable sure the majority of people in my neighborhood here in science-hating Texas have no idea how to set up their routers to allow torrent uploads and avoid leeching limitations.
Who said anything about torrents? My kids (9 and 11) know how to type "[movie name] full movie" and "[show name] season X episode X" into google and start streaming a show in seconds. If they have figured this out then most adults have likely figured it out too.
I know of a guy that pirates movies he never watches, because he thinks it is cool. He has thousands of movies in his "collection", more than any human could watch in a lifetime. He is a mass offender.
There is a difference between mass piracy and a mass offender. I do believe mass piracy is going on but it's only because of a few mass offenders. My kids (9 and 11) have even learned that typing "[movie name] full movie" or "[show name] season X episode X" in google usually returns several listing where you can stream whatever movie or show they want. They can even tell you which websites are good and which websites don't work before even clicking on the links and if nothing does turn up in google they go directly to the websites they know are good and search there. Youtube and google are probably the worst mass offenders. Even though they don't host the content themself, they make it easy enough for kids to find them. Now my kids know several websites to go to but they would have had a much harder time finding them in the first place if it wasn't for google and until google stops listing them you are just playing whack a mole. If google delisted them, you would still be playing whackamole but it would be much harder for the general public to find the sites to begin with.
The problem is that, human nature being what it is, a lot of drivers will come to rely too much on autopilot and will stop paying attention just like this guy apparently did. That will cause a lot of crashes just by itself. This isn't DIRECTLY the fault of autopilot, but is rather an INDIRECT consequence of having it (combined with human nature).
Not really a problem. The insurance companies already track accidents based on model and features. It will only take a few years of data to determine whether a particular autopilot feature makes a driver safer or not. If it reduces the number of severe accidents and fatalities then it's still a win even if it shifts the type of accidents.
Not once the pay is enough to comfortably support one's lifestyle.
But, does one ever really attain that level of pay?
If you work in IT and live in a reasonably priced area then it's pretty easy to attain that level of pay. I make about 90k a year which is not especially high for IT work but it's more than double what the average middle class person in my area makes which allows me to live like a king. I have more than enough money to support myself and my 3 kids, max out my retirement every year and still have plenty left over at the end of the month. My kids and I have all our needs and most of our wants covered and money isn't really an issue and hasn't been for a while. We go on vacation for several weeks a year and buy the things we want without really worrying about the price. As I now have a considerable sum in my retirement, I am starting to look into what it would take to retire. If you can't live comfortably on 90k/year (which is almost double the median household income in the USA) then you are doing something wrong. I could easily live comfortably on a lot less than I'm making and I am actually in the process of selling my house to move into something smaller because I've decided that it's too big for our needs and that will free up even more money to put into savings. So yes, it is possible and an interesting fact is that studies have shown that 70k is the sweet spot in the USA and any more money than that doesn't really make a person any happier.
It is not as stupid as you might think. Essentially all radios sold for use in cars today come with the RDS system as part of them, although it can be turned off. What this system does is give you some info: the channel you are listening to and so on. It also gives the radio the current time. But most importantly it also allows for interrupting _any_ sound source (radio, CD, DVD, USB....) to force your radio to play the voice message sent through the RDS system
Does it work if your radio is off. I rarely have the radio on. I will ocassionally turn it on for a few minutes on long car rides but almost never when in the city with traffic which is where this type of system would be the most useful.
Yep, Reaver rats. They'll rape us to death, eat our flesh and sew our skin into their clothing. And if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order.
This is what I instantly jumped to as well. They now know how to create both extremely docile rats and reaver rats that attack anything in sight.
3: Find a project that already does something very close to what you want and who'll probably see the value of your suggestion.
I'll add a 4th option along those same lines: Find a community that would benefit from the software and see if you can get a group of people to help build and/or help finance it. If it's 3D printer software, try drumming up support in the various 3D printer groups. If it's 3D rendering software you want then find groups that do 3D rendering. If it's novel software then anything's game. If you are wanting an open source clone of existing software then it would probably be best to find a related group that isn't directly associated with the commercial version you are wanting to replicate but even then if you have features that the commercial version doesn't support and it's a third party site like facebook then asking if anyone would like to help create a clone and you might be surprised about the support you might receive.
It sounds good, but are there any epidemiological studies to show that people after appendicitis die of infections earlier?
The data would be incomplete. What you really need is the death rate of people who have had their appendix removed and then don't have access to modern antibiotics. The appendix is not near as important today with access to modern medicine.
The appendix has MANY subtle jobs rather than one obvious one, that's why you can do without it.
It's not just the appendix. A lot of other organs that are thought "unnecessary" have a use. The gallbladder stores bile to help in digestion. The tonsils are designed to get infected first so you build up an immunity and the rest of you doesn't get sick. There is very little in the way of useless organs in the human body. It's interesting that the appendix and tonsils were both probably more useful back before antibiotics and modern hygiene. Today it probably doesn't make much difference but I would guess that back before modern medicine, if you would have actually been able to remove someone's appendix and tonsils safely that you would see their longterm survival rate drop after they were removed.
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It this is the situation, then why shouldn't the steps be
1. Public records to find the owners
2. Send certified letters letting them know they own it and you'd like to buy it
3. Buy it, since "they'd be getting money for something they didn't know they had"
4. Avoid assholeriness
5. Enjoy!!!
This is EXACTLY what he is doing. This "lawsuit" is notifying the 300 next of kin who might own property to make a claim. The lawsuit basically says that if noone steps forward in 21 days that the court will give the property free and clear to Zuckerberg. He's not being an asshole, he's following standard procedure in Hawaii. This is how it is always done there.
I care deeply about this because it's about someone wealthy from some social "platform"'s VC and stock-inflation value that decided to force natives out of their lands just because he has the money to do it. It proves he really hate everyone that isn't him, and uses everyone for his own personal gain.
From what I understand, only one person has been found so far and he's a professor that was willing to sell. We're talking 8 acres out of 700 and most of those 300 people who share it don't even know they own the land. He's not forcing anyone off any land. The lawsuit is to give people who might have ownership rights time to step forward and otherwise assume that they are all dead and proceed. This is standard procedure in hawaii. He's not doing anything that anyone else who buys land in hawaii doesn't have to do and what exactly are 300 people going to do with 8 acres. I'm sure Zuckerberg would be more than willing to give them the choice of any 8 acres on the edge of his tract if they really want it. This is all just propaganda to make him look like an evil rich guy.
Doesn't matter if they do live there or not.
He's filed a lawsuit to take something he wants from someone else for his own comfort.
That's pretty deplorable no matter how you slice it.
The purpose of the lawsuit is to locate the people who own the land so he can offer to buy it and if noone steps forward then to clear the title so that he owns it fair and square. He's not taking anything from anyone and noone is being forced to sell anything. This is standard procedure in hawaii where a plot of land has been passed down to descendants. Of the 700 acres, we are only talking about 8 acres of which 300 people potentially own the rights to. If he could, I'm sure Zuckerburg would be more than willing to give those 300 people 8 acres on the edge of his property in exchange for their fraction of an acre share but he just doesn't want someone owning half an acre in the middle of his plot. Again, this is standard procedure. The only reason this is news is because the media has made it out like it's a rich guy trying to take advantage of some non-existent natives.
Let the user pick a personalized name like they would for any child or pet.
Since it's only listening for specific "wake words" and this processing must be done on the device itself, I imagine it's easier for them to code a few specific wake words into the firmware (and perhaps not even possible to do much more; I'm not sure we know much about its hardware)--everything else you speak afterwards (and, so they say, only this speech) is sent to AWS or whatnot where there's a lot more processing power, which I imagine that allowing the user to configure an arbitrary word would also take.
I believe the way it works is that it looks for a couple phonemes and if those phonemes match it wakes up, makes sure it is a match and starts processing. If they can change it between 3 or 4 phoneme groups, it would seem like they could fairly easily allow you to choose which phonemes you want it to match. My guess is they don't do this for 2 reasons. The first is that people would be stupid and try to pick something like 'bob' or 'anne' without realizing that it is not complex enough for safe triggers. The second which relates to the first as well is marketing. It is good marketing to have someone constantly saying 'amazon' or 'alexa' over and over. 'Computer' is cute but it's also likely an attempt to corral that keyword the same way microsoft took the word windows.
You need to have a cutoff date at some point. Though I'd understand if they announce a short extension, if 6 months before the deadline it becomes clear that 1 team will be a month late.
Why would you need to have a cutoff? If you have a fully funded prize and you have people trying for the prize, why would you stop the contest before there is a winner? There are plenty of ongoing contests that are waiting for a winner. Some of them pay out the interest each year to the closest person, some just let the prize money build. It seems that if you really want a private company to go to the moon and if you think prize money will give them an incentive then instead of terminating the prize, they should keep increasing the prize money to attract more participants.
"computer, tape Agents of Shield for me, just the new ones" or "computer, put together a list of things I don't have to make my usual dinner party suflet" and have it actually work, consistently? Still a 'toy' usage but we don't even have that level of sophistication yet.
To be able to do arbitrary tasks with any level of accuracy, AI will have to get MUCH MUCH better than it is now. It can barely recognize the words you say. Being able to parse the sentence structure is too hard for current AI and you're talking about it looking in your cupboard and seeing what ingredients are missing. That's full blown android which we've been 30 years away from for the past 50 years with no real progress made not to mention just the robotics portion would be too expensive for most people.
I'm going to guess most of us have the light switch memorized so we'd hit it on and off even without looking or in the dark so changing to a voice activated system would likely slow you down.
The other issue with voice activation is that it is hit or miss. When was the last time you hit a light switch and it decided to not turn on because you didn't hit it just right? I use voice recognition a lot on my phone because it is easier to say "show me the 5 day forecast" than to try to navigate the menus. Most apps are going to be gimmicky. The ones that are quicker and easier than typing though will continue to gain usage. Google could encourage this by allowing users to sort by long term usage rates or at least factoring that into their sorting algorithms.
I've never understood it. Why would someone use Western Union to transfer money instead of a normal bank transfer?
I think the legitimate use for it is for emergencies. If you break down 1000 miles from home and need money to get home, you call your dad collect and have them send you money via western union. My dad was a truck driver and they always used comcheck which is a similar system where money could be transferred instantly. The other semi legitimate use is to send money more easily across international lines. Western union is kindof like hawala. The idea is that you can give person A at one location $100 and person A can call person B at another location to instantly release the money. There is no need to wait to have the money verified, physically transferred, etc... because person A trusts person B. Most of their regular customers seem to be this later category. It seems to be a lot of illegals and foreigners sending money abroad.
That would be the same as the people in California voting for a government that bans irrigation to protect the ground water levels.
You make it sound like this could never happen. I could easily see this happen. The percentage of farmers in California is small compared to city dwellers. What do the city dwellers care about irrigation. California recently passed something similar where they are basically going to cause all the dairy farmers to leave (https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/11/29/california-passes-a-new-climate-law-to-regulate-cow-farts/) and many of their other regulations have likewise hurt their own companies.
Actually, they regularly run into things like parked cars and windowless buildings. Did you have data to back up your claim, or were you just lying and hoping nobody would contradict you? The reason they hit the windows in houses, not the house, is that they hit the house, and you don't notice, but when they hit the window, you notice.
The reason they hit windows is because of the reflection and the transparency. A window sometimes works like a mirror and many times will reflect a second tree that they are trying to get to. They don't just randomly run into things they can see. Zoos have a solution for this. Instead of using glass which is both reflective and see thru, they use little very thin vertical wire which would probably be worse for the birds if the birds ran into it but the birds don't because they see it just fine.
Agreed. If I bought a car with a feature called "autopilot", I would think I would be comfortable taking a snooze (or watching a Harry Potter movie) while the car did the driving for me. I am really surprised they haven't dropped the name "autopilot" as it is totally misleading and something that has been pointed out repeatedly. I suspect that there are egos involved in the decision not to change the name.
Or, maybe, they think their software is close enough to achieve certification for totally taking over responsibility for driving the car that they think that can weather this storm and keep the name for the big roll out.
I agree completely. I'm actually surprised that they haven't been sued for false advertising instead just like the cell phone companies have for "unlimited". It should be called "Driver Assist" until the driver is allowed to nap. Yes, I know that a pilot isn't allowed to nap but that's not really the point. A pilot has had a lot more training AND is less likely to hit something if it does dose off AND usually has a second pilot as well.
And then it still doesn't make sense, because Mars will still be an inhospitable hell hole where nobody would want to live.
If we had autonomous robots that could build giant steel cities then there is nothing that says we couldn't make it hospitable. We would need a huge amount of energy to do it but if you had something along the lines of "Great Wolf Lodge" or "Mall of America", you could in theory create a place where people could live comfortably without ever going outside. This would not be all that different than the many people who rarely if ever leave the city they live and work in. But again, we are talking city scale construction (or at the very least mall size) and you would either have to ship a ton of equipment there or somehow bootstrap a modern factory starting with basically nothing.
And Economics 101. If you somehow managed to bring that much iron to the Earth, it would completely change price structures. Iron would become essentially free as a raw material, with only transportation and processing costs. People would develop all kinds of new applications for raw meteoric iron to take advantage of its low price, etc.
I seriously doubt it. Iron is already essentially free. It's around $100/ton (4 cents a pound) How much lower does it need to go? The cost of iron goods is pretty much already 99% based on the transportation and processing. Iron is already one of the cheapest raw materials there is.
I heard the accompanying video's talking head saying "...an asteroid with so much money, it could easily solve the worlds..." and then I shut it off.
Unless we can convert iron directly into food then it really doesn't solve any problems. Iron is already pretty cheap at only about 4 cents per pound and there is plenty of it to go around. If we could somehow get that iron to earth then the price of iron would approach zero but what exactly does this solve? It would likely lower the cost of skyscrapers and cars a little but probably not a lot. There is probably less than $100 worth of iron in a car so that is not a significant portion of the price of a car. The only use case I can think of for a huge amount of additional iron would be interstellar spacecrafts but it would take a ton of energy to melt it into ibeams, etc.. not to mention that something like an interstellar spacecraft is likely going to need electronics and a lot of other stuff that isn't made of iron. Really, there is very little in space that is going to solve the problems we have on earth. The resources we have on earth that people actually need are food, land, and finished goods none of which are found in space. The raw materials that go into making the finished goods are actually a minimal part of the final price.
What is this "need" that you speak of ? There's nothing in space that would be worth the insane expense of setting up an industry in the asteroid belt.
The only way mining in space makes sense is if we have fully autonomous robots where we can send 4 of them to mars and they can go collect materials, create a forge, and start building stuff. If we ever get to that point, these same robots will have already replaced 95% of the human jobs on earth.
I see a lesson in humility here by looking at how poor human scientists do at modelling-by-studying-defects in a general sense.
It suggests that models of the brain derived by seeing what effects damaged sections have on patient behavior may be worse than originally expected.
But just like any science, that's not the only thing they do. They compare different methods and models and come to a consensus. If you see that people who have damage to region X of the brain can't do Y and you see that region X of the brain is active in healthy people when they do Y then you have two points of data that point to the same conclusion. They do the same thing with carbon dating, quantum physics, gravity waves, etc... As long as the different measurements all agree then you assume that your assumptions are correct. If on the other hand you all of a sudden discover that a different method of calculating something doesn't agree with the former data then you have to study it and figure out why there is a difference. That's also why we do a lot of experiments where we are measuring something to see if it matches predicted values. We are assuming that it will so if we design an experiment and we don't get the expected results then that means that our assumptions might not be correct.
I am reasonable sure the majority of people in my neighborhood here in science-hating Texas have no idea how to set up their routers to allow torrent uploads and avoid leeching limitations.
Who said anything about torrents? My kids (9 and 11) know how to type "[movie name] full movie" and "[show name] season X episode X" into google and start streaming a show in seconds. If they have figured this out then most adults have likely figured it out too.
There is no "mass piracy" going on.
I know of a guy that pirates movies he never watches, because he thinks it is cool. He has thousands of movies in his "collection", more than any human could watch in a lifetime. He is a mass offender.
There is a difference between mass piracy and a mass offender. I do believe mass piracy is going on but it's only because of a few mass offenders. My kids (9 and 11) have even learned that typing "[movie name] full movie" or "[show name] season X episode X" in google usually returns several listing where you can stream whatever movie or show they want. They can even tell you which websites are good and which websites don't work before even clicking on the links and if nothing does turn up in google they go directly to the websites they know are good and search there. Youtube and google are probably the worst mass offenders. Even though they don't host the content themself, they make it easy enough for kids to find them. Now my kids know several websites to go to but they would have had a much harder time finding them in the first place if it wasn't for google and until google stops listing them you are just playing whack a mole. If google delisted them, you would still be playing whackamole but it would be much harder for the general public to find the sites to begin with.
The problem is that, human nature being what it is, a lot of drivers will come to rely too much on autopilot and will stop paying attention just like this guy apparently did. That will cause a lot of crashes just by itself. This isn't DIRECTLY the fault of autopilot, but is rather an INDIRECT consequence of having it (combined with human nature).
Not really a problem. The insurance companies already track accidents based on model and features. It will only take a few years of data to determine whether a particular autopilot feature makes a driver safer or not. If it reduces the number of severe accidents and fatalities then it's still a win even if it shifts the type of accidents.
But, does one ever really attain that level of pay?
If you work in IT and live in a reasonably priced area then it's pretty easy to attain that level of pay. I make about 90k a year which is not especially high for IT work but it's more than double what the average middle class person in my area makes which allows me to live like a king. I have more than enough money to support myself and my 3 kids, max out my retirement every year and still have plenty left over at the end of the month. My kids and I have all our needs and most of our wants covered and money isn't really an issue and hasn't been for a while. We go on vacation for several weeks a year and buy the things we want without really worrying about the price. As I now have a considerable sum in my retirement, I am starting to look into what it would take to retire. If you can't live comfortably on 90k/year (which is almost double the median household income in the USA) then you are doing something wrong. I could easily live comfortably on a lot less than I'm making and I am actually in the process of selling my house to move into something smaller because I've decided that it's too big for our needs and that will free up even more money to put into savings. So yes, it is possible and an interesting fact is that studies have shown that 70k is the sweet spot in the USA and any more money than that doesn't really make a person any happier.
It is not as stupid as you might think. Essentially all radios sold for use in cars today come with the RDS system as part of them, although it can be turned off. What this system does is give you some info: the channel you are listening to and so on. It also gives the radio the current time. But most importantly it also allows for interrupting _any_ sound source (radio, CD, DVD, USB....) to force your radio to play the voice message sent through the RDS system
Does it work if your radio is off. I rarely have the radio on. I will ocassionally turn it on for a few minutes on long car rides but almost never when in the city with traffic which is where this type of system would be the most useful.
Yep, Reaver rats. They'll rape us to death, eat our flesh and sew our skin into their clothing. And if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order.
This is what I instantly jumped to as well. They now know how to create both extremely docile rats and reaver rats that attack anything in sight.
Third options:
3: Find a project that already does something very close to what you want and who'll probably see the value of your suggestion.
I'll add a 4th option along those same lines: Find a community that would benefit from the software and see if you can get a group of people to help build and/or help finance it. If it's 3D printer software, try drumming up support in the various 3D printer groups. If it's 3D rendering software you want then find groups that do 3D rendering. If it's novel software then anything's game. If you are wanting an open source clone of existing software then it would probably be best to find a related group that isn't directly associated with the commercial version you are wanting to replicate but even then if you have features that the commercial version doesn't support and it's a third party site like facebook then asking if anyone would like to help create a clone and you might be surprised about the support you might receive.
It sounds good, but are there any epidemiological studies to show that people after appendicitis die of infections earlier?
The data would be incomplete. What you really need is the death rate of people who have had their appendix removed and then don't have access to modern antibiotics. The appendix is not near as important today with access to modern medicine.
Not news.
The appendix has MANY subtle jobs rather than one obvious one, that's why you can do without it.
It's not just the appendix. A lot of other organs that are thought "unnecessary" have a use. The gallbladder stores bile to help in digestion. The tonsils are designed to get infected first so you build up an immunity and the rest of you doesn't get sick. There is very little in the way of useless organs in the human body. It's interesting that the appendix and tonsils were both probably more useful back before antibiotics and modern hygiene. Today it probably doesn't make much difference but I would guess that back before modern medicine, if you would have actually been able to remove someone's appendix and tonsils safely that you would see their longterm survival rate drop after they were removed.