Well that's fucking ridiculous. No wonder your country is so fucked up when needing a simple public service like getting to the hospital and receiving medical care during the journey actually costs you cash. Just pay for the things out of general taxation - you'll be better off in the long run.
I'm curious how other countries with free ambulances deal with people taking the ambulance to the doctor for non-emergencies. Here in the USA, many people who don't have to pay (medicaid/medicare) already abuse the ambulance system as a "free" taxi. While in college, it was common for people to go to the nurse for bandaids and/or a tylenol, again, because it was "free". That "free" tylenol likely cost more in labor costs than an entire bottle would at the store.
My mother can't use a universal remote that can control both the TV and cable box.
My mom can't either but her mother has no problem with facebook, etc... The only real difference is that my grandmother was forced to use it for a couple years at her job and got over that initial learning curve while my mom managed to squeak by without learning it and therefore never did.
Are you stupid or did you just choose to ignore my entire post? It was not that long.
I asked how the trait that makes the 1% resistant to eradication could possibly lead to asexual reproduction. You answered how could resistance to eradication evolve in the first place.
It's not that that specific added gene would cause the asexual reproduction, it's that you've just made it impossible for the "normal" mosquito population to reproduce. This leaves only the 1% who are resistant to this method. Very few eradication methods are 100% effective. The 1% that are left would survive by having some mutant genes that makes them resistant to this particular eradication method. What those mutant genes are would be anyone's guess. As Jurassic Park famously said: "Nature Finds A Way". Just like antibiotic resistant bacteria, the mosquitoes that survive would have some new traits. What those traits look like are anyone's guess and we likely wouldn't know until the original population was decimated. Asexual reproduction would be one way to avoid being killed. There might be other recessive traits that also might surface. The point is that it's hard to predict what would happen if you kill off one species of mosquito and replace it with a different unknown mutation. That being said, with the Zika virus being as dangerous as it sounds, it might be worth it to spin the roulette wheel and hope for something safer to fill that ecological niche but it's never as simple as it first sounds.
One possible scenario would be that the engineered male mates with a female that has a certain DNA variation that allows their offspring to live. Because the rest of the population is now failing to have viable offspring, the new generations coming from the female with the DNA variation are now in advantage. We cannot predict what impact this new variation would have in the environment. Add up the fact that a single mosquito generation lasts only around two weeks, just one year of deploying engineered mosquitoes would lead to a considerable time in terms of evolutionary changes.
Yes, this would be the most likely scenario. If we eliminated 99% of this particular species of mosquito, chances are that remaining 1% or a completely different species of mosquito would expand to fill this particular niche. If we are lucky, this new species would be less harmful that the one we just killed off. If we are unlucky, the trait that makes the 1% resistant to eradication also gives this new mosquito some even more obnoxious trait like the ability to asexually reproduce, swarm, and kill its host.
This. I do like technology, and I approve with the concept of genetically modifying organisms to solve various problems, but these things need to be done on a non commercial only basis, otherwise we ll soon have birds falling down from the skies because the 40 day trial of the modification expired and the government didnt have the money to pay Monsanto in time.
Although I would generally agree with you, our track record for introducing new species to fix a problem is dismally low. There are a few cases where we've been successful (salmon in the great lakes) but many more where the "solution" caused even more problems (any of the hundreds of invasive species introduced to fix a problem). I kindof like the idea of controlled experiments with built-in kill switches.
It's likely a violation of Twitter's terms of "don't share your password" but that doesn't make it illegal or criminal. It's stupid to give your password out but to my knowledge not illegal even if it's the password to your bank's website. You might even be considered an "unauthorized user" from twitter's perspective but by giving you their password, the end-user has made you the defacto authorized user of that account.
It's a cool use of 3D Printing; but couldn't just putting the victim's finger on the phone work?
If you would have read the article, it states that the body was too decayed. Another possibly scenario would be where the body hasn't been found yet and they find the phone in the victim's apartment, along side the road, etc... There are plenty of situations where you might have a prerecorded fingerprint but not a body.
Oh, and call me cynical but my guess is that one of the reasons it's being tried in this case is to set a precedence in a "safe" case so they can later use it against living people with a search warrant.
Why do you assume someone on UBI is sitting at home doing nothing. My guess is they will be doing things that will supplement their UBI, but they can be more selective. Your basically asking for a centrally planned economy vs a free market labor economy.
No, I'm asking for a safety net. Somewhere where you can go and work 10 hours to get some food. Some sort of day labourer gig of last resort for someone who can't find work elsewhere. A stopgap that allows someone to survive while they look for work. My comment was to someone talking about the life/death situation of being unemployed. It wouldn't be designed to support you long term. Society needs to figure out what exactly they want. The program we have now SNAP even has the word "supplemental" in it's name but I've read dozens of articles about how you can't feed yourself on the amount of money you get with SNAP. Social security was also designed to be supplemental not someone's sole source of retirement. That's actually one thing positive about the reemergence of the "gig" economy. It makes it easier for people to supplement their income with odd jobs like they used to 50 and 100 years ago. It's only in recent years (and even today only in certain countries) where steady employment is the norm. Even in many well to do countries, odd jobs are a still lot more common than they are in the USA today.
Who's talking about abolishing capitalism? It just shouldn't be a life-and-death situation.
But there are plenty of other likely better solutions than Universal Basic Income. The public works projects of the past are great examples. Why can't we do something like that today? Today most of the unemployed are unskilled but it's still possible. A simple proposal would be to have a place that anybody who shows up gets a job at half of minimum wage. The job might be picking up trash, planting a tree, or even sitting in a classroom learning a new skills. Surely we can find something useful for people to do after the robots take all the unskilled jobs. Even if it was just sitting in a room reading a book or watching a video for personal enrichment, it makes more sense to me to pay someone to advance their skills than to sit at home and continue to struggle.
OK. So when it's $2500 from a single person, that's not enough to be tempting as a bribe. But what about when it's $5,000,000 from a single organization who's taking "forced" contributions (labor union dues, for example) and using them in a bundle - that's not a bribe?
In other words, why is a limit set for one type of entity and a different limit for a different type of entity? Why is an individual limited to $2500 but an organization or corporation unlimited?
I agree completely. Currently the $2500 limit pretty much makes it so that the individual has no power which is exactly what they want. I would gladly support a law that said that $2500 limit also applied to corporations, unions, etc...
Why should there be a limit in the first place? What's the Constitutional groundwork that supports a limit in terms of personal donations towards politics?
Because it's a form of bribery. You have to have a limit and/or ban it completely otherwise someone with millions of dollars can essentially buy votes and the average person's vote becomes meaningless. It's the same reason that we have anonymous voting and it's illegal to buy votes. Buying votes and buying political influence although it can be argued is part of free speech undermines democracy if $1 equals 1 vote instead of 1 person = 1 vote.
Should unions or trade associations have the right to run advertisements, lobby, or push issues?
I think that cap should be $2500 per person period and if I donate $200 to a union, the NRA, AARP, etc... and 50% of that is used for political purposes then that $100 counts towards my $2500 limit. So pooling funds is fine but it still counts towards a person's yearly limit.
This was going on before political donations. As long as companies (or labor unions, or other organized groups) can promise nice, fat "consulting/board" positions to politicians after they retire, they will have power.
This would be easily handled with "conflict of issue" or "bribery" laws. It would be easy enough to make these sort of things illegal. The problem would be getting the political power to do it in the first place and enforcing it afterwards. Public shaming in theory should even work but as you can see from our current crop of candidates, the public doesn't seem to care if their candidate is morally corrupt and does illegal or unethical things as long as that candidate is perceived to be on their "side".
... are far too forgiving. seller of counterfeit meds should be force fed the counterfeit product until dead, or same number of doses sold consumed, whichever occurs first.
This wouldn't help in most cases. In many cases counterfeit meds are "harmless" because they are inert sugar pills. Not harmless to the person who actually needs the medication but harmless to someone who doesn't who takes them. The other categories are watered down meds, substituting for a completely different cheaper medicine that looks similar, or actual generic knockoffs likely at a lower quality standard. You could argue that they are all fraud but there is a huge difference between selling something completely different from what you claim and selling something that is circumventing copyrights and patents. The later category (actual generic knockoffs) still hurts companies but might actually benefit some consumers.
I have family members that sell on amazon and ebay. They say they can get almost double on amazon on many items. The main reason is that people trust the sellers on amazon more than the sellers on ebay. In this case, it's the exact same seller but amazon have managed to create an environment where even used items fetch a premium. If they screw it up and people start realizing that the same hucksters are on amazon (and they are) then people will start shopping elsewhere.
image the drive. Install windows 10 as update. If things work fine after this, image the drive. If things are screwed up install win 10 as new install at this point you should already have a key that the previous install created. If the computer is functional image the drive and restore the windows 7 from image. I have dual boot 7 and 10 on one of my computers.
Yeah, funny. There is a good chance that the average non-slashdot user isn't even going to know what "image the drive" means much less be able to do it. My aunt thought that the windows login was her "logging on to the internet". There are plenty of other people out there who can barely connect to wifi on a fully functional computer. These people are screwed if an update hoses their computer. Their only real option is to buy a new computer (which is what my mom and dad usually do if even something minor breaks). This is possibly acceptable when it's a hardware problem or virus but seems all the more ridiculous when it is a "software update" forced on you that hoses everything.
4 years is a long time, and considering that Windows 7 still has about 50% market share, Microsoft has some serious work to do to convince businesses and home users to switch to a service that does not offer significant advantages to Windows 7 users, and has lots of downsides. None of the features added to Windows 10 are of any interest to me at this point. Even Direct X 10 isn't a draw yet. I have 6 machines running windows 7 and none will be upgraded until Windows 10 offers me more control, rather than less. I don't want a service, I want a functioning OS. I am using Windows on computers, not phones, and I don't need it on phones. Microsoft has hundreds of millions of Windows 7 users to convince, and they are doing an exceptionally poor job of convincing them based on "features" (like forced updates).
It is going to be a tough sell to get the other half of Windows users to switch when the new, service based OS has so much baggage.
Not to mention that they are soon going to be expected to pay for something that was previously free. Yeah, good luck with that. I upgraded my windows 8 box to get the start menu back. Luckily it went ok. I also upgraded a windows 7 laptop I had. It took about 10 attempts before it finally completed successfully. My mom and my aunt's boxes both auto upgraded and both died a horrible death. My aunt's computer flashes every second as soon as she logs in and my mom's computer only shows a cursor after she logs in. Not sure what the real percentage is but in my small personal sample that is a 50% failure rate (75% failure rate if you include my windows 7 box that failed multiple times before being successful). I can't imagine it really makes 50% of the computers out there unusable but even if it's 10% that's a huge amount of dead computers and pissed customers. I worked on my aunt's computer for over an hour and tried several supposed "fixes" with no luck. My guess with my aunt's computer is that it is the windows manager that is dying and restarting over and over.
When I did the math a while back, I believe I calculated that the average car lost about 20% (of that year's current value) every year. It didn't really matter whether it was new or used. A $30k new car and a $30k used car both lost about the same $6k in a year and it continued that way. The advantage of owning a 3k car vs a 30k car isn't that it doesn't lose value but that because the car is worth considerably less, the actual dollar amount of lost value is also less. 20% of 3k is only 600 dollars vs 6k for 20% of a 30k car or 12k for 20% of a car currently worth 60k.
Being in space for years, with extreme temperature variations, vacuum, and radiation, isn't sufficient to guarantee sterility? I know bacterial spores can be pretty tough, but THAT tough?
Unlike morons on Earth who are happy to fuck with our air, water, and food supply for profit, NASA understands that you can't fuck this up even once, and it simply isn't worth the chance...
Once even a single anything gets down there, you're screwed and can never remove it...
If a spaceship that has been in space for years can transport life from earth to jupiter then in all likelyhood it has already happened from the many asteroids that have hit earth in the past and blasted rocks into space.
And not all dinosaur species died out. The avian dinosaurs survived. So we have most mammal lines dying out, and most dinosaur lines dying out. In short: "giant meteor killed most, but not all, species on Earth"
Avian dinosaurs and mammals have several things in common. They both have some form of covering (fur/feathers), they both have a lot of smaller species, they both have a lot of omnivorous species, and most importantly all mammals and many avian species can regulate their own internal body heat. My guess is that the fur/feathers combined with being warm blooded is what gave mammals/avians the biggest lead. With wildly fluctuating temperatures, being able to self-regulate would be a major advantage. I don't think the immediate heat is the problem. The problem is that if you survive that then the dust has now blocked out the sun and temperatures drop for the next several years. Dinosaurs had evolved for a tropical environment and would have had no way to deal with several years of cold weather. This also explains why most of the reptiles that did survive are aquatic. Water would have helped the aquatic species regulate their body temperatures better.
No, only if you're following more people than you can possibly think about.
Please, for the love of all things holy, show me _everything_ my friends post. Let me filter out which of them I don't want to see. Hell, I don't even mind if you stick an *obvious* advert in the middle of the damn list, just give it me _ALL_.
Exactly. Why try to guess? Why not ask the user? I want to see everything person A posts, nothing person B posts, and only the most interesting things from person C's post. Oh, and give it to me in chronological order please. And while I'm making demands, what about allowing me to click on posts that I've seen so that I only see new posts. A message "no new posts" would be great to see. I wouldn't even mind an ad or two under it.
That is extremely narcissistic and the argument is only valid if you always go for the tree. You are in control of the vehicle. The pedestrian does not share that responsibility. It is also you who put the car in a situation where you have to choose between hitting the pedestrian and the tree. There is no moral justification for not going for the tree in that case.
What about on a limited access highway where there is a reasonable expectation that people aren't suppose to be? What about in the situation where the person intentionally jumps out in front of traffic in an attempt to commit suicide?
The issue I have with this question is that I doubt they are going to be programming the car to count the number of passengers in the car, the number of pedestrians or even distinguishing between a person and a deer. To make an accurate crash prediction you would likely want to even know the diameter of the tree and what is behind the tree. The goal of driverless cars is to avoid most crashes in the first place. The idea that someone would be adding all this moralistic code for rare never really happens events is a bit far fetched. In almost all cases, the goal of the car is to avoid collision and if that is not possible to minimize the speed of impact. After that, it becomes very complex because you have to look at what you're impacting and how much give it has. A deer/person has more give that a cement pillar and would actually be a safer option. Also, in many cases, staying on the road and hitting the deer/person would be safer than swerving and rolling down an embankment even if you technically didn't hit anything. It would be interesting to know though if they are coding for doing different behaviors based on whether the unknown obstacle on the road is a dog, a deer, or a person because many people would make different calculations depending on whether the animal in the road is human or not.
Technically (legally) you are wrong. Downloading a movie requires making a copy of it, one which the hosting site is not authorized to allow.
That could easily be said for something saved to your harddrive but you would have a much harder case making that for something streamed from youtube. Also, in youtube's case, google would likely have to give them your ip address and google is the more guilty of the two parties.
He torrented the movie...he's getting in trouble for uploading. Downloading is not a crime.
Exactly. As far as I know there is still nothing illegal about downloading or watching pirated content. If I find a pirated movie on youtube (of which there are ton, btw) or any other random website, then it's perfectly legal for me to watch it. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but that is the way that I understand the current copyright laws in the USA. I'm not even sure possession of downloaded movies is illegal as long as you don't try to give/sell them to someone else.
Now you're getting into semantics. In industry, a computerized machine that folds clothes is indeed an "industrial robot".
But there isn't a strict cutoff. What if it goes around the house, collects the "dirty" clothes, washes them, folds them, and then puts them back into the correct drawer? This ia presumed to require a great degree of "intelligence" to know which drawer to put them in, etc... What if it was only some subset of this? Where is the cutoff between "this is an industrial robot because it only sorts, washes, folds, and sticks in a cubby" vs "this is now an entity because it also goes room to room putting them in the correct drawer"? What if it was 2 robots, one to put them in a cubby and one that takes them from the cubby to the correct drawer? Each discreet task in itself isn't a completely autonomous robot but if you string enough tasks together and you start to have a robot that acts very much like a human.
Slashdot Mirror
Well that's fucking ridiculous. No wonder your country is so fucked up when needing a simple public service like getting to the hospital and receiving medical care during the journey actually costs you cash. Just pay for the things out of general taxation - you'll be better off in the long run.
I'm curious how other countries with free ambulances deal with people taking the ambulance to the doctor for non-emergencies. Here in the USA, many people who don't have to pay (medicaid/medicare) already abuse the ambulance system as a "free" taxi. While in college, it was common for people to go to the nurse for bandaids and/or a tylenol, again, because it was "free". That "free" tylenol likely cost more in labor costs than an entire bottle would at the store.
My mother can't use a universal remote that can control both the TV and cable box.
My mom can't either but her mother has no problem with facebook, etc... The only real difference is that my grandmother was forced to use it for a couple years at her job and got over that initial learning curve while my mom managed to squeak by without learning it and therefore never did.
Are you stupid or did you just choose to ignore my entire post? It was not that long.
I asked how the trait that makes the 1% resistant to eradication could possibly lead to asexual reproduction. You answered how could resistance to eradication evolve in the first place.
It's not that that specific added gene would cause the asexual reproduction, it's that you've just made it impossible for the "normal" mosquito population to reproduce. This leaves only the 1% who are resistant to this method. Very few eradication methods are 100% effective. The 1% that are left would survive by having some mutant genes that makes them resistant to this particular eradication method. What those mutant genes are would be anyone's guess. As Jurassic Park famously said: "Nature Finds A Way". Just like antibiotic resistant bacteria, the mosquitoes that survive would have some new traits. What those traits look like are anyone's guess and we likely wouldn't know until the original population was decimated. Asexual reproduction would be one way to avoid being killed. There might be other recessive traits that also might surface. The point is that it's hard to predict what would happen if you kill off one species of mosquito and replace it with a different unknown mutation. That being said, with the Zika virus being as dangerous as it sounds, it might be worth it to spin the roulette wheel and hope for something safer to fill that ecological niche but it's never as simple as it first sounds.
Not so limited.
One possible scenario would be that the engineered male mates with a female that has a certain DNA variation that allows their offspring to live. Because the rest of the population is now failing to have viable offspring, the new generations coming from the female with the DNA variation are now in advantage. We cannot predict what impact this new variation would have in the environment. Add up the fact that a single mosquito generation lasts only around two weeks, just one year of deploying engineered mosquitoes would lead to a considerable time in terms of evolutionary changes.
Yes, this would be the most likely scenario. If we eliminated 99% of this particular species of mosquito, chances are that remaining 1% or a completely different species of mosquito would expand to fill this particular niche. If we are lucky, this new species would be less harmful that the one we just killed off. If we are unlucky, the trait that makes the 1% resistant to eradication also gives this new mosquito some even more obnoxious trait like the ability to asexually reproduce, swarm, and kill its host.
This. I do like technology, and I approve with the concept of genetically modifying organisms to solve various problems, but these things need to be done on a non commercial only basis, otherwise we ll soon have birds falling down from the skies because the 40 day trial of the modification expired and the government didnt have the money to pay Monsanto in time.
Although I would generally agree with you, our track record for introducing new species to fix a problem is dismally low. There are a few cases where we've been successful (salmon in the great lakes) but many more where the "solution" caused even more problems (any of the hundreds of invasive species introduced to fix a problem). I kindof like the idea of controlled experiments with built-in kill switches.
Twitter did not consent.
It's likely a violation of Twitter's terms of "don't share your password" but that doesn't make it illegal or criminal.
It's stupid to give your password out but to my knowledge not illegal even if it's the password to your bank's website.
You might even be considered an "unauthorized user" from twitter's perspective but by giving you their password,
the end-user has made you the defacto authorized user of that account.
It's a cool use of 3D Printing; but couldn't just putting the victim's finger on the phone work?
If you would have read the article, it states that the body was too decayed. Another possibly scenario would be where the body hasn't been found yet and they find the phone in the victim's apartment, along side the road, etc... There are plenty of situations where you might have a prerecorded fingerprint but not a body.
Oh, and call me cynical but my guess is that one of the reasons it's being tried in this case is to set a precedence in a "safe" case so they can later use it against living people with a search warrant.
Why do you assume someone on UBI is sitting at home doing nothing. My guess is they will be doing things that will supplement their UBI, but they can be more selective. Your basically asking for a centrally planned economy vs a free market labor economy.
No, I'm asking for a safety net. Somewhere where you can go and work 10 hours to get some food. Some sort of day labourer gig of last resort for someone who can't find work elsewhere. A stopgap that allows someone to survive while they look for work. My comment was to someone talking about the life/death situation of being unemployed. It wouldn't be designed to support you long term. Society needs to figure out what exactly they want. The program we have now SNAP even has the word "supplemental" in it's name but I've read dozens of articles about how you can't feed yourself on the amount of money you get with SNAP. Social security was also designed to be supplemental not someone's sole source of retirement. That's actually one thing positive about the reemergence of the "gig" economy. It makes it easier for people to supplement their income with odd jobs like they used to 50 and 100 years ago. It's only in recent years (and even today only in certain countries) where steady employment is the norm. Even in many well to do countries, odd jobs are a still lot more common than they are in the USA today.
Who's talking about abolishing capitalism? It just shouldn't be a life-and-death situation.
But there are plenty of other likely better solutions than Universal Basic Income. The public works projects of the past are great examples. Why can't we do something like that today? Today most of the unemployed are unskilled but it's still possible. A simple proposal would be to have a place that anybody who shows up gets a job at half of minimum wage. The job might be picking up trash, planting a tree, or even sitting in a classroom learning a new skills. Surely we can find something useful for people to do after the robots take all the unskilled jobs. Even if it was just sitting in a room reading a book or watching a video for personal enrichment, it makes more sense to me to pay someone to advance their skills than to sit at home and continue to struggle.
OK. So when it's $2500 from a single person, that's not enough to be tempting as a bribe. But what about when it's $5,000,000 from a single organization who's taking "forced" contributions (labor union dues, for example) and using them in a bundle - that's not a bribe?
In other words, why is a limit set for one type of entity and a different limit for a different type of entity? Why is an individual limited to $2500 but an organization or corporation unlimited?
I agree completely. Currently the $2500 limit pretty much makes it so that the individual has no power which is exactly what they want. I would gladly support a law that said that $2500 limit also applied to corporations, unions, etc...
Why should there be a limit in the first place? What's the Constitutional groundwork that supports a limit in terms of personal donations towards politics?
Because it's a form of bribery. You have to have a limit and/or ban it completely otherwise someone with millions of dollars can essentially buy votes and the average person's vote becomes meaningless. It's the same reason that we have anonymous voting and it's illegal to buy votes. Buying votes and buying political influence although it can be argued is part of free speech undermines democracy if $1 equals 1 vote instead of 1 person = 1 vote.
Should unions or trade associations have the right to run advertisements, lobby, or push issues?
I think that cap should be $2500 per person period and if I donate $200 to a union, the NRA, AARP, etc... and 50% of that is used for political purposes then that $100 counts towards my $2500 limit. So pooling funds is fine but it still counts towards a person's yearly limit.
This was going on before political donations. As long as companies (or labor unions, or other organized groups) can promise nice, fat "consulting/board" positions to politicians after they retire, they will have power.
This would be easily handled with "conflict of issue" or "bribery" laws. It would be easy enough to make these sort of things illegal. The problem would be getting the political power to do it in the first place and enforcing it afterwards. Public shaming in theory should even work but as you can see from our current crop of candidates, the public doesn't seem to care if their candidate is morally corrupt and does illegal or unethical things as long as that candidate is perceived to be on their "side".
Counterfeit Meds should be life in prison.
... are far too forgiving. seller of counterfeit meds should be force fed the counterfeit product until dead, or same number of doses sold consumed, whichever occurs first.
This wouldn't help in most cases. In many cases counterfeit meds are "harmless" because they are inert sugar pills. Not harmless to the person who actually needs the medication but harmless to someone who doesn't who takes them. The other categories are watered down meds, substituting for a completely different cheaper medicine that looks similar, or actual generic knockoffs likely at a lower quality standard.
You could argue that they are all fraud but there is a huge difference between selling something completely different from what you claim and selling something that is circumventing copyrights and patents. The later category (actual generic knockoffs) still hurts companies but might actually benefit some consumers.
I have family members that sell on amazon and ebay. They say they can get almost double on amazon on many items. The main reason is that people trust the sellers on amazon more than the sellers on ebay. In this case, it's the exact same seller but amazon have managed to create an environment where even used items fetch a premium. If they screw it up and people start realizing that the same hucksters are on amazon (and they are) then people will start shopping elsewhere.
image the drive. Install windows 10 as update. If things work fine after this, image the drive. If things are screwed up install win 10 as new install at this point you should already have a key that the previous install created. If the computer is functional image the drive and restore the windows 7 from image. I have dual boot 7 and 10 on one of my computers.
Yeah, funny. There is a good chance that the average non-slashdot user isn't even going to know what "image the drive" means much less be able to do it.
My aunt thought that the windows login was her "logging on to the internet". There are plenty of other people out there who can barely connect to wifi on a fully functional computer. These people are screwed if an update hoses their computer. Their only real option is to buy a new computer (which is what my mom and dad usually do if even something minor breaks). This is possibly acceptable when it's a hardware problem or virus but seems all the more ridiculous when it is a "software update" forced on you that hoses everything.
4 years is a long time, and considering that Windows 7 still has about 50% market share, Microsoft has some serious work to do to convince businesses and home users to switch to a service that does not offer significant advantages to Windows 7 users, and has lots of downsides. None of the features added to Windows 10 are of any interest to me at this point. Even Direct X 10 isn't a draw yet. I have 6 machines running windows 7 and none will be upgraded until Windows 10 offers me more control, rather than less. I don't want a service, I want a functioning OS. I am using Windows on computers, not phones, and I don't need it on phones. Microsoft has hundreds of millions of Windows 7 users to convince, and they are doing an exceptionally poor job of convincing them based on "features" (like forced updates).
It is going to be a tough sell to get the other half of Windows users to switch when the new, service based OS has so much baggage.
Not to mention that they are soon going to be expected to pay for something that was previously free. Yeah, good luck with that.
I upgraded my windows 8 box to get the start menu back. Luckily it went ok. I also upgraded a windows 7 laptop I had. It took about 10 attempts before it finally completed successfully. My mom and my aunt's boxes both auto upgraded and both died a horrible death. My aunt's computer flashes every second as soon as she logs in and my mom's computer only shows a cursor after she logs in. Not sure what the real percentage is but in my small personal sample that is a 50% failure rate (75% failure rate if you include my windows 7 box that failed multiple times before being successful). I can't imagine it really makes 50% of the computers out there unusable but even if it's 10% that's a huge amount of dead computers and pissed customers. I worked on my aunt's computer for over an hour and tried several supposed "fixes" with no luck. My guess with my aunt's computer is that it is the windows manager that is dying and restarting over and over.
When I did the math a while back, I believe I calculated that the average car lost about 20% (of that year's current value) every year. It didn't really matter whether it was new or used. A $30k new car and a $30k used car both lost about the same $6k in a year and it continued that way. The advantage of owning a 3k car vs a 30k car isn't that it doesn't lose value but that because the car is worth considerably less, the actual dollar amount of lost value is also less. 20% of 3k is only 600 dollars vs 6k for 20% of a 30k car or 12k for 20% of a car currently worth 60k.
Being in space for years, with extreme temperature variations, vacuum, and radiation, isn't sufficient to guarantee sterility? I know bacterial spores can be pretty tough, but THAT tough?
Unlike morons on Earth who are happy to fuck with our air, water, and food supply for profit, NASA understands that you can't fuck this up even once, and it simply isn't worth the chance...
Once even a single anything gets down there, you're screwed and can never remove it...
If a spaceship that has been in space for years can transport life from earth to jupiter then in all likelyhood it has already happened from the many asteroids that have hit earth in the past and blasted rocks into space.
And not all dinosaur species died out. The avian dinosaurs survived. So we have most mammal lines dying out, and most dinosaur lines dying out. In short: "giant meteor killed most, but not all, species on Earth"
Avian dinosaurs and mammals have several things in common. They both have some form of covering (fur/feathers), they both have a lot of smaller species, they both have a lot of omnivorous species, and most importantly all mammals and many avian species can regulate their own internal body heat. My guess is that the fur/feathers combined with being warm blooded is what gave mammals/avians the biggest lead. With wildly fluctuating temperatures, being able to self-regulate would be a major advantage. I don't think the immediate heat is the problem. The problem is that if you survive that then the dust has now blocked out the sun and temperatures drop for the next several years. Dinosaurs had evolved for a tropical environment and would have had no way to deal with several years of cold weather. This also explains why most of the reptiles that did survive are aquatic. Water would have helped the aquatic species regulate their body temperatures better.
No, only if you're following more people than you can possibly think about.
Please, for the love of all things holy, show me _everything_ my friends post. Let me filter out which of them I don't want to see. Hell, I don't even mind if you stick an *obvious* advert in the middle of the damn list, just give it me _ALL_.
Exactly. Why try to guess? Why not ask the user? I want to see everything person A posts, nothing person B posts, and only the most interesting things from person C's post. Oh, and give it to me in chronological order please. And while I'm making demands, what about allowing me to click on posts that I've seen so that I only see new posts. A message "no new posts" would be great to see. I wouldn't even mind an ad or two under it.
That is extremely narcissistic and the argument is only valid if you always go for the tree.
You are in control of the vehicle. The pedestrian does not share that responsibility.
It is also you who put the car in a situation where you have to choose between hitting the pedestrian and the tree.
There is no moral justification for not going for the tree in that case.
What about on a limited access highway where there is a reasonable expectation that people aren't suppose to be?
What about in the situation where the person intentionally jumps out in front of traffic in an attempt to commit suicide?
The issue I have with this question is that I doubt they are going to be programming the car to count the number of passengers in the car, the number of pedestrians or even distinguishing between a person and a deer. To make an accurate crash prediction you would likely want to even know the diameter of the tree and what is behind the tree. The goal of driverless cars is to avoid most crashes in the first place. The idea that someone would be adding all this moralistic code for rare never really happens events is a bit far fetched. In almost all cases, the goal of the car is to avoid collision and if that is not possible to minimize the speed of impact. After that, it becomes very complex because you have to look at what you're impacting and how much give it has. A deer/person has more give that a cement pillar and would actually be a safer option. Also, in many cases, staying on the road and hitting the deer/person would be safer than swerving and rolling down an embankment even if you technically didn't hit anything. It would be interesting to know though if they are coding for doing different behaviors based on whether the unknown obstacle on the road is a dog, a deer, or a person because many people would make different calculations depending on whether the animal in the road is human or not.
Technically (legally) you are wrong. Downloading a movie requires making a copy of it, one which the hosting site is not authorized to allow.
That could easily be said for something saved to your harddrive but you would have a much harder case making that for something streamed from youtube. Also, in youtube's case, google would likely have to give them your ip address and google is the more guilty of the two parties.
He torrented the movie...he's getting in trouble for uploading. Downloading is not a crime.
Exactly. As far as I know there is still nothing illegal about downloading or watching pirated content. If I find a pirated movie on youtube (of which there are ton, btw) or any other random website, then it's perfectly legal for me to watch it. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but that is the way that I understand the current copyright laws in the USA. I'm not even sure possession of downloaded movies is illegal as long as you don't try to give/sell them to someone else.
Now you're getting into semantics. In industry, a computerized machine that folds clothes is indeed an "industrial robot".
But there isn't a strict cutoff. What if it goes around the house, collects the "dirty" clothes, washes them, folds them, and then puts them back into the correct drawer? This ia presumed to require a great degree of "intelligence" to know which drawer to put them in, etc... What if it was only some subset of this? Where is the cutoff between "this is an industrial robot because it only sorts, washes, folds, and sticks in a cubby" vs "this is now an entity because it also goes room to room putting them in the correct drawer"? What if it was 2 robots, one to put them in a cubby and one that takes them from the cubby to the correct drawer? Each discreet task in itself isn't a completely autonomous robot but if you string enough tasks together and you start to have a robot that acts very much like a human.