* inexpensive -- in Massachusetts, it's $25 for an ID. At the minimum wage of $7.25 that's nearly 3 and a half hours of work. I don't know what the cost of an ID is in
In order to sidestep this objection, most states have addressed this problem by allowing people without drivers license to get a FREE non-driver photo ID for voting. This seems like a simple and easy way to make this a non-issue.
Yes, there is some inconvenience to go get an ID but it probably takes longer to stand in line to vote than it does to stand in line to get an ID. Yes, the republicans might have ulterior motives for wanting stricter voter ID laws but so do the democrats for not wanting them. To anyone impartial VOTER ID laws just make sense and the democrats should be supportive of them too even if it does mean they get a few less votes.
*On a side note, background checks for gun ownerships also "just make sense" and likewise the republicans should allow it to happen. Ideally someone should wrap the background check laws and voter id laws into the same bill and pass some sense in washington. It's funny how they are almost exactly the same thing with opposing views on both sides just because of politics.
Google is doing what a good publisher should do, sharing public domain work and collecting a small revenue to pay for its trouble, "eporue" on the other hand is a parasite, seeing rent on something he didn't create, like some feudal baron. Adam Smith and Karl Marx agree on one thing and one thing only, rent seeking is inherently bad, so whether you are a conservative or a socialist you should join together and pillory this leech.
Yes, eporue might be rent-seeking but that doesn't mean that's a bad thing. If he is providing a copy of a video that is unavailable on youtube then he is providing a service and I have no problem with him getting a little revenue from it. One problem with streaming media is the long tail and most stuff in the public domain has very little value and therefore very little incentive for someone to upload it. I have no problem with a few rent-seekers uploading otherwise unavailable videos to youtube so that people have easier access to them. It sure beats all the millions of home videos and cat videos that no-one ever searches for. At least these obscure videos are videos other people might actually be interested in and have no other way of accessing. I know there have been plenty of videos that I've wanted to find that are just not available by any means online but I know someone somewhere has it sitting in their closet and hopefully someday they might upload it so that it isn't lost forever and can be once again enjoyed by other people.
The obvious first market for ebooks has been anything you read sequentially, like novels.
Ebooks are great for new releases as they are generally a shade cheaper than the new hardbacks. E-books (and movie) prices are still wacky on older titles. On older titles, new paperbacks are usually cheaper than the ebooks and used books are considerably cheaper. Movies are even worse, sometimes I can buy the physical movie cheaper than I can rent the digital one. There are also no bargain bins for ebooks or resale value. I can buy a used book on amazon for $4, read it, and turn around and sell it for the same price I paid for it.
Then again it might be to much to expect it to be able to do a full lawn every 3 days.
Surely it cold do a full lawn in under 24 hours. The typical "full lawn" generally only takes a human a couple hours. I can't imagine it taking longer than 3 days.
If they take more than a couple hours, the problem I see is that you have a very expensive, very dangerous piece of equipment operating unattended in your yard. To get these to be commonplace, they need some way of making them safe, making them reasonably priced, and preventing theft.
To be fair, anyone with less than that much in revenue isn't really worth suing in a copyright suit anyway.
Tell that to the RIAA. If Oracle claims copyright of Java, it would be fairly simple for them to start charging licensing fees. If they went after small shops, they could easily ask for $5k an executable and most shops would have to just pay it as it would cost more to fight it.
But I digress, Android is an even worse clusterfuck by itself because nobody wants to develop for it, and only develop content for it because some bigwig in their company says so.
People look at iPhones and iPads and then get bait&switched by AT&T/Verizon/Rogers/Bell/etc being told that these Android devices are exactly the same device and experience, but cheaper. Then they get a substandard experience and believe that all mobile devices are a shitty experience.
I've have iphones, ipads, and android devices. I much prefer the android devices. Despite apple's reputation of "just working", I have found that for me, the androids "just work". They android devices have a better user experience, have more configuration options, have less "gotchas" and just are all around more pleasant and easier to work with not to mention that google is considerably better than siri as are google maps.
Ditto for developing. I much prefer developing android apps vs iphone apps. The only downsize with android is having to pay attention to different resolutions for different devices. This is a minor inconvenience for a developer but gives the end-user a lot more choices on what type of phone they want so I think it's worth it. Have you actually owned and used both an iphone and multiple android devices as your primary device for any length of time? Yes, there are some crappy android phones out there but the top of the line android phones are every bit as good as the iphones if not better. I'm currently using the iphone 6 as my primary phone but will probably switch back to the android when it's time for a new phone as I much prefer the android. I have a friend who used iphones 4-6 and recently switched to android as well and doesn't plan on going back.
I hate to say this but, Siri is probably smarter than your kids are.
My 64 year old father uses Siri and has no issues. At first it had a problem understanding him, but now she responds with useful results.
Yes, siri has more knowledge than my kids and yes, it can give correct responses but I find that it's success rate is closer to 60% while google's is closer to 90%. Simple requests like "what time does store X close" many times it responds back that it doesn't know while somehow google does know. Same with navigation requests, it many times can't find the location while google has no problem understanding my request. So, yes, siri does give answers but once you get used to google's much better answers it is a poor substitute. Even google's voice recognition seems to be better where siri seems to get the words wrong more often than google on the same phone.
I want Google Now on Windows! Cortana is okay, but Google Now integrates with my email and my calendar and everything JUST WORKS.
I want google now on my iphone. I wish I could get my iphone to use google and google maps as the default. Even my kids realize how bad siri is. When I ask siri for something even if it's just for directions, they usually say "ask google, don't ask siri, siri is stupid"
Yes, I know that wind generators have a maximum rated speed but there is no reason that you can't design them for faster wind speeds. The problem only comes with highly variable wind speeds as something that works well in 100mph winds will probably have a high cut-in speed and won't activate at lower speeds. The solution is not to not use wind but rather to design a system that is fairly efficient in variable conditions. This can easily be done with diversification whether that is different wind generators with differing range of cut-in and cut-out speeds or even adding in some solar panels or other power sources to help even out the load. Steady load power plants like nuclear have a similar problem where they can't change to meet peak demand and this is easily solved with on-demand natural gas generators. People need to stop trying to find a one size fits all approach to power. The best power grid will be one where there are potentially dozen of power sources working in tandem. Yes, there might still be coal or natural gas plants for peak demand or cloudy days but if that's the only time they are used then our usage of fossil fuels has still been reduced dramatically.
and windmills have a limit to what conditions they can work in, when the wind is too strong they have to shut down...
I don't believe this. A lot of windmills are designed for a narrow operating range and have to shut down when wind is stronger than this but there is no reason that you couldn't continue to run wind mills designed to run in high speed winds or work on designing windmills that work in a larger range of wind speeds.
There is plenty of evidence to contradict TFA's claim, but like you point out I see no evidence premiums will or would drop. Insurance companies are about making money. If they can charge the rate, they will charge the rate. If you want to fix insurance, go back to Insurance companies being Non-Profit organizations.
You make it sound like insurance companies operate in a vacuum. If an autonomous car is safer and rates don't go down then someone new will come along and undercut the existing players. More importantly, if liability gets shifted to the car manufacturers then if rates are not what they consider reasonable then it's very possible for them to just self-insure their entire fleet and cut out the insurance companies completely.
One flaw - in modern society we look at efficiency in $ terms.
Cost of purchase and storage vs cost of logistics and transport. Most things will be cheaper to purchase and store.
Self driving cars could change this equation. A $20k toilet cleaning robot isn't cost effective today but if it could arrive on schedule, do it's job, and move on to the next house, it might be. Even something like a shopvac or ladder, if you could call it, and it could arrive via a self-driving pod or drone 15 minutes later and it was all automated, the logistics and transportation costs would be negligible. Most of the logistics and transport costs are because it's currently done by humans.
Yes, there are things that people use daily (like their phones) or a lot of people use at the same time (like the lawnmower or even turkey roasters) but there is a ton of stuff in a typical house that is not used regularly. I have a ladder that I use once a year. I would gladly give it to an organization to store for me if I could borrow it when I needed it. Kindof like fractional reserve banking, if 40 people all gave an organization their ladders, they could sell off half of them and there would still always be plenty to go around.
But you're also making the case for how absurd it is that people use additional energy (compounded over several million vehicles I bet it ads up) in the form of gasoline to always carry around stuff they only sometimes need.
The whole system is designed for people having stuff "they only sometimes need". Most commuters only need a single seat and a 20 mile range but they keep the 4 seat SUV with a gasoline engine so they can take the family to the lake once a month. It's not just cars. Most people have a "guest bedroom" and additional extra rooms in their house that are only used occasionally. It gets even worse than that, how often does someone actually use the ladder, extension cord, etc... that's hanging in their garage. I doubt that in an average city that more than 1% of ladders are being actively used at any one time. The "parent with extra crap" stuff is actually easy to solve. Just get a large duffle bag with all the stuff and throw it in the trunk when the car shows up but there is a ton of "extra capacity" everywhere in modern life. I would venture to guess that if we could efficiently distribute items only when needed that we could reduce our consumption of things like shopvacs, ladders, ext cords, by 90+% because a vast majority of the stuff in the average house is not used on a daily basis and some of it sits and rots for months between uses.
The pundits have been predicting such a scenario since sometime in the early 1980s. To date, it hasn't come to pass, and I'm pretty confident in saying that your vision is right up there with flying cars.
Sure, it has come to pass. Everybody has a web presence without the need to personally hire a programmer. Everyone can compile graphs and charts of their data and advanced analytics reporting without the need of a programmer. No, programmers haven't gone away and someone still needs to write the programs but many of the tasks that once required a programmer now can be done via a service without a programmer.
He posts a point like "intended target must stay the same" or and then gives more support for the opposing side. I could easy take every one of his points and argue the exact opposite probably more effectively than him. Most of the cyber attacks today seem to be undirected from rogue disconnected parties with undefined or constantly changing goals and no way to achieve any sort of victory unless victory is defined as "causing chaos".
That's quite a long list and I have NO interest in memorizing all that.
Shortcut keys are for power users and aren't really meant to be memorized directly. I prefer nice menus but I tend to go look up the shortcut keys or try to create a macro when I notice that I keep doing the same thing over and over again. If you want to know how useful shortcut keys can be, try playing StarCraft 1 with someone who uses shortcut keys. They will beat you every time if you're just using the mouse.
Right now, it makes little sense to talk about the most likely candidates. Nobody has won a primary or a caucus. A lot of things can change between now and then.
I agree "past performance doesn't mean future results" but I guess I'm a little cynical as it seems like the dominate candidates always seem to be just more of the same. Candidates with fresh ideas are always labelled as too extreme and pushed to the fringe while the "more of the same" candidates sometime pay lip service to a few of the fresh ideas of the other candidates just so they can still win while changing nothing.
Web pages (the kind you're talking about, anyway) do not employ logic. They do not employ any kind of procedural operations. They do not employ the concept of several / many / hundreds of moving parts.
That was kindof my point. When the first cars came out, you had to be a mechanic and be able to troubleshoot car problems to drive one because they would break down every few miles. When the first home computers came out you needed to know how to troubleshoot circuits to be able to use them.
The general population does seem to have problems with complex logic problems. There are some intermediate programs like ifttt.com that seem to work ok for the general population but I consider ifttt still for power users and basic useful stuff will continue to be simplified until many of the things done by programmers today can be done by someone who doesn't understand complex logic.
Swift isn't going to make it so "anybody can write apps." That is something that's been tried for decades, with things like drag-and-drop programming. SQL was originally intended for non-programmers. It doesn't work, because the difficulty of programming isn't the syntax. The difficulty of programming is logic.
These attempts seem to all lead down a common path. Take webpages: 1) only hard core programmers can do it. 2) It gets a little easier with geocities and wysiwyg editors. 3) It gets a little easier with myspace and then even easier with facebook. Now everyone has some sort of webpage which requires no programming at all.
This same progression happened with the first cars, the first computers, the first cameras, etc... So, no I don't think everyone is going to become a programmer but everyone will soon be doing stuff with their devices that previously required a programmer to do.
The real smoking gun is "how will we ever know that they are correct?" Assuming they are turned onto the problems they excel at (NP problems), it may be impossible to verify their answers are correct without a true breakthrough in mathematics.
To use the example you were replying to, if it can get a better answer to the "travelling salesman" problem faster than a conventional computer then it would still be very useful even if we can't prove that it's the optimal solution. Neural nets are in a similar state today and are quite useful even if we don't know exactly how the individual weights get the correct solution and even if the answers aren't perfect.
The problem I see with quantum computers is that it seems to be all smoke and mirrors. I don't understand what they are even trying to accomplish. Even theoretically, how is a quantum computer suppose to be better at solving problems than a conventional computer? Is it because it's in parallel? Well, we have GPUs which are pretty good at that already. Is it just because it is smaller? What exactly does quantum computing bring to the table that we don't already have?
Once people with an actual clue get into power, there's going to be several high level trials, which will include ex-presidents, NSA personnel, CIA personnel, FBI Personnel, let's face it, if it's a government alphabet agency, they're probably in on it. So you'll have plenty of company standing up against that wall.
Enjoy your reprieve while it lasts. The soon to be reorganized Government of the people, by the people and for the people (and no, corporations aren't people) will set things to right, and will welcome Snowden back to U.S. as the hero he is.
What fantasy world are you living in? The two most likely candidates for the next president are Bush or Clinton, neither of which are going to change anything. Of the 3, Obama is probably the most likely to do something and he has opted not to. Pretty much no-one "with an actual clue" has any chance of getting close to the white house. It would take citizens who care and aren't being pacified with bread and circus (reality tv, talking heads, etc) to do any type of reorganization. Even an armed rebellion would get nowhere as anyone with any resources is comfortable enough to not want to risk their lives. The revolutionary war happened because both the poor and the well off were hurting. George Washington was one of the richest men in the USA. Even then, only about 20% of the population participated on either side and they literally couldn't buy themselves shoes. It would take a major drop in standard of living in the USA before anything like that would ever happen here. People are a lot more risk averse and much less likely to want to leave their comfort zone today.
This is an absolutely inane idea for several reasons: a) They already exist; you can't defend against a sea-skimming missile or SRBMs without an autonomous system, People are just too slow.
The summary specifically mentions offensive not defensive.
I use the rings sold here to generate my passwords, there are cards and keychains too. Simple system and no need to rely on cloud storage or worry about having a wallet hacked.
How do you deal with site's arbitrary unstated rules? I've ran into many sites that enforce mutually exclusive rules (must contain a symbol, can't contain a symbol, etc..) which they only tell you when you create the password not when you later try to log in so you're left to try to guess which arbitrary rule the site you're currently trying to log in had.
Slashdot Mirror
* inexpensive -- in Massachusetts, it's $25 for an ID. At the minimum wage of $7.25 that's nearly 3 and a half hours of work. I don't know what the cost of an ID is in
In order to sidestep this objection, most states have addressed this problem by allowing people without drivers license to get a FREE non-driver photo ID for voting.
This seems like a simple and easy way to make this a non-issue.
Yes, there is some inconvenience to go get an ID but it probably takes longer to stand in line to vote than it does to stand in line to get an ID. Yes, the republicans might have ulterior motives for wanting stricter voter ID laws but so do the democrats for not wanting them. To anyone impartial VOTER ID laws just make sense and the democrats should be supportive of them too even if it does mean they get a few less votes.
*On a side note, background checks for gun ownerships also "just make sense" and likewise the republicans should allow it to happen. Ideally someone should wrap the background check laws and voter id laws into the same bill and pass some sense in washington. It's funny how they are almost exactly the same thing with opposing views on both sides just because of politics.
Google is doing what a good publisher should do, sharing public domain work and collecting a small revenue to pay for its trouble, "eporue" on the other hand is a parasite, seeing rent on something he didn't create, like some feudal baron. Adam Smith and Karl Marx agree on one thing and one thing only, rent seeking is inherently bad, so whether you are a conservative or a socialist you should join together and pillory this leech.
Yes, eporue might be rent-seeking but that doesn't mean that's a bad thing. If he is providing a copy of a video that is unavailable on youtube then he is providing a service and I have no problem with him getting a little revenue from it. One problem with streaming media is the long tail and most stuff in the public domain has very little value and therefore very little incentive for someone to upload it. I have no problem with a few rent-seekers uploading otherwise unavailable videos to youtube so that people have easier access to them. It sure beats all the millions of home videos and cat videos that no-one ever searches for. At least these obscure videos are videos other people might actually be interested in and have no other way of accessing. I know there have been plenty of videos that I've wanted to find that are just not available by any means online but I know someone somewhere has it sitting in their closet and hopefully someday they might upload it so that it isn't lost forever and can be once again enjoyed by other people.
The obvious first market for ebooks has been anything you read sequentially, like novels.
Ebooks are great for new releases as they are generally a shade cheaper than the new hardbacks. E-books (and movie) prices are still wacky on older titles. On older titles, new paperbacks are usually cheaper than the ebooks and used books are considerably cheaper. Movies are even worse, sometimes I can buy the physical movie cheaper than I can rent the digital one. There are also no bargain bins for ebooks or resale value. I can buy a used book on amazon for $4, read it, and turn around and sell it for the same price I paid for it.
Then again it might be to much to expect it to be able to do a full lawn every 3 days.
Surely it cold do a full lawn in under 24 hours. The typical "full lawn" generally only takes a human a couple hours. I can't imagine it taking longer than 3 days.
If they take more than a couple hours, the problem I see is that you have a very expensive, very dangerous piece of equipment operating unattended in your yard. To get these to be commonplace, they need some way of making them safe, making them reasonably priced, and preventing theft.
To be fair, anyone with less than that much in revenue isn't really worth suing in a copyright suit anyway.
Tell that to the RIAA. If Oracle claims copyright of Java, it would be fairly simple for them to start charging licensing fees. If they went after small shops, they could easily ask for $5k an executable and most shops would have to just pay it as it would cost more to fight it.
But I digress, Android is an even worse clusterfuck by itself because nobody wants to develop for it, and only develop content for it because some bigwig in their company says so.
People look at iPhones and iPads and then get bait&switched by AT&T/Verizon/Rogers/Bell/etc being told that these Android devices are exactly the same device and experience, but cheaper. Then they get a substandard experience and believe that all mobile devices are a shitty experience.
I've have iphones, ipads, and android devices. I much prefer the android devices. Despite apple's reputation of "just working", I have found
that for me, the androids "just work". They android devices have a better user experience, have more configuration options, have less "gotchas"
and just are all around more pleasant and easier to work with not to mention that google is considerably better than siri as are google maps.
Ditto for developing. I much prefer developing android apps vs iphone apps. The only downsize with android is having to pay attention to different
resolutions for different devices. This is a minor inconvenience for a developer but gives the end-user a lot more choices on what type of phone
they want so I think it's worth it. Have you actually owned and used both an iphone and multiple android devices as your primary device for any
length of time? Yes, there are some crappy android phones out there but the top of the line android phones are every bit as good as the iphones
if not better. I'm currently using the iphone 6 as my primary phone but will probably switch back to the android when it's time for a new phone
as I much prefer the android. I have a friend who used iphones 4-6 and recently switched to android as well and doesn't plan on going back.
I hate to say this but, Siri is probably smarter than your kids are.
My 64 year old father uses Siri and has no issues. At first it had a problem understanding him, but now she responds with useful results.
Yes, siri has more knowledge than my kids and yes, it can give correct responses but I find that it's success rate is closer to 60% while google's is closer to 90%. Simple requests like "what time does store X close" many times it responds back that it doesn't know while somehow google does know. Same with navigation requests, it many times can't find the location while google has no problem understanding my request. So, yes, siri does give answers but once you get used to google's much better answers it is a poor substitute. Even google's voice recognition seems to be better where siri seems to get the words wrong more often than google on the same phone.
I want Google Now on Windows! Cortana is okay, but Google Now integrates with my email and my calendar and everything JUST WORKS.
I want google now on my iphone. I wish I could get my iphone to use google and google maps as the default. Even my kids realize how bad siri is. When I ask siri for something even if it's just for directions, they usually say "ask google, don't ask siri, siri is stupid"
I don't believe this.
http://energybible.com/wind_en...
Yes, I know that wind generators have a maximum rated speed but there is no reason that you can't design them for faster wind speeds. The problem only comes with highly variable wind speeds as something that works well in 100mph winds will probably have a high cut-in speed and won't activate at lower speeds. The solution is not to not use wind but rather to design a system that is fairly efficient in variable conditions. This can easily be done with diversification whether that is different wind generators with differing range of cut-in and cut-out speeds or even adding in some solar panels or other power sources to help even out the load. Steady load power plants like nuclear have a similar problem where they can't change to meet peak demand and this is easily solved with on-demand natural gas generators. People need to stop trying to find a one size fits all approach to power. The best power grid will be one where there are potentially dozen of power sources working in tandem. Yes, there might still be coal or natural gas plants for peak demand or cloudy days but if that's the only time they are used then our usage of fossil fuels has still been reduced dramatically.
and windmills have a limit to what conditions they can work in, when the wind is too strong they have to shut down...
I don't believe this. A lot of windmills are designed for a narrow operating range and have to shut down when wind is stronger than this
but there is no reason that you couldn't continue to run wind mills designed to run in high speed winds or work on designing windmills
that work in a larger range of wind speeds.
There is plenty of evidence to contradict TFA's claim, but like you point out I see no evidence premiums will or would drop. Insurance companies are about making money. If they can charge the rate, they will charge the rate. If you want to fix insurance, go back to Insurance companies being Non-Profit organizations.
You make it sound like insurance companies operate in a vacuum. If an autonomous car is safer and rates don't go down then someone new will come along and undercut the existing players. More importantly, if liability gets shifted to the car manufacturers then if rates are not what they consider reasonable then it's very possible for them to just self-insure their entire fleet and cut out the insurance companies completely.
One flaw - in modern society we look at efficiency in $ terms.
Cost of purchase and storage vs cost of logistics and transport. Most things will be cheaper to purchase and store.
Self driving cars could change this equation. A $20k toilet cleaning robot isn't cost effective today but if it could arrive on schedule, do it's job, and move on to the next house, it might be. Even something like a shopvac or ladder, if you could call it, and it could arrive via a self-driving pod or drone 15 minutes later and it was all automated, the logistics and transportation costs would be negligible. Most of the logistics and transport costs are because it's currently done by humans.
Yes, there are things that people use daily (like their phones) or
a lot of people use at the same time (like the lawnmower or even turkey roasters)
but there is a ton of stuff in a typical house that is not used regularly. I have a ladder
that I use once a year. I would gladly give it to an organization to store for me if I could
borrow it when I needed it. Kindof like fractional reserve banking, if 40 people all gave an
organization their ladders, they could sell off half of them and there would still always be
plenty to go around.
But you're also making the case for how absurd it is that people use additional energy (compounded over several million vehicles I bet it ads up) in the form of gasoline to always carry around stuff they only sometimes need.
The whole system is designed for people having stuff "they only sometimes need". Most commuters only need a single seat and a 20 mile range but they keep the 4 seat SUV with a gasoline engine so they can take the family to the lake once a month. It's not just cars. Most people have a "guest bedroom" and additional extra rooms in their house that are only used occasionally. It gets even worse than that, how often does someone actually use the ladder, extension cord, etc... that's hanging in their garage. I doubt that in an average city that more than 1% of ladders are being actively used at any one time.
The "parent with extra crap" stuff is actually easy to solve. Just get a large duffle bag with all the stuff and throw it in the trunk when the car shows up but there is a ton of "extra capacity" everywhere in modern life. I would venture to guess that if we could efficiently distribute items only when needed that we could reduce our consumption of things like shopvacs, ladders, ext cords, by 90+% because a vast majority of the stuff in the average house is not used on a daily basis and some of it sits and rots for months between uses.
You could easily counter any effect of a flywheel by having multiple flywheels turning in opposite directions.
The pundits have been predicting such a scenario since sometime in the early 1980s. To date, it hasn't come to pass, and I'm pretty confident in saying that your vision is right up there with flying cars.
Sure, it has come to pass. Everybody has a web presence without the need to personally hire a programmer. Everyone can compile graphs and charts of their data and advanced analytics
reporting without the need of a programmer. No, programmers haven't gone away and someone
still needs to write the programs but many of the tasks that once required a programmer now can
be done via a service without a programmer.
He posts a point like "intended target must stay the same" or and then gives more support for the opposing side.
I could easy take every one of his points and argue the exact opposite probably more effectively than him.
Most of the cyber attacks today seem to be undirected from rogue disconnected parties with undefined or
constantly changing goals and no way to achieve any sort of victory unless victory is defined as "causing chaos".
That's quite a long list and I have NO interest in memorizing all that.
Shortcut keys are for power users and aren't really meant to be memorized directly. I prefer nice menus but I tend to go look up the shortcut keys or try to create a macro when I notice that I keep doing the same thing over and over again. If you want to know how useful shortcut keys can be, try playing StarCraft 1 with someone who uses shortcut keys. They will beat you every time if you're just using the mouse.
Right now, it makes little sense to talk about the most likely candidates. Nobody has won a primary or a caucus. A lot of things can change between now and then.
I agree "past performance doesn't mean future results" but I guess I'm a little cynical as it seems like the dominate candidates always seem to be just more of the same. Candidates with fresh ideas are always labelled as too extreme and pushed to the fringe while the "more of the same" candidates sometime pay lip service to a few of the fresh ideas of the other candidates just so they can still win while changing nothing.
BZZZT! No.
Web pages (the kind you're talking about, anyway) do not employ logic. They do not employ any kind of procedural operations. They do not employ the concept of several / many / hundreds of moving parts.
That was kindof my point.
When the first cars came out, you had to be a mechanic and be able to troubleshoot car problems to drive one because they would break down every few miles.
When the first home computers came out you needed to know how to troubleshoot circuits to be able to use them.
The general population does seem to have problems with complex logic problems. There are some intermediate programs like ifttt.com that seem to work ok for the general population but I consider ifttt still for power users and basic useful stuff will continue to be simplified until many of the things done by programmers today can be done by someone who doesn't understand complex logic.
Swift isn't going to make it so "anybody can write apps." That is something that's been tried for decades, with things like drag-and-drop programming. SQL was originally intended for non-programmers. It doesn't work, because the difficulty of programming isn't the syntax. The difficulty of programming is logic.
These attempts seem to all lead down a common path. Take webpages:
1) only hard core programmers can do it.
2) It gets a little easier with geocities and wysiwyg editors.
3) It gets a little easier with myspace and then even easier with facebook.
Now everyone has some sort of webpage which requires no programming at all.
This same progression happened with the first cars, the first computers, the first cameras, etc...
So, no I don't think everyone is going to become a programmer but everyone will soon be doing
stuff with their devices that previously required a programmer to do.
The real smoking gun is "how will we ever know that they are correct?" Assuming they are turned onto the problems they excel at (NP problems), it may be impossible to verify their answers are correct without a true breakthrough in mathematics.
To use the example you were replying to, if it can get a better answer to the "travelling salesman" problem faster than a conventional computer
then it would still be very useful even if we can't prove that it's the optimal solution. Neural nets are in a similar state today and are quite useful
even if we don't know exactly how the individual weights get the correct solution and even if the answers aren't perfect.
The problem I see with quantum computers is that it seems to be all smoke and mirrors. I don't understand what they are even trying to
accomplish. Even theoretically, how is a quantum computer suppose to be better at solving problems than a conventional computer?
Is it because it's in parallel? Well, we have GPUs which are pretty good at that already. Is it just because it is smaller? What exactly
does quantum computing bring to the table that we don't already have?
Once people with an actual clue get into power, there's going to be several high level trials, which will include ex-presidents, NSA personnel, CIA personnel, FBI Personnel, let's face it, if it's a government alphabet agency, they're probably in on it. So you'll have plenty of company standing up against that wall.
Enjoy your reprieve while it lasts. The soon to be reorganized Government of the people, by the people and for the people (and no, corporations aren't people) will set things to right, and will welcome Snowden back to U.S. as the hero he is.
What fantasy world are you living in? The two most likely candidates for the next president are Bush or Clinton, neither of which are going
to change anything. Of the 3, Obama is probably the most likely to do something and he has opted not to. Pretty much no-one
"with an actual clue" has any chance of getting close to the white house. It would take citizens who care and aren't being pacified with
bread and circus (reality tv, talking heads, etc) to do any type of reorganization. Even an armed rebellion would get nowhere as anyone
with any resources is comfortable enough to not want to risk their lives. The revolutionary war happened because both the poor and the
well off were hurting. George Washington was one of the richest men in the USA. Even then, only about 20% of the population participated
on either side and they literally couldn't buy themselves shoes. It would take a major drop in standard of living in the USA before anything
like that would ever happen here. People are a lot more risk averse and much less likely to want to leave their comfort zone today.
This is an absolutely inane idea for several reasons:
a) They already exist; you can't defend against a sea-skimming missile or SRBMs without an autonomous system, People are just too slow.
The summary specifically mentions offensive not defensive.
I use the rings sold here to generate my passwords, there are cards and keychains too. Simple system and no need to rely on cloud storage or worry about having a wallet hacked.
https://www.tindie.com/search/#q=password generator recall
How do you deal with site's arbitrary unstated rules? I've ran into many sites that enforce mutually exclusive rules (must contain a symbol, can't contain a symbol, etc..) which they only tell you when you create the password not when you later try to log in so you're left to try to guess which arbitrary rule the site you're currently trying to log in had.