For the less-than-alert reader, if you can accelerate to the speed of a passing body... you don't really need that body.
Why would that be? If we can get a small ship that travels at 50% the speed of light, we could reach a star like this in around 2 years. Once we reached it, if it was lucky enough to have a habitable planet then we're golden but even if it had a marslike planet, it still would be considerably easier to colonize a mars size planet around another star system that it would be to build a generational ship to get to the next closest star. Making a self contained environment for 2 years is alot easier than making one that can survive for 50+ years.
with the same obvious set of interests and the same payoffs for roughly the same people, the two-party system must never be questioned.
Yes, the two party system operates the same way as does a host of other areas. Basically, people can recognize monopolies but tend to ignore duopolies. There are probably more duopolies in existance today than monopolies because they can pretend to be competive if they share and price fix with a partner in crime. The republicrats are obviously one of the biggest and most entrenched and alot of people have figured it out but not enough see it or care yet to make much of a difference so instead they argue over technicalities like whether to spend $100 million or $110 million on some pet project when everything pretty much stays status quo.
For the most part I agree with you in concept but the spiral does go downward as not all jobs are equal. There has to be an economic incentive to automate a job, and that usually means "expensive." The jobs that can not be automated are generally those jobs where the prevailing wage is lower than the cost of the automation. I am speaking in generalities here not trying to find examples of jobs only "humans" can do.
I'm not sure this spiral downward is a given. There are plenty of jobs at the bottom like digging ditches that have been eliminated as well. Jobs that are not cost effective to automate aren't all at the bottom. I would argue that many of the ones at the bottom will be eliminated first. Once that spiral hits rock bottom and starts working back up we'll probably all be better off unless we end up with a situation where there are not enough jobs or the jobs at the top are too difficult to retrain certain people.
Technology can NOT eliminate work. All it can do is change the work you do.
This only holds as long as someone is willing to give you food/money for your work. The problem we're seeing today is that 90% of the stuff people want and need is produced by a handful of people. Food is provided by just a few farmers. Software is written once by a handful of people and cloned millions of time. Movies are created once and cloned millions of times. Millions of people all watch the same handful of ball players. What happens when you have no useful skills to barter with because a robot can do the work cheaper?
I love Pepsi's ads, they blow the lame ones Coke has away, but I don't buy Pepsi because to me it tastes like shit. Ads are bullshit plain and simple. I don't get why gullible people believe and listen to lies like that.
Ironically, what you don't realize is that the advertisement is working. So you like pepsi better than coke. What about all the other much cheaper colas? Yes, in some ways pepsi and coke are competitors but their prices are the same and they are both actually better off pretending to be competitors. Their real competition is the offbrand but they have managed to convince everyone including you that they are a premium brand when in reality if given 10 different colas you probably would have a hard time narrowing it down to which one is the actual coke.
I'm sorry, but YOU are the idiot. Autism is not a disease. The problem is not autism, it's neurotypical people who need to have things their way.
If you're talking about a "touch of autism" then you might be right but autism at the far end is most certainly a disease. People with severe autism can't read, write, talk, or take care of themself. They also many times have poor motor skills and weak muscle tone. Even if you removed them from a neurotypical society and put them in a jungle somewhere they still would be unable to take care of themself so it's not the neurotypical society that is the problem.
This isn't entirely true. There are plenty of companies that offer free phone support for their products. Some like your cellphone and cable companies might put you on hold forever but not all of them. I work for a small company that charges $35 per month and has about 2000 customers. We almost always answer the phone on the first ring. At only $35 per month a single customer could easily burn thru their profit each month but for the most part only a small percent of our customers call any given day. Yes, a few of them probably cost us more in support per year than we make from them but it averages out as many rarely call at all.
Can I get a "smart tv" with a user replaceable OS? I'd rather load an interface more suited to my needs (something like Kodi) that I can upgrade/maintain on my timetable.
Sure you can, it's called a dongle. What you really want is a dumb tv and then plug in your choice of roku, google, amazon, etc.. I agree with the OP and wish TV manufacturers would stick to what they are good at and just produce dumb tvs. If they feel the need, then sell them with a free roku stick, amazon stick, etc... but stop trying to develop an inhouse solution that will almost always be subpar to what a 3rd party can offer.
The point is that they are forcing a guilt trip on every single customer for some vague good cause and expect you to donate to but can't even tell you what it is that you're suppose to be supporting and are suppose to feel guilty if you don't support.
I think it is you that have misread the summary. I think the "until recently" is the real deal breaker for me. If his wife was epileptic but had things under control then having a panic button for the kid and/or a sensor for the wife makes sense but only in the same way it makes sense to teach a kid to dial 911 in a fire. If she is having frequent episodes then there probably needs to be someone else present in the house.
Call it what it is - guilting people into donating by making them more conscious of the fact that they're not donating by making them type $0 into a box so they feel like a piece of crap.
It's not about awareness.
I get this all the time at the checkout. Would you like to donate $1 to save needy children, to save a cat in need, to promote clean water, etc... I once asked a cashier who actually got the money on a "clean water" campaign and they couldn't even tell me. I always say no as a matter of course even for organizations that I regularly donate to. I don't want to encourage them to use that venue.
Remember the primary concern when these laws were proposed. As soon as criminals discover a way to maliciously activate the kill switch on a non-stolen phone, there will be serious fallout. Imagine the ransomware. There are similar concerns with law enforcement, who have demonstrated a desire to be able to wipe or forever disable a phone they've confiscated (usually one documenting their misdeeds).
That's assuming it's a permanent kill switch. If it's just that the IMEI is tied to your account until you release it, then this isn't a problem. They can steal you phone but unless they can also call up the cell company and get them to release your phone it does them no good. Paypal has a similiar system. It only allows a credit card or email to be tied to a specific account. If you try to use the same credit card on a different account, it just doesn't allow you to do it without calling and answering a bunch of questions which a thief probably wouldn't know.
It is a sad situation, because that will also get in the way of legitimate (and yes, it can exist) investigation, however that is the arms race they are forcing you in to. NOT encryption-when-you-have-something-to-hide, but encryption of EVERYTHING, as standard operating principle.
So my connection to my bank is encrypted? So what? They have access to my bank statements by just asking the banks. The little key fobs that stores give out that give you discounts are tracking all your purchases even if you pay in cash. Encryption is worthless when the endpoints are compromising. Your cell phone company knows where you are at all time and shares this information with the highest bidder. The only way to stop being tracking is to give up your credit card and your cell phone which no significant portion of the population is going to do.
I think one of the problems with a subscription model is that each month a person gets to evaluate whether it is still worth the cost. With the upfront purchase, you basically lock them in for a few years and all their peers and coworkers see them using their software.
My kids ask me questions like this all the time. Most people with normal intelligence realize that the "you" should really be replaced with the word "a person" as it refers to an ambiguous you not a specific you. For many of my kids questions, I had gotten used to just asking google before switching to an iphone last month and quickly discovered that siri tried to be a smart aleck instead of just doing a search. On a random side note, while on my android, my kids always used to ask me if I was talking to siri even though previously I had never owned an iphone. They also refer to our android tablets as ipads so apple seems to be much better at brand recognition than google is.
Just asked Siri on my ipod "Can you get chickenpox from chickens" and all it did was come up with a list of ~15 websites, the top being WebMD, as well as ~15 images of chickenpox rashes.
So, tl;dr version, pretty much the same results as using Google voice search in my GNote2.
Not sure how that works. I'm using a one month old iphone 6 so maybe siri varies some from platform to platform.
I find siri very annoying. It has a few tricks and tries to act cute but its cuteness means that it gives the wrong answer half the time. For instance, a simple question like "Can you get chickenpox from chickens?" gets a reply of "Who, me?" This is a simple question that a human can easily understand that it isn't directly addressed to them and Google voice search, not trying to have a persona of its own, is smart enough to just do a search for an answer it doesn't know instead of being a smart aleck. I've actually installed google voice search on my iphone because it doesn't try to act human and tends to give better results for everything but actual dealings with the phone's internal software. I just wish I could remap the siri button to load google voice search instead.
Adobe and game companies are in a slightly different situation. For Adobe, they are the only game in town and people make a living with their software. Microsoft is already being chewed on by linux desktops, linux servers, ipads, and even android tablets. Game companies also are in a different situation as people are paying for entertainment and know they have the option of not paying at any time. I'm much more likely to have a netflix subscription that is an optional service and I can cancel at any time than a subscription where some device I own stops working as soon as the subscription runs out. Even sony and nintendo are smart enough to leave a basic version of their game consoles that doesn't require a subscription.
"I'm very sorry Mr. Surface Pro 5 Owner, but with the current release cycle your hardware will no longer be supported at the end of this year... and we do not offer subscriptions for legacy hardware."
Sounds like the current state of affairs with almost all Android devices.
Not at all. You might not get updates pushed to you but the phone for the most part continues to work exactly the same way as the day you bought it. It doesn't suddenly not let you log in because it is no longer supported.
The U.S. government has a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any country in the history of the world. (The rate of 707 prisoners per 100,000 population is artificially reduced because of all the exclusions.)
I was actually surprised to discover that all the countries fall below 1% incarceration. I would guess that if you asked a random person on the street what percentage of the population are in prison most people would give you a number greater than 1%.
If you can afford a robot that could do this, your furniture is not going to be cheap junk that is assembled by the customer.
Maybe right now, but once the problem is solved, making it cheaper would probably be fairly straightforward. The point isn't for it to be economical but that it's a task that is fairly simple for a human but impossible for a computer. Of course, we have a long way to go as demonstrated by this video sped up 50 times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I like the idea of the IKEA challenge but why include a human? I would think having a robot open a box, pull out the instructions, and assemble the piece of furniture would be huge. Having a person involved just muddles the issue. You obviously might have to start with simple furniture but this seems like a worthwhile challenge as assembling furniture at times can even stump humans.
Former employers almost NEVER say things like that about employees that are asked to leave because there is a lot of liability involved, so they opt to have a blanket policy of saying nothing at all.
I've heard of this but of all the people I've called on both for entry level minimum wage jobs and upper level developer positions, I've never once ran into someone who didn't tell me everything I wanted to know. My questions usually include things like why did they leave, do you trust them, would you hire them again, etc... and I've never got the runaround.
One of the points of getting off Earth is that we *know* that planets are incredibly fragile things - lots of things could destroy life on Earth, even more could easily destroy just us. Our own actions included. And if that's the only place we live, that will be the end of us. Comparatively few things could destroy life on two planets, and most of those would be rendered relatively toothless by the enclosed ecosystems necessary to sustain life on Mars.
The enclosed ecosystem on mars will most likely be considerably more fragile than earth and even if you assume that you have a self-sufficient colony on mars, the most likely cause of annihilation which is manmade war probably wouldn't spare mars. We would probably be better off spending our resources trying to get everyone to get along. Unfortunately this is a social problem not a technological one so it's a bit harder to crack but there is still plenty of space and resources on earth, it would be better to try to prevent the collapse of earth than it would be to build a few colonies on mars that would most likely die as soon if not before earth does.
Space is dead, it's over, finished. We're not going anywhere. Fundamental science shows this. I suspect you're not exactly rational about this, and you think we'll find some sort of sci-fi "technology" that will cleverly go around all the limits fundamental science shows us.
I disagree with your conclusion but I do think that space is probably a waste of resources at this time. We currently have a HUGE excess of resources on this planet. If we can stop spending it on blowing each other up we have enormous potential. Just think of what we could accomplish if the entire world's military budget could be spent on medical research or space research. The USA budget alone could easily fund a generational ship. Heck, an aircraft carrier is halfway there already. So I wouldn't say it's impossible to leave but there are plenty of places like antartica, the sahara, and the bottom of the ocean that are alot more hospitable than space.
Slashdot Mirror
For the less-than-alert reader, if you can accelerate to the speed of a passing body... you don't really need that body.
Why would that be? If we can get a small ship that travels at 50% the speed of light, we could reach a star like this in around 2 years.
Once we reached it, if it was lucky enough to have a habitable planet then we're golden but even if it had a marslike planet, it still
would be considerably easier to colonize a mars size planet around another star system that it would be to build a generational ship
to get to the next closest star. Making a self contained environment for 2 years is alot easier than making one that can survive for
50+ years.
with the same obvious set of interests and the same payoffs for roughly the same people, the two-party system must never be questioned.
Yes, the two party system operates the same way as does a host of other areas.
Basically, people can recognize monopolies but tend to ignore duopolies. There
are probably more duopolies in existance today than monopolies because they
can pretend to be competive if they share and price fix with a partner in crime.
The republicrats are obviously one of the biggest and most entrenched and alot
of people have figured it out but not enough see it or care yet to make much of
a difference so instead they argue over technicalities like whether to spend
$100 million or $110 million on some pet project when everything pretty much
stays status quo.
For the most part I agree with you in concept but the spiral does go downward as not all jobs are equal. There has to be an economic incentive to automate a job, and that usually means "expensive." The jobs that can not be automated are generally those jobs where the prevailing wage is lower than the cost of the automation. I am speaking in generalities here not trying to find examples of jobs only "humans" can do.
I'm not sure this spiral downward is a given. There are plenty of jobs at the bottom like digging ditches that have been eliminated as well.
Jobs that are not cost effective to automate aren't all at the bottom. I would argue that many of the ones at the bottom will be eliminated
first. Once that spiral hits rock bottom and starts working back up we'll probably all be better off unless we end up with a situation where
there are not enough jobs or the jobs at the top are too difficult to retrain certain people.
Technology can NOT eliminate work. All it can do is change the work you do.
This only holds as long as someone is willing to give you food/money for your work.
The problem we're seeing today is that 90% of the stuff people want and need is produced by a handful of people.
Food is provided by just a few farmers. Software is written once by a handful of people and cloned millions of time.
Movies are created once and cloned millions of times. Millions of people all watch the same handful of ball players.
What happens when you have no useful skills to barter with because a robot can do the work cheaper?
I love Pepsi's ads, they blow the lame ones Coke has away, but I don't buy Pepsi because to me it tastes like shit. Ads are bullshit plain and simple. I don't get why gullible people believe and listen to lies like that.
Ironically, what you don't realize is that the advertisement is working. So you like pepsi better than coke. What about all the other
much cheaper colas? Yes, in some ways pepsi and coke are competitors but their prices are the same and they are both actually
better off pretending to be competitors. Their real competition is the offbrand but they have managed to convince everyone including
you that they are a premium brand when in reality if given 10 different colas you probably would have a hard time narrowing it down
to which one is the actual coke.
I'm sorry, but YOU are the idiot. Autism is not a disease. The problem is not autism, it's neurotypical people who need to have things their way.
If you're talking about a "touch of autism" then you might be right but autism at the far end is most certainly a disease.
People with severe autism can't read, write, talk, or take care of themself. They also many times have poor motor
skills and weak muscle tone. Even if you removed them from a neurotypical society and put them in a jungle somewhere
they still would be unable to take care of themself so it's not the neurotypical society that is the problem.
This isn't entirely true. There are plenty of companies that offer free phone support for their products. Some
like your cellphone and cable companies might put you on hold forever but not all of them. I work for a small
company that charges $35 per month and has about 2000 customers. We almost always answer the phone
on the first ring. At only $35 per month a single customer could easily burn thru their profit each month but for
the most part only a small percent of our customers call any given day. Yes, a few of them probably cost us
more in support per year than we make from them but it averages out as many rarely call at all.
Can I get a "smart tv" with a user replaceable OS? I'd rather load an interface more suited to my needs (something like Kodi) that I can upgrade/maintain on my timetable.
Sure you can, it's called a dongle. What you really want is a dumb tv and then plug in your choice of roku, google, amazon, etc..
I agree with the OP and wish TV manufacturers would stick to what they are good at and just produce dumb tvs. If they feel the
need, then sell them with a free roku stick, amazon stick, etc... but stop trying to develop an inhouse solution that will almost
always be subpar to what a 3rd party can offer.
The point is that they are forcing a guilt trip on every single customer for some
vague good cause and expect you to donate to but can't even tell you what it
is that you're suppose to be supporting and are suppose to feel guilty if you
don't support.
I think it is you that have misread the summary. I think the "until recently" is the real deal
breaker for me. If his wife was epileptic but had things under control then having a panic button
for the kid and/or a sensor for the wife makes sense but only in the same way it makes sense to
teach a kid to dial 911 in a fire. If she is having frequent episodes then there probably needs to be
someone else present in the house.
Call it what it is - guilting people into donating by making them more conscious of the fact that they're not donating by making them type $0 into a box so they feel like a piece of crap.
It's not about awareness.
I get this all the time at the checkout. Would you like to donate $1 to save needy children, to save a cat in need,
to promote clean water, etc... I once asked a cashier who actually got the money on a "clean water" campaign
and they couldn't even tell me. I always say no as a matter of course even for organizations that I regularly
donate to. I don't want to encourage them to use that venue.
Remember the primary concern when these laws were proposed. As soon as criminals discover a way to maliciously activate the kill switch on a non-stolen phone, there will be serious fallout. Imagine the ransomware. There are similar concerns with law enforcement, who have demonstrated a desire to be able to wipe or forever disable a phone they've confiscated (usually one documenting their misdeeds).
That's assuming it's a permanent kill switch. If it's just that the IMEI is tied to your account until you release it, then this
isn't a problem. They can steal you phone but unless they can also call up the cell company and get them to release your
phone it does them no good. Paypal has a similiar system. It only allows a credit card or email to be tied to a specific
account. If you try to use the same credit card on a different account, it just doesn't allow you to do it without calling
and answering a bunch of questions which a thief probably wouldn't know.
The ONE think they fear is effective encryption.
It is a sad situation, because that will also get in the way of legitimate (and yes, it can exist) investigation, however that is the arms race they are forcing you in to.
NOT encryption-when-you-have-something-to-hide, but encryption of EVERYTHING, as standard operating principle.
So my connection to my bank is encrypted? So what? They have access to my bank statements by just asking the banks.
The little key fobs that stores give out that give you discounts are tracking all your purchases even if you pay in cash.
Encryption is worthless when the endpoints are compromising. Your cell phone company knows where you are at all time
and shares this information with the highest bidder. The only way to stop being tracking is to give up your credit card and your
cell phone which no significant portion of the population is going to do.
I think one of the problems with a subscription model is that each month a person gets
to evaluate whether it is still worth the cost. With the upfront purchase, you basically
lock them in for a few years and all their peers and coworkers see them using their
software.
My kids ask me questions like this all the time. Most people with normal intelligence
realize that the "you" should really be replaced with the word "a person" as it refers
to an ambiguous you not a specific you. For many of my kids questions, I had
gotten used to just asking google before switching to an iphone last month and
quickly discovered that siri tried to be a smart aleck instead of just doing a search.
On a random side note, while on my android, my kids always used to ask me if I
was talking to siri even though previously I had never owned an iphone. They
also refer to our android tablets as ipads so apple seems to be much better at
brand recognition than google is.
Ummm, yeah,
Just asked Siri on my ipod "Can you get chickenpox from chickens" and all it did was come up with a list of ~15 websites, the top being WebMD, as well as ~15 images of chickenpox rashes.
So, tl;dr version, pretty much the same results as using Google voice search in my GNote2.
Not sure how that works. I'm using a one month old iphone 6 so maybe siri varies some from platform to platform.
I find siri very annoying. It has a few tricks and tries to act cute but its cuteness means that it gives the wrong answer
half the time. For instance, a simple question like "Can you get chickenpox from chickens?" gets a reply of "Who, me?"
This is a simple question that a human can easily understand that it isn't directly addressed to them and Google voice
search, not trying to have a persona of its own, is smart enough to just do a search for an answer it doesn't know instead
of being a smart aleck. I've actually installed google voice search on my iphone because it doesn't try to act human and
tends to give better results for everything but actual dealings with the phone's internal software. I just wish I could
remap the siri button to load google voice search instead.
Adobe and game companies are in a slightly different situation. For Adobe, they are the only game in town and people make
a living with their software. Microsoft is already being chewed on by linux desktops, linux servers, ipads, and even android tablets.
Game companies also are in a different situation as people are paying for entertainment and know they have the option of not
paying at any time. I'm much more likely to have a netflix subscription that is an optional service and I can cancel at any time
than a subscription where some device I own stops working as soon as the subscription runs out. Even sony and nintendo are
smart enough to leave a basic version of their game consoles that doesn't require a subscription.
"I'm very sorry Mr. Surface Pro 5 Owner, but with the current release cycle your hardware will no longer be supported at the end of this year... and we do not offer subscriptions for legacy hardware."
Sounds like the current state of affairs with almost all Android devices.
Not at all. You might not get updates pushed to you but the phone for the most part continues to work exactly the same
way as the day you bought it. It doesn't suddenly not let you log in because it is no longer supported.
The U.S. government has a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any country in the history of the world. (The rate of 707 prisoners per 100,000 population is artificially reduced because of all the exclusions.)
I was actually surprised to discover that all the countries fall below 1% incarceration. I would guess that if you asked a
random person on the street what percentage of the population are in prison most people would give you a number greater than
1%.
If you can afford a robot that could do this, your furniture is not going to be cheap junk that is assembled by the customer.
Maybe right now, but once the problem is solved, making it cheaper would probably be fairly
straightforward. The point isn't for it to be economical but that it's a task that is fairly simple
for a human but impossible for a computer. Of course, we have a long way to go as
demonstrated by this video sped up 50 times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I like the idea of the IKEA challenge but why include a human? I would think having a robot
open a box, pull out the instructions, and assemble the piece of furniture would be huge.
Having a person involved just muddles the issue. You obviously might have to start with
simple furniture but this seems like a worthwhile challenge as assembling furniture at
times can even stump humans.
Former employers almost NEVER say things like that about employees that are asked to leave because there is a lot of liability involved, so they opt to have a blanket policy of saying nothing at all.
I've heard of this but of all the people I've called on both for entry level minimum wage jobs and upper level developer positions, I've never once ran
into someone who didn't tell me everything I wanted to know. My questions usually include things like why did they leave, do you trust them,
would you hire them again, etc... and I've never got the runaround.
One of the points of getting off Earth is that we *know* that planets are incredibly fragile things - lots of things could destroy life on Earth, even more could easily destroy just us. Our own actions included. And if that's the only place we live, that will be the end of us. Comparatively few things could destroy life on two planets, and most of those would be rendered relatively toothless by the enclosed ecosystems necessary to sustain life on Mars.
The enclosed ecosystem on mars will most likely be considerably more fragile than earth and even if you assume that you have a self-sufficient
colony on mars, the most likely cause of annihilation which is manmade war probably wouldn't spare mars. We would probably be better off
spending our resources trying to get everyone to get along. Unfortunately this is a social problem not a technological one so it's a bit harder
to crack but there is still plenty of space and resources on earth, it would be better to try to prevent the collapse of earth than it would be to
build a few colonies on mars that would most likely die as soon if not before earth does.
Space is dead, it's over, finished. We're not going anywhere. Fundamental science shows this. I suspect you're not exactly rational about this, and you think we'll find some sort of sci-fi "technology" that will cleverly go around all the limits fundamental science shows us.
I disagree with your conclusion but I do think that space is probably a waste of resources at this time.
We currently have a HUGE excess of resources on this planet. If we can stop spending it on blowing
each other up we have enormous potential. Just think of what we could accomplish if the entire world's
military budget could be spent on medical research or space research. The USA budget alone could
easily fund a generational ship. Heck, an aircraft carrier is halfway there already. So I wouldn't say
it's impossible to leave but there are plenty of places like antartica, the sahara, and the bottom of the
ocean that are alot more hospitable than space.