Didn't they teach you how to round in elementary school?
If the price ends in 0 or 5, no rounding.
If the price ends in 1 or 2, round down to 0.
If the price ends in 3 or 4, round up to 5.
If the price ends in 6 or 7, round down to 5.
If the price ends in 8 or 9, round up to 10.
Rounding is symmetric, and over time neither party comes out ahead. Half the totals are rounded down, half are rounded up. If you're obsessed about this, arrange your purchases so that your total always rounds down. That'll show them! One or two cents at a time, but it'll show them...
Yep, a silver dime is "still" worth a dollar. Lots of people use that as a wind-up for the "silver/gold is real money" argument, and it's kind of convincing -- until you realize that that same amount of silver was "worth" $3-3.50 during silver's 1980 spike, then fell back to about 35 cents for all of the 1990s (silver hovered around $5/ozt from 1989 until 2004), then spiked back up over $3 in 2011, and has slowly decayed back to $1. I know lots of people who "backed up the truck" when silver "dipped" back down below $30/ozt in 2012. Those people will likely wait a long time to see any profit on their "investment" (speculation).
Silver is a commodity, and its "value" fluctuates by any standard other than itself. It's even fluctuated widely in comparison to gold, its twin shibboleth -- the "historic" ratio was 16 ounces of silver per ounce of gold, but it's fluctuated from 10:1 to 100:1 just in the last 40 years.
Now, what do you suppose would happen if we went back to circulating coinage, and something happened to drive up the price of silver, so a dime-sized "silver dollar" once again contained $2 worth of silver metal?
It's all moot, though, I think. Long before we make any significant change to our system of coins, cash will be viewed as quaint at best, if not actionably suspicious.
At the beginning of the 20th century, we had cents, nickels, dimes, quarters, halves, and dollars. Then we had quarter-eagles ($2.50), half-eagles ($5), eagles ($10), and double eagles ($20). The purchasing power of a dollar then was about 30 times what it is today.
So: ditch the cent and nickel. Keep the dime, half and dollar coins (making the half less bulky, please!), and bring back coins for $2.50, $5, $10, and $20. The dime will still be worth less than the 1900 cent, but this way we keep the nominal "dollar", we get coins with reasonable purchasing power, and we ditch the time- and resource-wasting one-cent and five-cent denominations.
Interestingly, the dollar's purchasing power is about one-tenth what it was in 1949. So the coins I propose above would roughly correspond to the value of a dent, nickel, dime, quarter, half, dollar, and two-dollar bill in 1949, a time when people seemed quite happy with our coinage system.
Speech recognition in the 1990s, or even the 2000s, was awful. It didn't lack use cases; it lacked truly massive storage and processing power, and (for the best recognition) the always-on-nearly-everywhere network infrastructure to support shipping off sound samples to the the sites where that storage and processing lives. Until processors and infrastructure reached that tipping point, it just didn't work well enough to be useful outside of niche cases.
Now, I can tell my Samsung S5's to-do app "get Mott's applesauce", and watch it spell out "get mods", then "applesauce", then go back and erase "mods" and replace it with "Mott's", appropriately capitalized and punctuated. That's... better than most people posting on the Internet can do, frankly. Why? Because it can match what I might have said against an enormous corpus of things other people have said or written, and do an excellent job of adapting to context. Good luck implementing that with 1990s technology.
The summary indicates that this virus infects muscle tissue. I don't know how selective a virus can be, so I don't know how effectively you could select one that specifically targeted or refrained from targeting germ cells or their progenitors.
It seems that making a modification that can be carried down the female line would be trickier, since egg cells are all produced long before puberty begins. You'd need to infect those cells directly, I'd think, and I imagine any such therapy would lag well behind the type discussed in this article (because OMG frankenbabies). There's a need for such therapy, though; some conditions prevent successful fetal development, so you don't have the option of treating after birth.
I know there are concerns around human genetic manipulation, but there are a lot of people suffering in its absence. I'd be willing to take the risk on a therapy like this if I were suffering from a debilitating or fatal genetic illness. Furthermore, I am ready to shoulder my portion of the societal and ethical risks entailed by others testing it.
I'm kinda hoping that a scientist working in the field knows about this, and just figured that "compression" was too big a word for most laymen (and, increasingly, most reporters).
Maybe we'll eventually see tracking, framerates and latency good enough to avoid motion sickness. For many of us, 15 minutes in today's best VR gear is a quick ticket to a day's worth of virtual stomach flu (no fever, no contagion, just the sensations). It sucks, but it's physiological reality.
So, until that magical day, VR for me is a really unpleasant weight-loss tool, and not much else.
Well, see, that's exactly what I want. A small (patio-scale) laser defense system, to protect my family from disease-bearing mosquitoes and aggressive stinging insects. If you've got the tech to track targets at that scale of size and velocity, distinguishing desirable from undesirable insects is probably not too tough. I've already seen some demos.
Would I spend a million bucks on such a system? Of course not. A thousand? I wouldn't, but many would. A hundred? Sure. Come on, exponential advancement!
It's helping to keep at least two economists focused on something other than real-world situations, where their advice would inevitably cause more harm than good.
650TB worth of 5TB drives -- external drives, so you don't need to worry about sleds and stuff -- would be under $20K today.
I expect getting a single drive (SSD of one form or another) with 650TB of capacity will be easy within 10 to 20 years. I'm a bit nervous extending the current cost-of-storage trend out much further than that, despite its solid track record over the past 30 or 40 years. By the time we're talking about petabyte capacity on a single small device, a lot of things will be very different.
OTOH, with all the low hanging fruit of easily accessible resources now depleted, once thermonuclear exchange commences, I doubt humanity will ever have the resources int he aftermath to reboot back to current tech.
Some resources would have been "depleted", but others would have been "concentrated into convenient, usable form in industrial ruins".
Once you grant the initial massive die-off, the survivors might be able to bootstrap via an economy based mostly on scavenging. It would still be hard and horrible, but not necessarily hopeless.
We'll see. I do kind of hope that his youthful arrogance doesn't get him killed. It seems unlikely that one kid will be able to outdo the big-budget teams of researchers working on this problem -- but I don't think it's impossible.
Yes, it's so tragic whenever we see these stories about a lonely old hacker found dead in his apartment, trapped under a toppled pile of bits.
Get a grip. Our digital closets are growing much faster than our digital hoards. Space and indexing technologies are growing faster than our compulsion to accumulate plaintext. Keeping email is not a problem.
You mean besides the human beings who, as a result of heavy childhood exposure, grew up to be more violent, more impulsive, more aggressive, and less intelligent?
Sure. Lead emitted from cars settle onto the ground, and kind of just sits there. It doesn't biodegrade, it's not soluble enough to wash away especially easily, and it's heavy enough to stay where it lands -- until organisms like us end up ingesting and sequestering it, and that seems to take a LONG time, much longer than the 20-odd years since it was banned in the US.
I don't have time this afternoon to look up numbers, but as I recall, you'll still find highly elevated levels of lead in surface soil near highways that saw a lot of traffic during the leaded-gas era. I don't expect the US to pony up a few trillion bucks to remediate all that soil any time soon.
Yeah, but then again, I doubt many readers are actually familiar with the difference between 2000 degrees and 3500 degrees in either unit system. Chemists and metallurgists could nail it down pretty well -- hot enough to melt anything except carbon, but not to boil most of the interesting stuff beyond lead or zinc -- but, again, it would be lost on most readers.
If they take these actions, and malevolent strong AI does not come to pass, perhaps they've saved us all.
If they take these actions, and malevolent strong AI does come to pass, they're no more doomed than they would've been anyhow.
Of course, Pascal's wager falls apart if you pick the wrong god to worship (or the wrong way to worship it), and Musk and Thiel's wager falls apart if the world-consuming evil AI has a soft spot for goodlife. And if strong AI doesn't happen in any form, maybe they've wasted their money.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't they teach you how to round in elementary school?
If the price ends in 0 or 5, no rounding.
If the price ends in 1 or 2, round down to 0.
If the price ends in 3 or 4, round up to 5.
If the price ends in 6 or 7, round down to 5.
If the price ends in 8 or 9, round up to 10.
Rounding is symmetric, and over time neither party comes out ahead. Half the totals are rounded down, half are rounded up. If you're obsessed about this, arrange your purchases so that your total always rounds down. That'll show them! One or two cents at a time, but it'll show them...
Yep, a silver dime is "still" worth a dollar. Lots of people use that as a wind-up for the "silver/gold is real money" argument, and it's kind of convincing -- until you realize that that same amount of silver was "worth" $3-3.50 during silver's 1980 spike, then fell back to about 35 cents for all of the 1990s (silver hovered around $5/ozt from 1989 until 2004), then spiked back up over $3 in 2011, and has slowly decayed back to $1. I know lots of people who "backed up the truck" when silver "dipped" back down below $30/ozt in 2012. Those people will likely wait a long time to see any profit on their "investment" (speculation).
Silver is a commodity, and its "value" fluctuates by any standard other than itself. It's even fluctuated widely in comparison to gold, its twin shibboleth -- the "historic" ratio was 16 ounces of silver per ounce of gold, but it's fluctuated from 10:1 to 100:1 just in the last 40 years.
Now, what do you suppose would happen if we went back to circulating coinage, and something happened to drive up the price of silver, so a dime-sized "silver dollar" once again contained $2 worth of silver metal?
It's all moot, though, I think. Long before we make any significant change to our system of coins, cash will be viewed as quaint at best, if not actionably suspicious.
At the beginning of the 20th century, we had cents, nickels, dimes, quarters, halves, and dollars. Then we had quarter-eagles ($2.50), half-eagles ($5), eagles ($10), and double eagles ($20). The purchasing power of a dollar then was about 30 times what it is today.
So: ditch the cent and nickel. Keep the dime, half and dollar coins (making the half less bulky, please!), and bring back coins for $2.50, $5, $10, and $20. The dime will still be worth less than the 1900 cent, but this way we keep the nominal "dollar", we get coins with reasonable purchasing power, and we ditch the time- and resource-wasting one-cent and five-cent denominations.
Interestingly, the dollar's purchasing power is about one-tenth what it was in 1949. So the coins I propose above would roughly correspond to the value of a dent, nickel, dime, quarter, half, dollar, and two-dollar bill in 1949, a time when people seemed quite happy with our coinage system.
Really?
Speech recognition in the 1990s, or even the 2000s, was awful. It didn't lack use cases; it lacked truly massive storage and processing power, and (for the best recognition) the always-on-nearly-everywhere network infrastructure to support shipping off sound samples to the the sites where that storage and processing lives. Until processors and infrastructure reached that tipping point, it just didn't work well enough to be useful outside of niche cases.
Now, I can tell my Samsung S5's to-do app "get Mott's applesauce", and watch it spell out "get mods", then "applesauce", then go back and erase "mods" and replace it with "Mott's", appropriately capitalized and punctuated. That's... better than most people posting on the Internet can do, frankly. Why? Because it can match what I might have said against an enormous corpus of things other people have said or written, and do an excellent job of adapting to context. Good luck implementing that with 1990s technology.
No, I suppose they'd be heading for the locker rooms.
The summary indicates that this virus infects muscle tissue. I don't know how selective a virus can be, so I don't know how effectively you could select one that specifically targeted or refrained from targeting germ cells or their progenitors.
It seems that making a modification that can be carried down the female line would be trickier, since egg cells are all produced long before puberty begins. You'd need to infect those cells directly, I'd think, and I imagine any such therapy would lag well behind the type discussed in this article (because OMG frankenbabies). There's a need for such therapy, though; some conditions prevent successful fetal development, so you don't have the option of treating after birth.
I know there are concerns around human genetic manipulation, but there are a lot of people suffering in its absence. I'd be willing to take the risk on a therapy like this if I were suffering from a debilitating or fatal genetic illness. Furthermore, I am ready to shoulder my portion of the societal and ethical risks entailed by others testing it.
I'm kinda hoping that a scientist working in the field knows about this, and just figured that "compression" was too big a word for most laymen (and, increasingly, most reporters).
Maybe we'll eventually see tracking, framerates and latency good enough to avoid motion sickness. For many of us, 15 minutes in today's best VR gear is a quick ticket to a day's worth of virtual stomach flu (no fever, no contagion, just the sensations). It sucks, but it's physiological reality.
So, until that magical day, VR for me is a really unpleasant weight-loss tool, and not much else.
I believe Timothy is showing signs of hypoxia. Better evacuate him immediately.
(Typos not present in source article. Yes, I checked. Clicking through and copying text is one of my apparently-rare mutant powers.)
Well, I guess that bit about "Here's to the crazy ones" carried more weight than we supposed.
Laser Bug Zapper Inches to Market -- the video is from 2010. Didn't realize it had been kicking around that long.
Well, see, that's exactly what I want. A small (patio-scale) laser defense system, to protect my family from disease-bearing mosquitoes and aggressive stinging insects. If you've got the tech to track targets at that scale of size and velocity, distinguishing desirable from undesirable insects is probably not too tough. I've already seen some demos.
Would I spend a million bucks on such a system? Of course not. A thousand? I wouldn't, but many would. A hundred? Sure. Come on, exponential advancement!
It's helping to keep at least two economists focused on something other than real-world situations, where their advice would inevitably cause more harm than good.
650TB worth of 5TB drives -- external drives, so you don't need to worry about sleds and stuff -- would be under $20K today.
I expect getting a single drive (SSD of one form or another) with 650TB of capacity will be easy within 10 to 20 years. I'm a bit nervous extending the current cost-of-storage trend out much further than that, despite its solid track record over the past 30 or 40 years. By the time we're talking about petabyte capacity on a single small device, a lot of things will be very different.
Could you try again? Google Translate seems to have some trouble with your arithmetic.
OTOH, with all the low hanging fruit of easily accessible resources now depleted, once thermonuclear exchange commences, I doubt humanity will ever have the resources int he aftermath to reboot back to current tech.
Some resources would have been "depleted", but others would have been "concentrated into convenient, usable form in industrial ruins".
Once you grant the initial massive die-off, the survivors might be able to bootstrap via an economy based mostly on scavenging. It would still be hard and horrible, but not necessarily hopeless.
Once AT&T hooks us up, I'll be able to download this volume of data in a mere two months.
Oh, wait. 1TB monthly data caps.
Okay, once AT&T hooks us up, I'll be able to download this volume of data in a mere 54 years.
We'll see. I do kind of hope that his youthful arrogance doesn't get him killed. It seems unlikely that one kid will be able to outdo the big-budget teams of researchers working on this problem -- but I don't think it's impossible.
Yes, it's so tragic whenever we see these stories about a lonely old hacker found dead in his apartment, trapped under a toppled pile of bits.
Get a grip. Our digital closets are growing much faster than our digital hoards. Space and indexing technologies are growing faster than our compulsion to accumulate plaintext. Keeping email is not a problem.
You mean besides the human beings who, as a result of heavy childhood exposure, grew up to be more violent, more impulsive, more aggressive, and less intelligent?
Sure. Lead emitted from cars settle onto the ground, and kind of just sits there. It doesn't biodegrade, it's not soluble enough to wash away especially easily, and it's heavy enough to stay where it lands -- until organisms like us end up ingesting and sequestering it, and that seems to take a LONG time, much longer than the 20-odd years since it was banned in the US.
I don't have time this afternoon to look up numbers, but as I recall, you'll still find highly elevated levels of lead in surface soil near highways that saw a lot of traffic during the leaded-gas era. I don't expect the US to pony up a few trillion bucks to remediate all that soil any time soon.
Yeah, but then again, I doubt many readers are actually familiar with the difference between 2000 degrees and 3500 degrees in either unit system. Chemists and metallurgists could nail it down pretty well -- hot enough to melt anything except carbon, but not to boil most of the interesting stuff beyond lead or zinc -- but, again, it would be lost on most readers.
Sure, there's some long-baseline interferometry happening on Earth's surface, but I'd love to see imagers with a baseline spanning an AU or so.
If they take these actions, and malevolent strong AI does not come to pass, perhaps they've saved us all.
If they take these actions, and malevolent strong AI does come to pass, they're no more doomed than they would've been anyhow.
Of course, Pascal's wager falls apart if you pick the wrong god to worship (or the wrong way to worship it), and Musk and Thiel's wager falls apart if the world-consuming evil AI has a soft spot for goodlife. And if strong AI doesn't happen in any form, maybe they've wasted their money.
Then again, good luck proving that you are.