In theory, I suppose, double liability would motivate everyone involved in design, construction, and operation to make sure that there are no mistakes. In practice, every human -- and every human organization -- has the power to cause accidents that they can't possibly pay for. Doubling the liability for those accidents won't make a bit of difference.
I drive carefully. I've still had a couple of accidents, though. If one of those accidents had sent me into a van hauling $10M worth of Swarovski crystal sculptures, I'd have been sorry, really I would, but I wouldn't be paying off the damages. If the courts found me at fault and fined me $20M, I wouldn't be any sorrier, or in any better position to pay.
I wish the author had elaborated a bit on this. I know that we're far away from the "ideal gas" regime here, and that things get independently wonky when you're dealing with supersonic flow, but "cooling down as it gets compressed" is so counter-intuitive that they should throw us at least a few lines of explanation.
Any effort to emulate or restore declarative memory will obviously include emulating the association and activation networks that drive it. Believe it or not, the people doing this kind of research already realize that.
Nobody is talking about adding a USB port so you can plug a thumb drive into your hippocampus and instantly "know" everything contained on it. That would be great, but there's a lot of other work to do first, as you say.
If only getting pregnant always required long, conscientious, deliberate effort, and avoiding pregnancy were the easy result of one night's drunken whim.
But that's now how it is, and this proposal won't make it so.
Yeah, but there could be quite a difference between breaking the windshield and breaking one or two of the potentially dozens of cameras that could be distributed around the airframe. It's a lot easier to design in redundant cameras than redundant cockpits.
Well, to be fair (and since nearly everybody else is piling onto the obvious drawbacks), this should actually remove some complexity and a significant point of failure. Windows, their joints with the fuselage material, and the resulting corners are a major engineering headache.
Also, it avoids the whole "lasers into the cockpit windows" issue. </snark>
I feel a little bit of awe every time I watch a truck driver backing a trailer up to a dock. It's an impressive skill. However, I'm quite certain that this is one area where humans don't stand a chance against an automated system with access to radar/ultrasound/camera data from multiple angles. Same thing, I'm sure, for dropping and hooking. No matter how good you are at what you do, you have only two eyes, constrained to look in a single direction at a time, and you can't pay close attention to more than a couple of data streams at a time.
As for loading and unloading -- do you really want your most valuable skill to be lugging and stacking boxes? Sure, humans will probably be more flexible in that regard for many years to come, but we're also terribly vulnerable to workplace injuries while we're doing it.
Sure, having desktops "controlled by the user" has worked out just swell for the last 30 years or so. If you want to make sure a system stays at peak performance, doesn't get infected, and keeps up with bug fixes, put it "under the complete control" of someone who thinks a "buffer overflow attack" means someone pouring too much cleaning solution into a floor polisher.
Thing is, you don't have to shave metal from the coin unless you're stupid, lazy, and/or in a big hurry.
Coins of precious metal wear down with use. Metal gets rubbed off the high points of the coin. A heavily worn silver dime can lose as much as 20% of its weight, and still be recognizable as a dime. Where does the metal go? All over the place -- bits of it are left as dust or markings at every point where the coin moves across a surface. In the days of circulating PMs, when coins wore down too far, they were returned to the government, which would melt them down and recycle their metal into new coins. The government absorbed the losses due to circulation.
If you're an enterprising individual, you can get a bunch of silver or gold coins, put them in a dust-tight bag, tumble that bag for a few days, and collect the dust. You're left with worn, but still perfectly legal, coins; they are, in fact, circulated, just not among multiple entities. It's called sweating, and can be done chemically as well, although that method is easier to detect.
So, if you're on a gold or silver standard, your "hard currency" still loses value over time, but you have the power to capture that "lost value" yourself if you so choose. If a state or nation proposed to issue silver or gold coins for circulation today, you can be sure people would use the full power of twenty-first century technology to chisel their cut off the top. There's no way any entity would volunteer to be on the hook for circulation losses, especially when it's so easy for another entity to accelerate and capture those losses.
This legal change allows companies (and people) to issue money other than US dollars.
If a company pays its employee $6/hr in US dollars, it's failing to meet the minimum wage requirement, period. Issuing a gift card loaded with McBucks, quatloos, or whatever will not put them in compliance.
Admittedly, this is a common-sense observation, which means its legal relevance may be limited.
...I'm feeling a bit smug about this development. I can hold it six inches away from my nose, peer under my glasses, and have the equivalent FOV and resolution of a 28-inch desktop display, handheld.
Of course, if I want to do anything with it, I have to use my fingers, which appear the size of fireplace logs...
According to this article, wholesale electric power contract prices in Germany and neighboring countries peaked last November at 50.50 Euro/MWh, which I believe works out to just under 7 cents/KWh. Ask folks in California whether that's "outrageously expensive".
Since then, prices have decreased in December, January, February, and March; March prices were about 4.85 cents/KWh.
Even better, due to regulations requiring grid participants to purchase renewable energy when it's available, the price of non-renewable power is sometimes actually dropping to or below zero. That's right, there were apparently brief intervals where nuclear and coal plants were paying customers to draw power from them.
As of 2011, Germany had already spent over 100 billion Euros subsidizing solar. This level of subsidization could easily produce over 20 nuclear plants and would basically end the further need for carbon free electrical energy spending, while offsetting much more carbon in a shorter period of time. Not to mention the vast economic benefits to the country from supplying a majority of the plant components versus buying from Asia. But, Germany will continue to spend even more, sending vast sums of money to Asia in efforts to just 'keep up', while their electricity prices continue to skyrocket, resulting in higher costs for business and manufacturing.
Those higher costs don't seem to be putting much of a damper on Germany's economic growth.
It seems like there should be useful mappings between the linear layout and chording affordances of a piano keyboard, and some computer-based tasks (although probably not "typing", I'd think). Maybe a less wrist-wracking rendition of Emacs commands?
Let's see. If you're typing with a normal alphanumeric keyboard, keystroke ordering matters, but keystroke force (velocity) doesn't, and hold time matters only crudely. How would you take advantage of velocity sensitivity?
Yep, that's the great barrier to intelligence-enhancement stories -- it's nearly impossible for an author to write a convincing character who's smarter than the author. Vernor Vinge quoted a rejection letter from John W. Campbell on the topic: "You can't write this story. Neither can anyone else."
Having said that, I'll admit that as a child I enjoyed Brain Wave. But, yes, it was full of holes. It's nearly impossible to retain your willing suspension of disbelief when the super-intelligent protagonists are missing things that you see clearly.
Hey may have hit it best, but he was far from first. Poul Anderson's Brain Wave, for example, came out in 1953-54. I think there were a lot of even earlier examples, but I don't have them at my fingertips.
I have to admit that I haven't read any of his other stories, but Flowers was certainly an important one.
When I first read it, I was a smart/nerdy kid, and I thought that being smart was the most important thing in the world; naturally, something that could make you smarter would be the best thing imaginable, and then having that blessing taken back would be the worst. Flowers planted a seed of the idea that increased intelligence (whatever that means, really) wouldn't necessarily be an unalloyed blessing.
Slashdot Mirror
What's a "program" ("anything")?
What does it mean to be "engineered to produce" one?
What's a "hardware fluke"?
What constitutes "explanation" of how it was done?
Not. Even. Wrong.
I can imagine how that would be the case, although I certainly couldn't derive it.
...by ensuring that no plants ever get built.
In theory, I suppose, double liability would motivate everyone involved in design, construction, and operation to make sure that there are no mistakes. In practice, every human -- and every human organization -- has the power to cause accidents that they can't possibly pay for. Doubling the liability for those accidents won't make a bit of difference.
I drive carefully. I've still had a couple of accidents, though. If one of those accidents had sent me into a van hauling $10M worth of Swarovski crystal sculptures, I'd have been sorry, really I would, but I wouldn't be paying off the damages. If the courts found me at fault and fined me $20M, I wouldn't be any sorrier, or in any better position to pay.
I wish the author had elaborated a bit on this. I know that we're far away from the "ideal gas" regime here, and that things get independently wonky when you're dealing with supersonic flow, but "cooling down as it gets compressed" is so counter-intuitive that they should throw us at least a few lines of explanation.
Anybody here want to step up to the plate?
Any effort to emulate or restore declarative memory will obviously include emulating the association and activation networks that drive it. Believe it or not, the people doing this kind of research already realize that.
Nobody is talking about adding a USB port so you can plug a thumb drive into your hippocampus and instantly "know" everything contained on it. That would be great, but there's a lot of other work to do first, as you say.
Well, if avoiding pregnancy is all you're concerned about, it sounds like there's an easy solution: you get the chip.
If only getting pregnant always required long, conscientious, deliberate effort, and avoiding pregnancy were the easy result of one night's drunken whim.
But that's now how it is, and this proposal won't make it so.
Seriously, it looks like a guinea pig with dual rotors. I can't be the only one who sees this.
Yeah, but there could be quite a difference between breaking the windshield and breaking one or two of the potentially dozens of cameras that could be distributed around the airframe. It's a lot easier to design in redundant cameras than redundant cockpits.
Well, to be fair (and since nearly everybody else is piling onto the obvious drawbacks), this should actually remove some complexity and a significant point of failure. Windows, their joints with the fuselage material, and the resulting corners are a major engineering headache.
Also, it avoids the whole "lasers into the cockpit windows" issue. </snark>
I feel a little bit of awe every time I watch a truck driver backing a trailer up to a dock. It's an impressive skill. However, I'm quite certain that this is one area where humans don't stand a chance against an automated system with access to radar/ultrasound/camera data from multiple angles. Same thing, I'm sure, for dropping and hooking. No matter how good you are at what you do, you have only two eyes, constrained to look in a single direction at a time, and you can't pay close attention to more than a couple of data streams at a time.
As for loading and unloading -- do you really want your most valuable skill to be lugging and stacking boxes? Sure, humans will probably be more flexible in that regard for many years to come, but we're also terribly vulnerable to workplace injuries while we're doing it.
Sure, having desktops "controlled by the user" has worked out just swell for the last 30 years or so. If you want to make sure a system stays at peak performance, doesn't get infected, and keeps up with bug fixes, put it "under the complete control" of someone who thinks a "buffer overflow attack" means someone pouring too much cleaning solution into a floor polisher.
By the time you reach age 50, your idea of "normal vision" will change substantially.
Here's a modest proposal to the contrary.
Thing is, you don't have to shave metal from the coin unless you're stupid, lazy, and/or in a big hurry.
Coins of precious metal wear down with use. Metal gets rubbed off the high points of the coin. A heavily worn silver dime can lose as much as 20% of its weight, and still be recognizable as a dime. Where does the metal go? All over the place -- bits of it are left as dust or markings at every point where the coin moves across a surface. In the days of circulating PMs, when coins wore down too far, they were returned to the government, which would melt them down and recycle their metal into new coins. The government absorbed the losses due to circulation.
If you're an enterprising individual, you can get a bunch of silver or gold coins, put them in a dust-tight bag, tumble that bag for a few days, and collect the dust. You're left with worn, but still perfectly legal, coins; they are, in fact, circulated, just not among multiple entities. It's called sweating, and can be done chemically as well, although that method is easier to detect.
So, if you're on a gold or silver standard, your "hard currency" still loses value over time, but you have the power to capture that "lost value" yourself if you so choose. If a state or nation proposed to issue silver or gold coins for circulation today, you can be sure people would use the full power of twenty-first century technology to chisel their cut off the top. There's no way any entity would volunteer to be on the hook for circulation losses, especially when it's so easy for another entity to accelerate and capture those losses.
This legal change allows companies (and people) to issue money other than US dollars.
If a company pays its employee $6/hr in US dollars, it's failing to meet the minimum wage requirement, period. Issuing a gift card loaded with McBucks, quatloos, or whatever will not put them in compliance.
Admittedly, this is a common-sense observation, which means its legal relevance may be limited.
...I'm feeling a bit smug about this development. I can hold it six inches away from my nose, peer under my glasses, and have the equivalent FOV and resolution of a 28-inch desktop display, handheld.
Of course, if I want to do anything with it, I have to use my fingers, which appear the size of fireplace logs...
Seems like it shoots down the idea that no Neanderthal ate cooked veggies.
One counterexample goes a long way toward rejecting a theory.
Electricity Prices Fall In Europe As German Renewable Energy Output Increases
According to this article, wholesale electric power contract prices in Germany and neighboring countries peaked last November at 50.50 Euro/MWh, which I believe works out to just under 7 cents/KWh. Ask folks in California whether that's "outrageously expensive".
Since then, prices have decreased in December, January, February, and March; March prices were about 4.85 cents/KWh.
Even better, due to regulations requiring grid participants to purchase renewable energy when it's available, the price of non-renewable power is sometimes actually dropping to or below zero . That's right, there were apparently brief intervals where nuclear and coal plants were paying customers to draw power from them.
As of 2011, Germany had already spent over 100 billion Euros subsidizing solar. This level of subsidization could easily produce over 20 nuclear plants and would basically end the further need for carbon free electrical energy spending, while offsetting much more carbon in a shorter period of time. Not to mention the vast economic benefits to the country from supplying a majority of the plant components versus buying from Asia. But, Germany will continue to spend even more, sending vast sums of money to Asia in efforts to just 'keep up', while their electricity prices continue to skyrocket, resulting in higher costs for business and manufacturing.
Those higher costs don't seem to be putting much of a damper on Germany's economic growth.
Oh, wait, maybe it's because Germany's renewable output actually appears to be driving down energy prices, not only for Germany but its neighbors. Prices peaked in November of 2013, and fell in December, January, February, and March -- not exactly "peak solar" months, as others have pointed out.
I've seen headlines elsewhere that just say "Germany Now Gets Half Its Power from Solar". "Now" is misleading in that context.
This is a noteworthy milestone, and a good sign, but let's not exaggerate it.
It seems like there should be useful mappings between the linear layout and chording affordances of a piano keyboard, and some computer-based tasks (although probably not "typing", I'd think). Maybe a less wrist-wracking rendition of Emacs commands?
Let's see. If you're typing with a normal alphanumeric keyboard, keystroke ordering matters, but keystroke force (velocity) doesn't, and hold time matters only crudely. How would you take advantage of velocity sensitivity?
Yep, that's the great barrier to intelligence-enhancement stories -- it's nearly impossible for an author to write a convincing character who's smarter than the author. Vernor Vinge quoted a rejection letter from John W. Campbell on the topic: "You can't write this story. Neither can anyone else."
Having said that, I'll admit that as a child I enjoyed Brain Wave. But, yes, it was full of holes. It's nearly impossible to retain your willing suspension of disbelief when the super-intelligent protagonists are missing things that you see clearly.
Hey may have hit it best, but he was far from first. Poul Anderson's Brain Wave , for example, came out in 1953-54. I think there were a lot of even earlier examples, but I don't have them at my fingertips.
I have to admit that I haven't read any of his other stories, but Flowers was certainly an important one.
When I first read it, I was a smart/nerdy kid, and I thought that being smart was the most important thing in the world; naturally, something that could make you smarter would be the best thing imaginable, and then having that blessing taken back would be the worst. Flowers planted a seed of the idea that increased intelligence (whatever that means, really) wouldn't necessarily be an unalloyed blessing.