There's nothing silly about wanting automatic machines to reduce human labor more than they already have. Just because they don't have a single machine to both wash and dry clothes now doesn't mean we shouldn't ever expect this.
Well, that's even sillier. As far as I know, nobody's expecting autonomous vehicles to reach out with a great robotic claw, grab potential passengers, and belt them into their seats, then escort them into their offices and place them in their cubicles.
Good point. After all, Slashdot readers as a group are superhumanly skilled drivers, and the venom they direct at any post supporting autonomous vehicles is simply a rational response to the threat posed by less-perfect-than-them machines. Any autonomous posting system would quickly adjust to this fact, and stop bothering to post in vehicle threads.
If you need to guide each step of your dishwasher or washing machine's progress through the various phases of the cleaning cycle, manually controlling the speed of the agitator/drum/washing arms... you should visit an appliance store. A lot has changed in the last eighty or ninety years. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Do you seriously think that Lyft would deploy cars that don't video-record every second of interior and exterior activity from multiple angles, indexed against the full contact information of each user?
Well, I also can't prove that you aren't capable of reaching out with your thoughts, grabbing the Moon, and hurling it into the Sun.
However, the preponderance of evidence strongly suggests that you can't. In fact, it would be silly to believe that you could, even though noted physicists like William Shatner say "anything is possible". I'll even go so far as to claim that you can't, even though I admittedly don't have a lot of experience, experimental data, or resources to devote to telekinetic orbital mechanics.
If the US government had not designed, built, and deployed drones on the massive scale that it did, the state of the art in drone manufacture would not be nearly as far advanced as it is. Can you list any sophisticated technical innovations that have been introduced by terrorists, before any government had done so?
You seem to think of "drones" as large, powerful aircraft bristling with weapons. The ones that are "much smaller, cheaper, and easier to build", the ones making "the air of the USA... thick with privately-owned drones", are a very different sort of thing. They aren't arising from US government technology; they're arising from Moore's Law and economies of scale.
Ten years ago, it would have been extremely difficult and expensive to build a handheld drone with built-in stabilization, navigation, and video transmission. Today, such a drone is well within the budget of most first-world individuals. This has almost nothing to do with any government's efforts. These drones aren't spinoffs from Predators, or cruise missiles, or V-2 buzz-bombs; they're spinoffs from mobile phones and toy helicopters.
So far, what Americans are most concerned about is voyeurism. Most of them haven't yet realized the existential danger here: if a $200 drone (soon to be a $20 drone) can hover outside your window and peep at your daughter, it can also fly up under your eaves and set itself on (hot, lithium-fueled) fire. A terrorist or ex-spouse or misguided kid needn't be smart or resourceful to figure out how; they need only find an Internet posting from someone who's figured it out.
It's Slashdot's dirty little secret: many posters are actually meatbags. Sometimes some of them forget to pretend that they aren't interested in meatbag-only news, like meatbag debugging techniques.
If you're (understandably) grossed out by meatbag-related news, yeah, you might want to consider relocating.
Perhaps someone should tell Microsoft that "binged" is already a word, and it's neither pronounced nor defined they way they apparently hope it will be.
Well, yes, paper towels might be more effective and more hygenic, but without Dyson Airblades or those obnoxious XLerator blow-dryers, how are we expected to damage our hearing in the restroom? If we don't have a 95-decibel mini-jet-engine firing up every few seconds in a small room covered in hard, echoing surfaces, we'll pretty much have to stick actual spikes in our ears to get the same result.
Just remember this: if there's no mandate for general accessibility, and accessible tools aren't widely available, it'll be a lot harder for you to kill yourself and get out of our way when you get old enough to develop tremors, lose your hearing, or lose your sight.
I did a double-take at that -- it just didn't sound plausible. But, sure enough, Manhattan is just a couple of kilometers wide, and a kilometer is a million millimeters. If there are millions of axons passing through that cubic millimeter of cortex, that's about how far the segments would stretch in total.
Not "all" directions, but all directions from which Earth appears to be transiting the Sun -- and that's, let's see, Sun subtends 0.5 degrees from Earth, similar triangles, you'd need a beam spread of about 0.25 square degrees. I don't even have the back of an envelope handy, but it seems like that means emulating the Sun's brightness over about 2 one-millionths of its total radiant pattern. No, wait, you'd only need to emulate the part that the Earth is blocking -- in the limit, about one ten-thousandth of that previous total.
0.2 x 10^-9 of the Sun's total radiant flux is still... rather a lot of power.
Actually, I'm making this a lot harder than it needs to be. Look up how much power the Earth absorbs from the Sun. Build a laser that can radiate that much power out from the night side of our planet, erasing the deficit from the Sun's radiative pattern. Now, how are you going to power that laser, never mind handling the waste heat from its less-than-100% efficiency?
I know -- build giant solar panels in independent orbit around the Sun! But, oh dear, now you have to mask their transit signatures.
A better idea: how about we build a really huge farm of solar panels around Earth, changing its signature from "Earth-like planet" to "just another Jovian giant"? Then all we'll have to worry about is imperialistic gas-bags trying to take over a nonexistent planet. (I'll leave the political comparisons to other posters.)
Red herring. Helium should properly be called "helion".
As for aluminum/aluminium, I'll grant that aluminium is "correct" when we all also adopt "platinium", "lanthanium" and "molybdenium". For bonus points, we can go back and retcon iron to "ferrium", gold to "aurium", lead to "plumbium"...
...is definitely an announcement that top executives are going to sign a pledge. Ask any worker under conditions of strict anonymity, and I'm sure they'll cite the lack of executive-level pledges as their main day-to-day impediment.
Yes, I think the day of computer-generated best-sellers will come sooner than most people think. Train your network on the whole corpus of current literature, weight things according to market performance, do lots of a/b testing with the first short stuff you generate, and grow it out as you learn to optimize.
The bad news is that the market will be entirely flooded by the novel-length equivalent of "you won't BELIEVE what happened after this one weird trick..."
You just make sure that the first thing you print is another smartphone. Set your phone to airplane mode while doing so. Once you have the duplicate phone, since it's not on a plan, you don't need to worry about it getting any calls; use it to print subsequent models.
Don't forget to take your phone back out of airplane mode. Once you start selling all those duplicate phones, you'll want to make sure your customers can reach you.
Slashdot Mirror
Fruit flies like a banana.
There's nothing silly about wanting automatic machines to reduce human labor more than they already have. Just because they don't have a single machine to both wash and dry clothes now doesn't mean we shouldn't ever expect this.
You mean like these?
Well, that's even sillier. As far as I know, nobody's expecting autonomous vehicles to reach out with a great robotic claw, grab potential passengers, and belt them into their seats, then escort them into their offices and place them in their cubicles.
Good point. After all, Slashdot readers as a group are superhumanly skilled drivers, and the venom they direct at any post supporting autonomous vehicles is simply a rational response to the threat posed by less-perfect-than-them machines. Any autonomous posting system would quickly adjust to this fact, and stop bothering to post in vehicle threads.
If you need to guide each step of your dishwasher or washing machine's progress through the various phases of the cleaning cycle, manually controlling the speed of the agitator/drum/washing arms... you should visit an appliance store. A lot has changed in the last eighty or ninety years. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Flooding a human driver's "optical sensors" with laser light is a pretty effective DoS attack, when you come right down to it.
I'm sorry that commas are confusing. Here, maybe this will help.
Slide 1:
OPEN SOURCING OUR PLATFORM
Slide 2:
...ACROSS ALL SKILL LEVELS!
* Schools
* Student Groups
* Organizations
Slide 3:
HOST YOUR OWN:
* Competitions
* Practice sessions
* Conferences
Slide 4:
TEACH SKILLS:
* Computer Science
* Security
Slide 5:
<happy music video>
Do you seriously think that Lyft would deploy cars that don't video-record every second of interior and exterior activity from multiple angles, indexed against the full contact information of each user?
I hate it when the handlers don't warn the bystanders before they throw in the raw meat.
Well, I can't say I'm surprised that they omitted "the red pen" from their list.
Well, I also can't prove that you aren't capable of reaching out with your thoughts, grabbing the Moon, and hurling it into the Sun.
However, the preponderance of evidence strongly suggests that you can't. In fact, it would be silly to believe that you could, even though noted physicists like William Shatner say "anything is possible". I'll even go so far as to claim that you can't, even though I admittedly don't have a lot of experience, experimental data, or resources to devote to telekinetic orbital mechanics.
If the US government had not designed, built, and deployed drones on the massive scale that it did, the state of the art in drone manufacture would not be nearly as far advanced as it is. Can you list any sophisticated technical innovations that have been introduced by terrorists, before any government had done so?
You seem to think of "drones" as large, powerful aircraft bristling with weapons. The ones that are "much smaller, cheaper, and easier to build", the ones making "the air of the USA... thick with privately-owned drones", are a very different sort of thing. They aren't arising from US government technology; they're arising from Moore's Law and economies of scale.
Ten years ago, it would have been extremely difficult and expensive to build a handheld drone with built-in stabilization, navigation, and video transmission. Today, such a drone is well within the budget of most first-world individuals. This has almost nothing to do with any government's efforts. These drones aren't spinoffs from Predators, or cruise missiles, or V-2 buzz-bombs; they're spinoffs from mobile phones and toy helicopters.
So far, what Americans are most concerned about is voyeurism. Most of them haven't yet realized the existential danger here: if a $200 drone (soon to be a $20 drone) can hover outside your window and peep at your daughter, it can also fly up under your eaves and set itself on (hot, lithium-fueled) fire. A terrorist or ex-spouse or misguided kid needn't be smart or resourceful to figure out how; they need only find an Internet posting from someone who's figured it out.
Please tell me more about this $50 drone with more than 3.5kg of payload capacity.
It's Slashdot's dirty little secret: many posters are actually meatbags. Sometimes some of them forget to pretend that they aren't interested in meatbag-only news, like meatbag debugging techniques.
If you're (understandably) grossed out by meatbag-related news, yeah, you might want to consider relocating.
Perhaps someone should tell Microsoft that "binged" is already a word, and it's neither pronounced nor defined they way they apparently hope it will be.
Well, yes, paper towels might be more effective and more hygenic, but without Dyson Airblades or those obnoxious XLerator blow-dryers, how are we expected to damage our hearing in the restroom? If we don't have a 95-decibel mini-jet-engine firing up every few seconds in a small room covered in hard, echoing surfaces, we'll pretty much have to stick actual spikes in our ears to get the same result.
Just remember this: if there's no mandate for general accessibility, and accessible tools aren't widely available, it'll be a lot harder for you to kill yourself and get out of our way when you get old enough to develop tremors, lose your hearing, or lose your sight.
You know, if you say "is", you really don't have to say "currently" or "right now", much less both.
The planet is going to lose its balance and fall over. And then you'll be sorry.
I did a double-take at that -- it just didn't sound plausible. But, sure enough, Manhattan is just a couple of kilometers wide, and a kilometer is a million millimeters. If there are millions of axons passing through that cubic millimeter of cortex, that's about how far the segments would stretch in total.
Not "all" directions, but all directions from which Earth appears to be transiting the Sun -- and that's, let's see, Sun subtends 0.5 degrees from Earth, similar triangles, you'd need a beam spread of about 0.25 square degrees. I don't even have the back of an envelope handy, but it seems like that means emulating the Sun's brightness over about 2 one-millionths of its total radiant pattern. No, wait, you'd only need to emulate the part that the Earth is blocking -- in the limit, about one ten-thousandth of that previous total.
0.2 x 10^-9 of the Sun's total radiant flux is still... rather a lot of power.
Actually, I'm making this a lot harder than it needs to be. Look up how much power the Earth absorbs from the Sun. Build a laser that can radiate that much power out from the night side of our planet, erasing the deficit from the Sun's radiative pattern. Now, how are you going to power that laser, never mind handling the waste heat from its less-than-100% efficiency?
I know -- build giant solar panels in independent orbit around the Sun! But, oh dear, now you have to mask their transit signatures.
A better idea: how about we build a really huge farm of solar panels around Earth, changing its signature from "Earth-like planet" to "just another Jovian giant"? Then all we'll have to worry about is imperialistic gas-bags trying to take over a nonexistent planet. (I'll leave the political comparisons to other posters.)
Red herring. Helium should properly be called "helion".
As for aluminum/aluminium, I'll grant that aluminium is "correct" when we all also adopt "platinium", "lanthanium" and "molybdenium". For bonus points, we can go back and retcon iron to "ferrium", gold to "aurium", lead to "plumbium"...
...is definitely an announcement that top executives are going to sign a pledge. Ask any worker under conditions of strict anonymity, and I'm sure they'll cite the lack of executive-level pledges as their main day-to-day impediment.
Yes, I think the day of computer-generated best-sellers will come sooner than most people think. Train your network on the whole corpus of current literature, weight things according to market performance, do lots of a/b testing with the first short stuff you generate, and grow it out as you learn to optimize.
The bad news is that the market will be entirely flooded by the novel-length equivalent of "you won't BELIEVE what happened after this one weird trick..."
You just make sure that the first thing you print is another smartphone. Set your phone to airplane mode while doing so. Once you have the duplicate phone, since it's not on a plan, you don't need to worry about it getting any calls; use it to print subsequent models.
Don't forget to take your phone back out of airplane mode. Once you start selling all those duplicate phones, you'll want to make sure your customers can reach you.