In physics, the reason for the halt in progress is obvious: string theory. Half the talent in the field dragged into that cul-de-sac with nothing to show for it. OTOH, there's been tremendous progress in cosmology in the past 20 years, just not the specific sorts of discoveries tied to an individual or pair of authors that the Nobel committee likes.
"We already made it big. There's no need to keep the part of the internet that let that happen. It's just trouble all around if we keep allowing other companies to get big - heck, one of them might compete with us."
Perhaps we need a new internet, or at least a new web. Of course, there's a tough problem to solve: if there's no way for authoritarians to take down content they don't like, or identify uploaders of such content (e.g. Freenet), how do you deal with spam? P2P is great for popular content, but it rather bad for niche content. Still, these seem like problems it's possible to solve.
No. Wind blowing across the turbine on the outside of the roof moves the turbine blades and by design goes "squeak squeak squeak" very loudly. They are extremely efficient in converting wind energy into irritation.
Every time I hear trumps space force I picture that scene from starship troopers where the whole platoon got slaughtered in the first battle.
Why imagine something other that Russia's space force? It's just the guys who do spy satellites moving from the Air Force to the Space Force (and whatever other payloads the AF launches).
C cannot be made safe. It's a language for when you really need raw access. It's a language for kernels, and for writing languages. It's a language for when a memory address actually represents a temperature sensor (if you've ever wondered what a "const volatile int" was). People definitely use it beyond those bounds.
Heck, it's just tradition that keeps kernels in C. Very little of a kernel needs to be.
C++ can be used in a very safe way. All the libraries support it. The continuing problem is that people don't do that. They write "C/C++", that is, they write C++ as if they were writing C. The fact you can do that may make C++ irredeemable for security-conscious code.
I find that very frustrating, having written C++ for years without a memory leak or buffer overflow (it's easy if you use the right primitives). But it would be very hard to police junior coders and keep such vulnerabilities from creeping in, and I wouldn't start a new project in C++ if security was any concern.
At least with C you know where you stand, and that if security is paramount you need to minimize it to where it's the right tool, review it heavily, fuzz test it, and so on.
The problem with all such objections is "what, every alien?" All it takes is one faction from one alien species and the galaxy would be covered with Dyson swarms. Presumably alien psychology is no less diverse than humans.
Also, the technology needed to build a Dyson swarm isn't far ahead of what we have now. It's really the scale that makes it impressive, but it's all pretty straightforward. You really only need fusion power, and not even that to get started. We could put a hole in an asteroid and make a colony for a million people with current tech if we thought it was worth the price.
Also, the sun won't mind if we take some of its mass one day - it will make the sun live longer, cleanse its body of toxins.
It there any way to prove whether Pollock made his paintings to express what he claimed, or made them as a result of convulsions while having the DTs? Would the answer to that question change whether they were art?
If you don't need logical consistency, you're free to choose anything arbitrarily. That being the case, I choose logical consistency. It has proven a very good way of operating effectively in the world.
There are no axioms for ethics, no first principles to reason from except from an "external cause". Without such, you cannot base morality on reason. This is known as the "is-ought gap": there's no principle that lets one reason from an "is" to an "ought".
Various meta-ethical principles have been proposed as starting point, to counter the assumption that held for millennia that there could only be a theological starting point. Kant's ethics, JS Mill's Utilitarianism, etc, etc. One such is a sort of "near-relativism" in which the meta-ethical principle is that every set of ethical principles is simultaneously fine, each person has the right to decide for themselves, except those that hold causing harm to others as the good.
Not sure what connection you're making. The only central authority needed for a Dyson swarm is traffic control (which is a big deal). The swarm itself is a zillion large objects orbiting the Sun, each of which can be doing its own thing - no need to assume any specific economic system, or even any uniformity of such. None, some, or all could be rented: aliens, who knows?
But now you are talking about "some legal definition that needs to be universally agreed on or dictated from up on high". You've just moved the judge from one point to another.
Sure, but Amazon is not paying JeffB particularly much, is the point. His total comp isn't an example of a CEO being paid many times what the average worker makes, as falsely implied by TFA.
A bit OT, but the reason long-term capital gains need to be taxed at a lower rate is that we don't index them for inflation. I'm a huge fan of a true flat tax, taxing all earning the same, but that would include indexing capital gains. It will never happen, sadly, but it would be nice.
You you call modern art "art"? For most of it, there's no real way to determine whether the artist had any intention, beyond profit. But some people find meaning in it, nonetheless. A common definition of good art is a work where different viewers have different interpretations, find differing meanings, and the idea that some of them are right and some wrong does not belong in art.
We might be living in the matrix. A sunset may or may not have a creator. Does that make it Schrodinger's art? Whether or not it's art is indeterminate, and the wavestate can only be collapsed by some possible future observation?
It's also worth pointing out that plenty of people who work for Amazon have top secret clearance (and need it for their job). I've known some. Presumably the quite elaborate clearance process serves some purpose, and just in general any good software dev shop will have processes to detect flawed code. Writing underhanded code that has plausible deniability so you don't go to jail is quite hard, and requires really top-notch skill.
Do you follow the "underhanded C contest"? That is some impressive coding, and you have all the low-level power of C to work with. Vastly harder in Java.
All good engineers care about how their products are used, because it's vital to understand the use cases to make a good product. Some small subset will have no ethical qualms too, but that's a pretty shallow talent pool to hire from.
That makes sense for small projects, but not large systems. Mandatory car analogy:
Some luxury cars now have a feature that uses IR to spot pedestrians at night and highlights them in a HUD to make them easy to see. Ethical? The same tech is used in tank gunsights, and a primitive version in pricey rifle sights. The technology to "see people better at night" has no moral color. But it can be used for good or for evil.
Also, the talent pool of people willing to work on defense projects is plenty deep. Where people get upset is when they thought they were working on the car HUD, and are shocked to discover their tech was later sold as the tank HUD.
That doesn't quite work out. Each person having their morality can nearly be made into a logically consistent system, but not quite. Some people are griefers, to use the gaming term, and delight in hurting others or taking away their rights, and that's their morality. Corporate management seems to collect such people, so it's very relevant here.
So, each person deciding on their own does require one important ethical principle dictated to all: moral systems that hold as a good causing harm to others are invalid. And that's a non-trivial constraint; heck, it's an elaborate ethical code in itself once you look at all the corner cases.
So if every manager decides that bullying from their position of power is fine and ethical, and you say "everyone gets to decide", then they're doing nothing wrong. You're left with nothing more than "but I don't like it", which isn't ethics any more, just subjective taste.
But being aggressively anti-union and using your control over an economic behemoth to keep salaries down and workers firmly under your thumb... that's not bullying at all, right?
Amazon recently decided to pay all its US warehouse workers a minimum of $15/hour. Senior developers at Amazon make more that JeffB does (all his money is from founder's stock, he declined any additional stock-based compensation last year, and his salary was $176k).
Amazon is not a pleasant place to work, and has lots of problems, but they pay well enough.
You joke, but a galaxy mostly covered by Dyson swarms would look something like this. It's the hardest problem in the Fermi paradox: Dyson swarms seem inevitable for a high-tech species, and would be visible in other galaxies if there were a lot of them. But we don't see that.
If an artist took a drug that knocked him unconscious but still made him move his muscles rhythmically and that movement was translated into a painting somehow, I -- and I imagine most people -- wouldn't care for that painting one bit.
You know Jackson Pollock was quite a successful artist, right? I don't like his stuff either, but it's inarguably "art".
It's seeing a slice of the world he experienced as captured by his art in the moment is what we yearn to see.
Mismatch between the speakers intent and the listener's understanding indicates bad communication, but not necessarily bad art. The artists intent is largely irrelevant to the meaning of art - that's part of what separates "practical" from "art". The meaning of art lies within the viewer, and if that exists there need not even be any intent from the artist (e.g., how every cynic thinks modern art works).
Well, Crystal City is clearly lobbyist country. Long Island not so much. The fact that both are within 7 miles of JeffB's houses says it all. Heck, he couldn't even decide on one of them, and went with "build me an HQ near each of my houses".
Virginia has one of the lower tax burdens in the country
Virginia has a freaking income tax. A couple of the cities Amazon conned by pretending they were finalists are in states with no income tax. (And it's no coincidence Amazon started in a state with no income tax.)
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In physics, the reason for the halt in progress is obvious: string theory. Half the talent in the field dragged into that cul-de-sac with nothing to show for it. OTOH, there's been tremendous progress in cosmology in the past 20 years, just not the specific sorts of discoveries tied to an individual or pair of authors that the Nobel committee likes.
"We already made it big. There's no need to keep the part of the internet that let that happen. It's just trouble all around if we keep allowing other companies to get big - heck, one of them might compete with us."
Perhaps we need a new internet, or at least a new web. Of course, there's a tough problem to solve: if there's no way for authoritarians to take down content they don't like, or identify uploaders of such content (e.g. Freenet), how do you deal with spam? P2P is great for popular content, but it rather bad for niche content. Still, these seem like problems it's possible to solve.
No. Wind blowing across the turbine on the outside of the roof moves the turbine blades and by design goes "squeak squeak squeak" very loudly. They are extremely efficient in converting wind energy into irritation.
It's obviously revolutionary - it's a turbine! Wouldn't be much good if it didn't revolve.
Every time I hear trumps space force I picture that scene from starship troopers where the whole platoon got slaughtered in the first battle.
Why imagine something other that Russia's space force? It's just the guys who do spy satellites moving from the Air Force to the Space Force (and whatever other payloads the AF launches).
GEO is effectively two dimensional. Everything passes through the equator, so you can't have two sats at the same longitude.
C/C++ is not a language.
C cannot be made safe. It's a language for when you really need raw access. It's a language for kernels, and for writing languages. It's a language for when a memory address actually represents a temperature sensor (if you've ever wondered what a "const volatile int" was). People definitely use it beyond those bounds.
Heck, it's just tradition that keeps kernels in C. Very little of a kernel needs to be.
C++ can be used in a very safe way. All the libraries support it. The continuing problem is that people don't do that. They write "C/C++", that is, they write C++ as if they were writing C. The fact you can do that may make C++ irredeemable for security-conscious code.
I find that very frustrating, having written C++ for years without a memory leak or buffer overflow (it's easy if you use the right primitives). But it would be very hard to police junior coders and keep such vulnerabilities from creeping in, and I wouldn't start a new project in C++ if security was any concern.
At least with C you know where you stand, and that if security is paramount you need to minimize it to where it's the right tool, review it heavily, fuzz test it, and so on.
The problem with all such objections is "what, every alien?" All it takes is one faction from one alien species and the galaxy would be covered with Dyson swarms. Presumably alien psychology is no less diverse than humans.
Also, the technology needed to build a Dyson swarm isn't far ahead of what we have now. It's really the scale that makes it impressive, but it's all pretty straightforward. You really only need fusion power, and not even that to get started. We could put a hole in an asteroid and make a colony for a million people with current tech if we thought it was worth the price.
Also, the sun won't mind if we take some of its mass one day - it will make the sun live longer, cleanse its body of toxins.
It there any way to prove whether Pollock made his paintings to express what he claimed, or made them as a result of convulsions while having the DTs? Would the answer to that question change whether they were art?
If you don't need logical consistency, you're free to choose anything arbitrarily. That being the case, I choose logical consistency. It has proven a very good way of operating effectively in the world.
There are no axioms for ethics, no first principles to reason from except from an "external cause". Without such, you cannot base morality on reason. This is known as the "is-ought gap": there's no principle that lets one reason from an "is" to an "ought".
Various meta-ethical principles have been proposed as starting point, to counter the assumption that held for millennia that there could only be a theological starting point. Kant's ethics, JS Mill's Utilitarianism, etc, etc. One such is a sort of "near-relativism" in which the meta-ethical principle is that every set of ethical principles is simultaneously fine, each person has the right to decide for themselves, except those that hold causing harm to others as the good.
Not sure what connection you're making. The only central authority needed for a Dyson swarm is traffic control (which is a big deal). The swarm itself is a zillion large objects orbiting the Sun, each of which can be doing its own thing - no need to assume any specific economic system, or even any uniformity of such. None, some, or all could be rented: aliens, who knows?
But now you are talking about "some legal definition that needs to be universally agreed on or dictated from up on high". You've just moved the judge from one point to another.
Sure, but Amazon is not paying JeffB particularly much, is the point. His total comp isn't an example of a CEO being paid many times what the average worker makes, as falsely implied by TFA.
A bit OT, but the reason long-term capital gains need to be taxed at a lower rate is that we don't index them for inflation. I'm a huge fan of a true flat tax, taxing all earning the same, but that would include indexing capital gains. It will never happen, sadly, but it would be nice.
You you call modern art "art"? For most of it, there's no real way to determine whether the artist had any intention, beyond profit. But some people find meaning in it, nonetheless. A common definition of good art is a work where different viewers have different interpretations, find differing meanings, and the idea that some of them are right and some wrong does not belong in art.
We might be living in the matrix. A sunset may or may not have a creator. Does that make it Schrodinger's art? Whether or not it's art is indeterminate, and the wavestate can only be collapsed by some possible future observation?
Hmm, I assumed you would see the bullying by management as a problem. My mistake.
You're making a trollish comparsion - taking a thread straight to Hitler is unneeded.
Most real-life moral issues are not so black-and-white.
It's also worth pointing out that plenty of people who work for Amazon have top secret clearance (and need it for their job). I've known some. Presumably the quite elaborate clearance process serves some purpose, and just in general any good software dev shop will have processes to detect flawed code. Writing underhanded code that has plausible deniability so you don't go to jail is quite hard, and requires really top-notch skill.
Do you follow the "underhanded C contest"? That is some impressive coding, and you have all the low-level power of C to work with. Vastly harder in Java.
All good engineers care about how their products are used, because it's vital to understand the use cases to make a good product. Some small subset will have no ethical qualms too, but that's a pretty shallow talent pool to hire from.
That makes sense for small projects, but not large systems. Mandatory car analogy:
Some luxury cars now have a feature that uses IR to spot pedestrians at night and highlights them in a HUD to make them easy to see. Ethical? The same tech is used in tank gunsights, and a primitive version in pricey rifle sights. The technology to "see people better at night" has no moral color. But it can be used for good or for evil.
Also, the talent pool of people willing to work on defense projects is plenty deep. Where people get upset is when they thought they were working on the car HUD, and are shocked to discover their tech was later sold as the tank HUD.
That doesn't quite work out. Each person having their morality can nearly be made into a logically consistent system, but not quite. Some people are griefers, to use the gaming term, and delight in hurting others or taking away their rights, and that's their morality. Corporate management seems to collect such people, so it's very relevant here.
So, each person deciding on their own does require one important ethical principle dictated to all: moral systems that hold as a good causing harm to others are invalid. And that's a non-trivial constraint; heck, it's an elaborate ethical code in itself once you look at all the corner cases.
So if every manager decides that bullying from their position of power is fine and ethical, and you say "everyone gets to decide", then they're doing nothing wrong. You're left with nothing more than "but I don't like it", which isn't ethics any more, just subjective taste.
But being aggressively anti-union and using your control over an economic behemoth to keep salaries down and workers firmly under your thumb... that's not bullying at all, right?
Amazon recently decided to pay all its US warehouse workers a minimum of $15/hour. Senior developers at Amazon make more that JeffB does (all his money is from founder's stock, he declined any additional stock-based compensation last year, and his salary was $176k).
Amazon is not a pleasant place to work, and has lots of problems, but they pay well enough.
You joke, but a galaxy mostly covered by Dyson swarms would look something like this. It's the hardest problem in the Fermi paradox: Dyson swarms seem inevitable for a high-tech species, and would be visible in other galaxies if there were a lot of them. But we don't see that.
If an artist took a drug that knocked him unconscious but still made him move his muscles rhythmically and that movement was translated into a painting somehow, I -- and I imagine most people -- wouldn't care for that painting one bit.
You know Jackson Pollock was quite a successful artist, right? I don't like his stuff either, but it's inarguably "art".
It's seeing a slice of the world he experienced as captured by his art in the moment is what we yearn to see.
Sounds like a bodycam.
Mismatch between the speakers intent and the listener's understanding indicates bad communication, but not necessarily bad art. The artists intent is largely irrelevant to the meaning of art - that's part of what separates "practical" from "art". The meaning of art lies within the viewer, and if that exists there need not even be any intent from the artist (e.g., how every cynic thinks modern art works).
Well, Crystal City is clearly lobbyist country. Long Island not so much. The fact that both are within 7 miles of JeffB's houses says it all. Heck, he couldn't even decide on one of them, and went with "build me an HQ near each of my houses".
Virginia has one of the lower tax burdens in the country
Virginia has a freaking income tax. A couple of the cities Amazon conned by pretending they were finalists are in states with no income tax. (And it's no coincidence Amazon started in a state with no income tax.)