They were also in a frontier with big empty spaces at the borders, and had veteran, proven state militias and professional military leadership. There was no thought of "we'll never need an army" but instead "we have all the army we need already, in the state militias".
Today war is highly technical, and raising a militia fairly pointless when it comes to war - a soldier with the right training and equipment is vastly more effective than a guy with an assault rifle. As we move more to bots it will become more so. It's much like the centuries before Agincourt, where the advantage of good armor and a warhorse, with years of training for both man and horse, was equally extreme.
Microsoft has a long history of producing shitty, proprietary technology and then abandoning it later.
Sure, but it's more fair to say: Microsoft has a long history of producing new technologies/tools, and then abandoning the shitty ones. Most ideas that look good on paper don't work out well in the long run. There's nothing specific to Microsoft about that, except they're one of the few software companies that's been around for 20+ years to have so much baggage.
And, seriously, would you prefer they kept COM and ActiveX around? Eesh.
always thought the famous attribution was spoken *to* the mexicans as a warning, not to the Texans as a motivator.
Not where I grew up, anyhow. Heck, my Mom had a notepad stuck to the fridge with "Things to Remember" printed as the header, and places to write 1 -10 as a numbered list of tasks. Of course, 1 was pre-printed: "The Alamo". Maybe it was an earlier time, but it was seeped into the culture as motivation.
Anyhow, ever generation has had it's hippies with their "we don't need an army" and "what if they gave a war and nobody came". Sadly, all of human history begs to differ, and the answer to "what if they gave a war and only one side came" is very grim indeed. There's still a lot of genocide ongoing in the world.
Do you believe the supply of US$ has any but the weakest connection to the amount of paper money? Do you believe bitcoins any different if banks ever care about it?
If banks ever start offering BTC-denominated savings accounts and loans (I supposed we'd call them euro-bitcoins at that point) then scarcity is right out.
A currency has value only from what people will trade for it. Scarcity is only important in so far as it informs that. The US dollar isn't really scarce any more, as the Fed has established what amounts to an infinite pool, but that's a slow-motion effect and locally it still works.
Right, anyone who disagrees with you is a racist, where have I heard that before?
The Mexican drug cartels are better organized and better equipped (and far more sociopathic) than the Mexican army. And as someone who will always Remember the Alamo, I don't ignore the threat the Mexican army presents.
As far as the deficit vs military spend - I go by the link in my sig - those numbers are well sourced. Either way, we're sure to keep cutting military spending, heedless of any risk, and cutting everything else except "mailing checks to voters" and high-pork programs. Our current crop of politicians sees the budget only as a tool to buy votes, as any actual governing is a joke. This will end in tears.
15% of Americans were affected by the temporary cut in food stamp benefits Friday. How many people need their Social Security checks to live? How many need their Medicaid or Medicare checks? How many need their federal pension checks?
Add that to the quite significant percentage of people who work for the government, and around half the voters need their monthly government checks. This is the failure mode of democracy.
What stops anything from going faster than the speed of light is that the faster an object goes, the more massive it becomes
No no no. I wish people would stop repeating this. That's not at all true. As you go faster, relative to me, your clock (as I see it) slows down. That's it. That's the effect of relativity. Mass is just wrong, it's all time.
The better way to explain the speed limit though has nothing to do with that. Everything in the universe goes at the same speed - c- all the time. Usually we move in the direction we call "the future" at this speed - one second per second. All any form of acceleration does is change the direction of that vector. At low speeds, we're still moving almost entirely in the "future" direction, so relativistic effects are negligible, but as your velocity becomes mostly in the "distance" direction your progress in time slows (at least, as seen by me). But since you're always going c all the time, there's simply no way to go faster - there is only one speed.
What you want is a "starwisp". Accelerating meat to near-c and then trying to shield it is silly. Accelerate a 1 kg computer carrying AI instead. AI is no more of a reach than the idea of harnessing that much power, so why not?
Do you? That would be hot - but I have about 1000, mostly in hardback (I'd have many more, but I keep having to move cross-country). Judging by your UID, you've been collecting for as long as I have, so I could believe it.
Ending the standing military and increasing homeland defenses would balance the budget.
No, it wouldn't. Our deficit is that insane. It would help a bunch, but really a strong standing military is a good investment - the economic damage done by an invasion is so extreme that even if the risk is low, it's worth funding some military. However, there's no doubt that significant military cuts are coming: we'll cut everything except mailing checks to voters until there's just nothing else left to cut.
(BTW, there are greedy and sociopathic folks on our southern border that are armed better than any police force, despite not being a nation-state. The world is full of assholes, and you do need to deter them).
If people cared 10% enough to have an armed rebellion, we'd fix this though the voting booth. The sad fact is, many people are comfortable with tyranny for as long as the government check comes, and will riot only when the EBT card stops working, and the government loves this.
We have a government determined to create ever-more people dependent on their government check for the basics of life, and an ever-growing group that knows no other way to live. This will end in tears.
Well, I don't know. Relativity doesn't require ideas such as a universal clock or some universally common frame of reference, but there is one nevertheless. When speaking of some event 1 million years ago and 1 million LY away, both concepts of time are meaningful.
Of your you were right, but: no one's taking away the handbuilt general purpose PC. As every true geek has one (or six), nothing of value will be lost.
And we had better not go around curing disease withoput also promoting birth control. Despite what the churches say, and the local dislikes and prejudices. Or we'll just be condemning more people to starve
Well, you're unlikely to persuade a Catholic charity to do that, but others can (and do) take up the slack. Heck, even in predominately Catholic countries people stop having so many children once child mortality drops (with about a 1-generation lag), and their priests are smart enough not to enquire too closely. Cure diseases now, people are smart enough to manage the birth rate later.
Except in General Relativity, something that happened 1 million years ago and 1 million light years away is happening now in the real, but non-intuitive, sense of "now". Our intuitions about time and distance are Newtonian, and not all that helpful at other scales.
What happens if we pass "peak oil" and no one notices? If you haven't been keeping track, supply is "not an issue" at current prices, and current oil prices seem unlikely to cause the collapse of society (there is more oil available in sands and shale than perhaps you realize - perhaps more than all the liquid oil there ever was). Perhaps oil usage will peak soon: eventually some other energy storage technology is bound to take over for transportation, but not in a bad way.
Gradually, bit by bit, each human worker in the economy is becoming obsoleted. This is pretty cool technology, and if the way our economy and politics worked was similarly cool this would be an undeniably great thing. However, socially this means reduction in employment, and reduction in wages paid for others. Steadily, over time, we have broken down professions and it will be increasingly hard to find things humans are actually useful for as employees or business operators in 'the economy.' What then?
Fortunately, humans always want more goods and services. If 100% of existing goods and services were provided by robot, we could still have full employment providing more.
I believe eventually we'll all have jobs providing consulting services to one another on which of all this free stuff made by robots would please us most. And the sexbots aren't going to program themselves, you know.
No, that's a myth. A stab wound from a (kitchen-sized) knife typically does more damage than a bullet, at least for torso wounds. And the knife never runs out of ammo. Whether shot or stabbed in the torso, your survival is more about how long it takes you to medical care, either way you're bleeding to death internally unless you get help soon.
There's a big difference when people are spread out, or when they might fight back, but when it's a bunch of people tightly packed and disarmed, a knife is sadly just as deadly.
The TSA is a volunteer service. I have just slightly more sympathy for them than the "fucking people too" who joined the SS. But of course there's no excuse for shooting at them - you never know where those bullets might end up; you'll likely hurt someone nearby!
Several "mass stabbings" have happened in the past couple of years. When people are tightly packed, this doesn't require a ninja, just a kitchen knife.
The best part of the first Cannonball Run was the team that used an ambulance for the race (wasn't that Burt Reynold's character?). Csaba Csereactually did this in the real Cannonball Run! He said it worked perfectly - they had no trouble from the law, and would have won except the ambulance blew it's transmission as they approached the west coast. (Hey guys, next time don't stop in San Francisco to blow a tranny.)
Slashdot Mirror
They were also in a frontier with big empty spaces at the borders, and had veteran, proven state militias and professional military leadership. There was no thought of "we'll never need an army" but instead "we have all the army we need already, in the state militias".
Today war is highly technical, and raising a militia fairly pointless when it comes to war - a soldier with the right training and equipment is vastly more effective than a guy with an assault rifle. As we move more to bots it will become more so. It's much like the centuries before Agincourt, where the advantage of good armor and a warhorse, with years of training for both man and horse, was equally extreme.
Microsoft has a long history of producing shitty, proprietary technology and then abandoning it later.
Sure, but it's more fair to say: Microsoft has a long history of producing new technologies/tools, and then abandoning the shitty ones. Most ideas that look good on paper don't work out well in the long run. There's nothing specific to Microsoft about that, except they're one of the few software companies that's been around for 20+ years to have so much baggage.
And, seriously, would you prefer they kept COM and ActiveX around? Eesh.
always thought the famous attribution was spoken *to* the mexicans as a warning, not to the Texans as a motivator.
Not where I grew up, anyhow. Heck, my Mom had a notepad stuck to the fridge with "Things to Remember" printed as the header, and places to write 1 -10 as a numbered list of tasks. Of course, 1 was pre-printed: "The Alamo". Maybe it was an earlier time, but it was seeped into the culture as motivation.
Anyhow, ever generation has had it's hippies with their "we don't need an army" and "what if they gave a war and nobody came". Sadly, all of human history begs to differ, and the answer to "what if they gave a war and only one side came" is very grim indeed. There's still a lot of genocide ongoing in the world.
Do you believe the supply of US$ has any but the weakest connection to the amount of paper money? Do you believe bitcoins any different if banks ever care about it?
If banks ever start offering BTC-denominated savings accounts and loans (I supposed we'd call them euro-bitcoins at that point) then scarcity is right out.
A currency has value only from what people will trade for it. Scarcity is only important in so far as it informs that. The US dollar isn't really scarce any more, as the Fed has established what amounts to an infinite pool, but that's a slow-motion effect and locally it still works.
Right, anyone who disagrees with you is a racist, where have I heard that before?
The Mexican drug cartels are better organized and better equipped (and far more sociopathic) than the Mexican army. And as someone who will always Remember the Alamo, I don't ignore the threat the Mexican army presents.
As far as the deficit vs military spend - I go by the link in my sig - those numbers are well sourced. Either way, we're sure to keep cutting military spending, heedless of any risk, and cutting everything else except "mailing checks to voters" and high-pork programs. Our current crop of politicians sees the budget only as a tool to buy votes, as any actual governing is a joke. This will end in tears.
15% of Americans were affected by the temporary cut in food stamp benefits Friday. How many people need their Social Security checks to live? How many need their Medicaid or Medicare checks? How many need their federal pension checks?
Add that to the quite significant percentage of people who work for the government, and around half the voters need their monthly government checks. This is the failure mode of democracy.
What stops anything from going faster than the speed of light is that the faster an object goes, the more massive it becomes
No no no. I wish people would stop repeating this. That's not at all true. As you go faster, relative to me, your clock (as I see it) slows down. That's it. That's the effect of relativity. Mass is just wrong, it's all time.
The better way to explain the speed limit though has nothing to do with that. Everything in the universe goes at the same speed - c- all the time. Usually we move in the direction we call "the future" at this speed - one second per second. All any form of acceleration does is change the direction of that vector. At low speeds, we're still moving almost entirely in the "future" direction, so relativistic effects are negligible, but as your velocity becomes mostly in the "distance" direction your progress in time slows (at least, as seen by me). But since you're always going c all the time, there's simply no way to go faster - there is only one speed.
What you want is a "starwisp". Accelerating meat to near-c and then trying to shield it is silly. Accelerate a 1 kg computer carrying AI instead. AI is no more of a reach than the idea of harnessing that much power, so why not?
Do you? That would be hot - but I have about 1000, mostly in hardback (I'd have many more, but I keep having to move cross-country). Judging by your UID, you've been collecting for as long as I have, so I could believe it.
Ending the standing military and increasing homeland defenses would balance the budget.
No, it wouldn't. Our deficit is that insane. It would help a bunch, but really a strong standing military is a good investment - the economic damage done by an invasion is so extreme that even if the risk is low, it's worth funding some military. However, there's no doubt that significant military cuts are coming: we'll cut everything except mailing checks to voters until there's just nothing else left to cut.
(BTW, there are greedy and sociopathic folks on our southern border that are armed better than any police force, despite not being a nation-state. The world is full of assholes, and you do need to deter them).
If people cared 10% enough to have an armed rebellion, we'd fix this though the voting booth. The sad fact is, many people are comfortable with tyranny for as long as the government check comes, and will riot only when the EBT card stops working, and the government loves this.
We have a government determined to create ever-more people dependent on their government check for the basics of life, and an ever-growing group that knows no other way to live. This will end in tears.
Well, I don't know. Relativity doesn't require ideas such as a universal clock or some universally common frame of reference, but there is one nevertheless. When speaking of some event 1 million years ago and 1 million LY away, both concepts of time are meaningful.
Of your you were right, but: no one's taking away the handbuilt general purpose PC. As every true geek has one (or six), nothing of value will be lost.
And we had better not go around curing disease withoput also promoting birth control. Despite what the churches say, and the local dislikes and prejudices. Or we'll just be condemning more people to starve
Well, you're unlikely to persuade a Catholic charity to do that, but others can (and do) take up the slack. Heck, even in predominately Catholic countries people stop having so many children once child mortality drops (with about a 1-generation lag), and their priests are smart enough not to enquire too closely. Cure diseases now, people are smart enough to manage the birth rate later.
That's more to do with the amount of exposed rock vs rock covered by ice. Rock weathering is the only carbon cycle that matters on geological scales.
Except in General Relativity, something that happened 1 million years ago and 1 million light years away is happening now in the real, but non-intuitive, sense of "now". Our intuitions about time and distance are Newtonian, and not all that helpful at other scales.
It takes 1.2 x 10^(-7) cubic furlongs of sand to make 4 firkins of oil, so about an 8-9 to 1 reduction.
What happens if we pass "peak oil" and no one notices? If you haven't been keeping track, supply is "not an issue" at current prices, and current oil prices seem unlikely to cause the collapse of society (there is more oil available in sands and shale than perhaps you realize - perhaps more than all the liquid oil there ever was). Perhaps oil usage will peak soon: eventually some other energy storage technology is bound to take over for transportation, but not in a bad way.
Gradually, bit by bit, each human worker in the economy is becoming obsoleted. This is pretty cool technology, and if the way our economy and politics worked was similarly cool this would be an undeniably great thing.
However, socially this means reduction in employment, and reduction in wages paid for others. Steadily, over time, we have broken down professions and it will be increasingly hard to find things humans are actually useful for as employees or business operators in 'the economy.' What then?
Fortunately, humans always want more goods and services. If 100% of existing goods and services were provided by robot, we could still have full employment providing more.
I believe eventually we'll all have jobs providing consulting services to one another on which of all this free stuff made by robots would please us most. And the sexbots aren't going to program themselves, you know.
No, that's a myth. A stab wound from a (kitchen-sized) knife typically does more damage than a bullet, at least for torso wounds. And the knife never runs out of ammo. Whether shot or stabbed in the torso, your survival is more about how long it takes you to medical care, either way you're bleeding to death internally unless you get help soon.
There's a big difference when people are spread out, or when they might fight back, but when it's a bunch of people tightly packed and disarmed, a knife is sadly just as deadly.
The TSA is a volunteer service. I have just slightly more sympathy for them than the "fucking people too" who joined the SS. But of course there's no excuse for shooting at them - you never know where those bullets might end up; you'll likely hurt someone nearby!
Several "mass stabbings" have happened in the past couple of years. When people are tightly packed, this doesn't require a ninja, just a kitchen knife.
The best part of the first Cannonball Run was the team that used an ambulance for the race (wasn't that Burt Reynold's character?). Csaba Csere actually did this in the real Cannonball Run! He said it worked perfectly - they had no trouble from the law, and would have won except the ambulance blew it's transmission as they approached the west coast. (Hey guys, next time don't stop in San Francisco to blow a tranny.)
Yeah, you're not the first to say "customers don't know what they like, I'll tell those idiots what they like!" Good luck with that plan.