Invulnerable immortality would be Very Bad Indeed, the sort of thing that mortals who especially piss off the classical Greek pantheon get stuck with.
A freedom from biological aging(ideally with somewhat superior regenerative capabilities than presently available, to cover life' nicks, bumps, and 3rd-degree-burns-covering-94%-of-your-body) though seems like it would be an obvious good. Even if it turns out that ennui makes life untenable at age 150, I don't see any advantages to being a shriveled, arthritic shell, rather than aging to early 20s-ish and just staying there until life grows uninteresting.
Silence, city slicker. There is no reason that the Good, God-fearing Small Town Americans, with their Values, should be forced to subsidize your fancy city lifestyle. You, of course, have a natural duty to subsidize the cost of running infrastructure all the way to the middle of nowhere, and that guy who lives just down the road aways from the middle of nowhere.
If it means universal service provisions for broadband internet access, then yes.
There are people in rural areas right now that don't have Internet access because telcos aren't willing to spend the money to run it out to them.
Universal service provisions allowed telephone service to reach every single person in the entire country back in the day. The same thing should happen for broadband internet access today.
Given the amazing suckitude of American internet even in relatively ideal buildout areas(speeds are low and prices are high relative to international levels, being able to choose between Verizon and Comcast counts as 'competition', genuinely high speeds are Not For Sale or extraordinarily prohibitively priced, usage quotas, inability to get a dry loop without some 'triple play' bundle bullshit, and similar seem to be getting worse, etc, etc.), I just cannot get enthusiastic about the idea of throwing free money at them to do rural buildout...
(Doubly so now that wireless data services are technologically possible: If Telco A wants to prove that they've provided 'broadband' to 95% of the residents of some chunk of the sticks, in exchange for their juicy pile of cash, it will be comparatively simple to throw up just enough 4G to assure that a smiling company rep can run an internet speed test that hits the required numbers at a certain number of sample points, without going to any real effort to provide useful prices, useful latency, useful reliability, or non-comical usage caps. At least with wireline services, it was a bit harder to cheat on whether or not you'd actually run the wire or not.)
Their experiment in being Wall St. with glaciers didn't work out so hot, though... (to their credit, however, they (relatively speaking) just washed their hands of the issue and told people to fuck off, rather than working on the theory that if we just pandered a little harder to the people who fucked up in the first place, they would deign to fix the problem...)
I think it would have been better said "We have discovered an algorithm that ant know well."
Arguably, unless 'knowing' is something that you can do with substantially less nervous system than we expect, it might be more apt to think of ants as being capable of executing an algorithm, rather than 'knowing' it. By way of example, even children who haven't had a day of math in their lives, and are totally ignorant of the physics describing the trajectories of objects near the earth's surface can still catch a ball you toss to them most of the time(and sending them off to physics class is hardly the most efficient way of improving their performance...)
Or could you just implant metamaterials in your cornea to correct your vision?
I wonder how many nurses it would take to hold the patient down once they learned of your plan to go after their cornea with an ion-beam rework system?
This neither stops the thing from having some value in the interim, nor blunts the condemnation of those who choose to hasten this process for everyone....
Does Consumer Reports still have a good reputation? If so, problem solved
Only partially. To the best of my knowledge, Consumer Reports is still well regarded in terms of freedom from vendor capture, editorial independence, and similar virtues; but it's carefully cultivated area of expertise (necessarily) moves rather slowly and covers limited ground.
Cars, consumer durables, that sort of thing, no problem. Books, music, games, movies, and similar cultural ephemera? Less useful. Consumer electronics not so well known that David Pogue might have heard of them? Less useful. Reputability of the various obscure online retailers who are quite attractive in terms of their ability to cut out the middle man, or at least replace him with a cheaper middleman(Well, let's see, I could go to Best Buy and pay Belkin to slap their sticker on a KVM switch manufactured by Guangdong Light Industries, or I could pay some dude in Hong Kong a third as much to drop-ship me the same damn thing, albeit without a brand sticker and an incomprehensible manual, hard choice...), also not an area of strength.
Even if Consumer Reports brings the consumer electronics tech side of their review mechanism fully to parity with their traditional areas, their scope is inevitably going to be limited compared to the vast volume of stuff out there.
Mr. Todd Jason Rutherford went into the business of poisoning the well, making the internet a worse and less reliable place, and now he just can't trust online reviews... Poor fellow, a dear innocent lamb in a cruel world.
Seriously, fuck this guy and the horse he rode in on. He poisoned the well, let him drink deeply. The only unfortunate part of his sordid story is that he helped impose the same lowered quality on the rest of us. Ah well, at least his business collapsed, ironically thanks to a bad review...
I don't understand how this isn't of practical use.
Size. In order to attack larger problems, you need more entangled qubits. For some mixture of engineering and physics reasons that I am deeply unqualified to discuss, building systems capable of keeping qubits in their proper state seems to get increasingly hairy as the number of qubits you need grows.
That's why '15' is a popular number to factorize in quantum computing experiments. It's really small. Since classical computers are far more mature, and a great deal cheaper, the problems that very small quantum computers are capable of attacking are also solvable in minimal time by ordinary means. Only if you can build a fairly large quantum computer do you get to the point where the extreme efficiency(for certain purposes) of the quantum computations can be applied to problems sufficiently large that you can't just steamroller them with cheap silicon.
In this case, I suspect that the NSA would readily agree... This quantum computer is far too small for any practical purposes that couldn't be brute-forced with a TI-83 much more easily; but tepid accuracy isn't a big deal if checking your work is computationally inexpensive...
the sweep-it-under-the-carpet method of trash removal works great for the inlaws, the planet? not so much
Well, given that most of the newly minted CO2 that we are concerned about is produced by digging up carbon that was swept under the carpet and setting it on fire(with a side of deforestation), I'd say that under-the-carpet storage is a time-proven part of the carbon cycle.
Now, techniques for sweeping it under the carpet without titanic amounts of energy and in less than geologic time... that's still in progress.
Please, do correct me if I'm wrong; but I was under the impression that the overwhelming majority of the cost of doing space work was in launching the things, with the relatively high salary and R&D costs of building sophisticated precision instruments in very short runs.
Is the cost of computing anywhere near that significant(especially in situations where you are willing to skip serious rad-hard gear), to the point where you would be better off using a commodity phone(with screen, consumer-pocket-resistant chassis, more GPU than you need for Quake3, etc.) rather than a slightly more expensive, but by no means all that esoteric, ARM SoC board designed for embedded applications? In the same vein, is there an advantage to using an Android environment(whose virtues lie primarily in UI and 3rd party applications) rather than a standard embedded linux or other OS?
Booting in under 30 seconds is going to be a bit of a trick for anything servery. Even just putzing around in the BIOS can eat up most of that time(potentially some minutes if there is a lot of memory being self-tested, or if the system has a bunch of hairy option ROMs, as the SCSI/SAS/RAID-generally disk controllers commonly found in servers generally do...) If you really want fast, you just need to suck it up and get hot-swappable storage: even SATA supports that(well, some chipsets do, your mileage may vary, talk to your vendor and kidnap the vendor's children to ensure you get a straight answer, no warranty express or implied, etc.) and SAS damn well better, and supports SATA drives. That way, it doesn't matter how long the server takes to boot, you can just swap the disks in and either leave it running or set the BIOS wakeup schedule to have it start booting ten minutes before you expect to need it.
Slightly classier would be using/dev/disk/by-label or by-UUID to assign a unique mountpoint for every drive sled that might come in from the field(ie. allowing you to easily tell which field unit the drive came from).
If the files from each site are assured to have unique names, you could present them in a single mount directory with unionFS; but you probably don't want to find out what happens if every site spits out identically named FOO.log files, and(unless there is a painfully crippled tool somewhere else in the chain) having a directory per mountpoint shouldn't be terribly serious business.
1. Most DRM systems(and even some many non-DRMed consumer 'cloud sync' stuff) are built around the architectural assumption that a given device will have one 'account' authorized/set/whatever at a time, and each 'account' will have some set of things licensed to it. Even if you have my credentials, it is generally somewhere between 'awkward' and 'designed not to be possible' for you to actually use a union of your account and mine, or even transfer stuff from my account to yours. You can deathorize your account and authorize mine, and then be stuck with access just to my stuff, and even switch back and forth; but you generally can't transparently access the contents of both.
2. Because this stuff is mostly distributed on a 'licensed not sold, DRM-circumvention-forbidden, the EULA owns you now, suck it peasant' basis, you likely don't have much clout in terms of getting anything in #1 changed in your favor. At best, those UI/UX decisions are just a customer support problem, at worst, you might be explicitly prohibited from accessing somebody else's account, even if they wanted you to, and Dear Old Dad's estate can get its account banhammered for even trying to let the heirs in(if detected, obviously password sharing happens all the time).
Some sort of keeps-the-accountants-employed trust structure might have some advantages(incidentally, given the very low cost of setting up a US corporation in places like Delaware and Nevada, has anybody considered getting around the regional restrictions by purchasing through a US shell's credit card?); but it would be unlikely to save you from the fact that account aggregation is generally somewhere between unsupported and explicitly forbidden...
The problem isn't so much that 'using the internet to exchange documents' is a bad plan(because it isn't) but that Blackboard's specific offering in that area blows goats through capillary tubing. At least it's expensive and buggy, though.
The cases always get a bit more interesting if the feds are involved(because institutionalizing pesky dissidents for being crazy would be a convenient thing to be able to do); but there are a lot of much more prosaic involuntary psych commitments. A suicide attempt will probably earn you one, as will psychosis or delusions sufficiently strong and unpleasant to render you likely to violence toward yourself or others.
For obvious reasons, this corner of medicine really does bear considerable watching; but it operates largely according to protocols designed for serious but politically uninteresting psych cases. Being seriously mentally ill and cogent enough to be a credible threat to political types is relatively rare.
Why ask for a credit card number when you can rest assured that most customers who actually have and use one will pay with it and present their 'loyalty card' in the same transaction within the fairly near future?
Oh, don't you worry your pretty little consumer head about that...
If you are purchasing a luxury item that will provide status and prestige, you can take advantage of 'facebook sponsored purchases' in order to insert news of your purchase more prominently into your friend's facebook pages for just a small additional fee.
If you are buying an embarrassing sex toy, our Founder's Favorite 'They "trust me"; Dumb fucks.', option will keep your little secret just between you and Zuck, 100% guaranteed*!
Slashdot Mirror
Invulnerable immortality would be Very Bad Indeed, the sort of thing that mortals who especially piss off the classical Greek pantheon get stuck with.
A freedom from biological aging(ideally with somewhat superior regenerative capabilities than presently available, to cover life' nicks, bumps, and 3rd-degree-burns-covering-94%-of-your-body) though seems like it would be an obvious good. Even if it turns out that ennui makes life untenable at age 150, I don't see any advantages to being a shriveled, arthritic shell, rather than aging to early 20s-ish and just staying there until life grows uninteresting.
Silence, city slicker. There is no reason that the Good, God-fearing Small Town Americans, with their Values, should be forced to subsidize your fancy city lifestyle. You, of course, have a natural duty to subsidize the cost of running infrastructure all the way to the middle of nowhere, and that guy who lives just down the road aways from the middle of nowhere.
If it means universal service provisions for broadband internet access, then yes.
There are people in rural areas right now that don't have Internet access because telcos aren't willing to spend the money to run it out to them.
Universal service provisions allowed telephone service to reach every single person in the entire country back in the day. The same thing should happen for broadband internet access today.
Given the amazing suckitude of American internet even in relatively ideal buildout areas(speeds are low and prices are high relative to international levels, being able to choose between Verizon and Comcast counts as 'competition', genuinely high speeds are Not For Sale or extraordinarily prohibitively priced, usage quotas, inability to get a dry loop without some 'triple play' bundle bullshit, and similar seem to be getting worse, etc, etc.), I just cannot get enthusiastic about the idea of throwing free money at them to do rural buildout...
(Doubly so now that wireless data services are technologically possible: If Telco A wants to prove that they've provided 'broadband' to 95% of the residents of some chunk of the sticks, in exchange for their juicy pile of cash, it will be comparatively simple to throw up just enough 4G to assure that a smiling company rep can run an internet speed test that hits the required numbers at a certain number of sample points, without going to any real effort to provide useful prices, useful latency, useful reliability, or non-comical usage caps. At least with wireline services, it was a bit harder to cheat on whether or not you'd actually run the wire or not.)
Their experiment in being Wall St. with glaciers didn't work out so hot, though... (to their credit, however, they (relatively speaking) just washed their hands of the issue and told people to fuck off, rather than working on the theory that if we just pandered a little harder to the people who fucked up in the first place, they would deign to fix the problem...)
I think it would have been better said "We have discovered an algorithm that ant know well."
Arguably, unless 'knowing' is something that you can do with substantially less nervous system than we expect, it might be more apt to think of ants as being capable of executing an algorithm, rather than 'knowing' it. By way of example, even children who haven't had a day of math in their lives, and are totally ignorant of the physics describing the trajectories of objects near the earth's surface can still catch a ball you toss to them most of the time(and sending them off to physics class is hardly the most efficient way of improving their performance...)
Ants may have discovered TCP; but they are ignorant of the secret of aggressive litigation...
Or could you just implant metamaterials in your cornea to correct your vision?
I wonder how many nurses it would take to hold the patient down once they learned of your plan to go after their cornea with an ion-beam rework system?
I'm pretty sure that a distortion-free optical material can only be used to make objective lenses...
And, in the long run, everybody dies.
This neither stops the thing from having some value in the interim, nor blunts the condemnation of those who choose to hasten this process for everyone....
Does Consumer Reports still have a good reputation? If so, problem solved
Only partially. To the best of my knowledge, Consumer Reports is still well regarded in terms of freedom from vendor capture, editorial independence, and similar virtues; but it's carefully cultivated area of expertise (necessarily) moves rather slowly and covers limited ground.
Cars, consumer durables, that sort of thing, no problem. Books, music, games, movies, and similar cultural ephemera? Less useful. Consumer electronics not so well known that David Pogue might have heard of them? Less useful. Reputability of the various obscure online retailers who are quite attractive in terms of their ability to cut out the middle man, or at least replace him with a cheaper middleman(Well, let's see, I could go to Best Buy and pay Belkin to slap their sticker on a KVM switch manufactured by Guangdong Light Industries, or I could pay some dude in Hong Kong a third as much to drop-ship me the same damn thing, albeit without a brand sticker and an incomprehensible manual, hard choice...), also not an area of strength.
Even if Consumer Reports brings the consumer electronics tech side of their review mechanism fully to parity with their traditional areas, their scope is inevitably going to be limited compared to the vast volume of stuff out there.
Mr. Todd Jason Rutherford went into the business of poisoning the well, making the internet a worse and less reliable place, and now he just can't trust online reviews... Poor fellow, a dear innocent lamb in a cruel world.
Seriously, fuck this guy and the horse he rode in on. He poisoned the well, let him drink deeply. The only unfortunate part of his sordid story is that he helped impose the same lowered quality on the rest of us. Ah well, at least his business collapsed, ironically thanks to a bad review...
I don't understand how this isn't of practical use.
Size. In order to attack larger problems, you need more entangled qubits. For some mixture of engineering and physics reasons that I am deeply unqualified to discuss, building systems capable of keeping qubits in their proper state seems to get increasingly hairy as the number of qubits you need grows.
That's why '15' is a popular number to factorize in quantum computing experiments. It's really small. Since classical computers are far more mature, and a great deal cheaper, the problems that very small quantum computers are capable of attacking are also solvable in minimal time by ordinary means. Only if you can build a fairly large quantum computer do you get to the point where the extreme efficiency(for certain purposes) of the quantum computations can be applied to problems sufficiently large that you can't just steamroller them with cheap silicon.
In this case, I suspect that the NSA would readily agree... This quantum computer is far too small for any practical purposes that couldn't be brute-forced with a TI-83 much more easily; but tepid accuracy isn't a big deal if checking your work is computationally inexpensive...
the sweep-it-under-the-carpet method of trash removal
works great for the inlaws, the planet? not so much
Well, given that most of the newly minted CO2 that we are concerned about is produced by digging up carbon that was swept under the carpet and setting it on fire(with a side of deforestation), I'd say that under-the-carpet storage is a time-proven part of the carbon cycle.
Now, techniques for sweeping it under the carpet without titanic amounts of energy and in less than geologic time... that's still in progress.
Anybody care how fast a Blue Gene/P boots? :-)
Just hire an IBM consultant to boot it for you. That will give you a new perspective on the costs of boot time...
Please, do correct me if I'm wrong; but I was under the impression that the overwhelming majority of the cost of doing space work was in launching the things, with the relatively high salary and R&D costs of building sophisticated precision instruments in very short runs.
Is the cost of computing anywhere near that significant(especially in situations where you are willing to skip serious rad-hard gear), to the point where you would be better off using a commodity phone(with screen, consumer-pocket-resistant chassis, more GPU than you need for Quake3, etc.) rather than a slightly more expensive, but by no means all that esoteric, ARM SoC board designed for embedded applications? In the same vein, is there an advantage to using an Android environment(whose virtues lie primarily in UI and 3rd party applications) rather than a standard embedded linux or other OS?
Booting in under 30 seconds is going to be a bit of a trick for anything servery. Even just putzing around in the BIOS can eat up most of that time(potentially some minutes if there is a lot of memory being self-tested, or if the system has a bunch of hairy option ROMs, as the SCSI/SAS/RAID-generally disk controllers commonly found in servers generally do...) If you really want fast, you just need to suck it up and get hot-swappable storage: even SATA supports that(well, some chipsets do, your mileage may vary, talk to your vendor and kidnap the vendor's children to ensure you get a straight answer, no warranty express or implied, etc.) and SAS damn well better, and supports SATA drives. That way, it doesn't matter how long the server takes to boot, you can just swap the disks in and either leave it running or set the BIOS wakeup schedule to have it start booting ten minutes before you expect to need it.
Slightly classier would be using /dev/disk/by-label or by-UUID to assign a unique mountpoint for every drive sled that might come in from the field(ie. allowing you to easily tell which field unit the drive came from).
If the files from each site are assured to have unique names, you could present them in a single mount directory with unionFS; but you probably don't want to find out what happens if every site spits out identically named FOO.log files, and(unless there is a painfully crippled tool somewhere else in the chain) having a directory per mountpoint shouldn't be terribly serious business.
Music, yes. Video, books, and executables? I hope you like 'fairplay'...
There are really two problems working together:
1. Most DRM systems(and even some many non-DRMed consumer 'cloud sync' stuff) are built around the architectural assumption that a given device will have one 'account' authorized/set/whatever at a time, and each 'account' will have some set of things licensed to it. Even if you have my credentials, it is generally somewhere between 'awkward' and 'designed not to be possible' for you to actually use a union of your account and mine, or even transfer stuff from my account to yours. You can deathorize your account and authorize mine, and then be stuck with access just to my stuff, and even switch back and forth; but you generally can't transparently access the contents of both.
2. Because this stuff is mostly distributed on a 'licensed not sold, DRM-circumvention-forbidden, the EULA owns you now, suck it peasant' basis, you likely don't have much clout in terms of getting anything in #1 changed in your favor. At best, those UI/UX decisions are just a customer support problem, at worst, you might be explicitly prohibited from accessing somebody else's account, even if they wanted you to, and Dear Old Dad's estate can get its account banhammered for even trying to let the heirs in(if detected, obviously password sharing happens all the time).
Some sort of keeps-the-accountants-employed trust structure might have some advantages(incidentally, given the very low cost of setting up a US corporation in places like Delaware and Nevada, has anybody considered getting around the regional restrictions by purchasing through a US shell's credit card?); but it would be unlikely to save you from the fact that account aggregation is generally somewhere between unsupported and explicitly forbidden...
The problem isn't so much that 'using the internet to exchange documents' is a bad plan(because it isn't) but that Blackboard's specific offering in that area blows goats through capillary tubing. At least it's expensive and buggy, though.
Perhaps more importantly, GOPHER and Usenet suck less than Blackboard...
Any word on what percentage of them shudder and/or spew corrosive bile if you sneak up behind them and whisper "Blackboard!"?
The cases always get a bit more interesting if the feds are involved(because institutionalizing pesky dissidents for being crazy would be a convenient thing to be able to do); but there are a lot of much more prosaic involuntary psych commitments. A suicide attempt will probably earn you one, as will psychosis or delusions sufficiently strong and unpleasant to render you likely to violence toward yourself or others.
For obvious reasons, this corner of medicine really does bear considerable watching; but it operates largely according to protocols designed for serious but politically uninteresting psych cases. Being seriously mentally ill and cogent enough to be a credible threat to political types is relatively rare.
Why ask for a credit card number when you can rest assured that most customers who actually have and use one will pay with it and present their 'loyalty card' in the same transaction within the fairly near future?
Oh, don't you worry your pretty little consumer head about that...
If you are purchasing a luxury item that will provide status and prestige, you can take advantage of 'facebook sponsored purchases' in order to insert news of your purchase more prominently into your friend's facebook pages for just a small additional fee.
If you are buying an embarrassing sex toy, our Founder's Favorite 'They "trust me"; Dumb fucks.', option will keep your little secret just between you and Zuck, 100% guaranteed*!