The parents are even letting the kids stay in the main house. Do you really think they are going to give a large TV and bladeless fan to them?
I assume you meant "aren't even letting". And yes, that's exactly what I expect. That's the usual pattern with families like that. The fan doesn't work very well—give it to the kids. Replaced the bedroom TV—give the old one to the kids. Happens all the time.
I haven't seen any plans for this to happen, so the battery supply will not be there to build these vehicles.
Here, let me google that for you. At June's shareholder meeting, Tesla announced that they were in the process of finalizing locations for three additional Gigafactories. Construction is expected to start no later than next year.
At the same meeting, Tesla told shareholders they expect to eventually build at least 10 and possibly as many as 20 Gigafactories. No timeframe was given for that particular goal.
This may come as a shock to you, but Elon Musk is actually capable of multiplying numbers together. Truly a genius of our time.
When is mapping Kuiper Belt objects going to be useful information?
Immediately. There's a theory that comets are Kuiper Belt objects whose orbits have been disturbed. Even if they're not originally Kuiper Belt objects, cometary orbits often extend will into the Kuiper Belt, and are therefore subject to possibly significant gravitational influence. Knowing a major comet's orbit has changed because of a close flyby with a Kuiper Belt object may be the difference between predicting a collision with Earth 70 years in the future vs 3 days in the future. I think the additional advanced notice could be useful.
If Mr. Cook wanted Apple to show that they cared about the countries they do business in as well as make an immediate impact, they would stop offshoring their profits and pay taxes on them in the country they made the money.
This is Apple playing Trump. "Let us repatriate our hoarded cash for 0.01% tax and we'll build three factories in the US. Big big big! Pinky swear!" They get their money back into the States, having successfully robbed the US taxpayer, then drag their feet on the factories for three years until Trump is out of office, whereupon they shitcan the project. And Trump won't even notice, because Fox and Friends won't report it.
I don't think India is at risk of having any self-driving cars any time soon. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read more than one account of India's roads, and last I heard they were still a chaotic nightmare most places, where the rules of the road are barely even suggestions, let alone guidelines. That's not an environment a robot can be expected to function well in, if at all. Unless Indians somehow Westernized their vehicular behavior in the past year, there's no risk at all of self-driving vehicles showing up there. Quite aside from the price of the extra equipment. India is still the place that wants and needs to build sub-$6000 vehicles. There's not a lot of room in that budget for servos and sensors.
India's Transport Minister is grandstanding in the best tradition of government ministers everywhere, "solving" a nonexistent problem.
a war with NK will NOT start by a bunch of NK soldiers marching across the DMZ.
Of course not. It's full of land mines... Would you be so confident in saying that if it weren't?
North Korea doesn't actually want to destroy Seoul with all that artillery they currently have pointed at it. They want to own it instead. If they could just march across the DMZ to own Seoul, they would.
These budgetary priorities only address the wants of whites and do not address the serious problems facing communities of people of color. Always ask, who benefits? If the answer is "only whites", then it's a bad idea.
Knowing where all the flying rocks are benefits every living thing on Earth, including voles. You're not prejudiced against voles are you?
This just goes to show that there aren't enough orbital telescopes, in enough different orbits.
Why? Because a few people had to lug a few boxes to Patagonia? I think that was probably a lot cheaper than putting a telescope in orbit.
Because to make a map of the solar system, the process has to be repeated many many times. Current best estimates are that there are around 35,000 Kuiper Belt objects larger than 100km in diameter, and there could be 100 million total objects of detectable size. Lugging boxes to Patagonia helped pin down one of those objects.
Even if we had a dozen Hubbles out there, one would have had to modify its orbit so that it happened to coincide with the shadow track of this miniscule object at just the right moment.
No need to meddle with the orbits of any of the space based telescopes. Just pick a different star to use for occultation for each of them. If you already have approximate ephemera, it's easy enough to run the equations eight more times, not just for Earth. You also have a great many more useful choices of source light, since the space based telescopes don't have to contend with being portable (at least not conventionally) or with Earth's atmosphere.
Depending on where the planets are at the time, you may not actually be able to use all eight telescopes, what with the Sun or their various companion planets getting in the way, but that's why you deploy to both L4 and L5. Even if the L4 telescope can't see because there's a gas giant in the way, L5 should be able to see what you want to look at. With multiple orbital telescopes, you should get multiple opportunities to observe an occultation for each one of them, if you're after an object in our solar system. This is also why Venus is a candidate planet to serve as gravitational anchor; its orbital period is short enough to change its perspective on the solar system quite rapidly compared to the outer gas giants, which should be useful in multiple circumstances.
And your uplink to the internet is going to be what exactly?
I'm assuming they use point to point wireless for backhaul, which runs at up to 866 Mbits/s, commercial off the shelf. That plus a brick of batteries in the base allows 100% unwired deployment, which is faster, safer, cheaper, and easier than running wires for either power or data. Neither wifi access points nor the point to point wireless data systems are high power devices, so batteries are perfectly acceptable.
If I were designing such a station, it would have a cylindrical steel base with a locking access door, behind which are a couple hundred pounds of easily removable lead acid batteries. The batteries should have enough energy storage capacity to power the electronics for a week, and double as anti-tamper weight so people don't knock over, move, or otherwise mess with the device. A hollow steel pole would rise up from the center of the base to a height of 4 meters. At the top of the pole would be mounts for a fancy MIMO antenna wifi access point and up to three point to point wireless devices, all in IP67 waterproof cases. The mount point for the wifi would be fixed. The mount points for the point to point devices would be ball and socket joints with screws to pin them down.
Deployment would happen in four stages. First, a deployment plan would be created for the venue in question, and the requisite number of poles configured with between 1 and 3 point to point antennas. Any of them with direct line of site to the uplink station would only need one. Those acting as relays for more distant stations would have two. Only the most difficult of venues would require deployment of the triple link station. Then my crew would use a 2 wheel dolly with fat all terrain tires to deploy each station. They'd also have a 4 wheel wagon with fat all terrain tires, in which the batteries for the base would be transported. A third guy would carry a step ladder. They'd haul all this stuff to each predetermined location, set down the base, install the batteries into it, and the guy on the step ladder would climb up and adjust the point to point antennas to aim in the correct directions to link to either another of these stations or to the uplink station that has wired access to the Internet. I'd have at least three step ladders, and guys to wield them. There would be some custom firmware in the wifi access point that allows a smart phone to connect to it and retrieve signal strength from the point to point antennas, so the guy aiming them could be sure he has them aligned properly.
The stations would run 24/7 during their deployment, both to be sure the network is ready for each day and as a security measure after hours to detect if someone is tampering with or attempting to steal the equipment. An optional fillip would be an IP security camera on every station, aimed to capture footage of anyone messing with the station. A possible additional feature would be a ring of security cameras aimed to capture footage of the venue for additional safety if the event organizers desire it. That costs extra, 'cause I'd have to deploy the security trailer with all the monitors and the cadre of people trained to watch them.
This is what I came up with after a few minutes' thought. I expect the people who already provide the commercial services have thought of all that plus a few more things besides.
This just goes to show that there aren't enough orbital telescopes, in enough different orbits. Instead of building more broken-by-design warplanes, we should be designing the next generation Hubble telescope. And no, the Webb telescope isn't a Hubble. Different frequencies. And, and this part is important, we should build eight copies of it, not just one, and send them to the L4 and L5 Lagrange points of the Sun and each of Venus, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. (The Venus variant will be somewhat cheaper, 'cause we can skimp on solar panels.) Then we either need big fat radio telescopes at the Earth-Moon L4 and L5 points, with multiple independent large antenna arrays, or we need to perfect laser data transmission in free space at solar system scales. I'm not sure which is smaller, a radio antenna array or the optics required to handle laser communication. I'm guessing the laser, since the frequencies are so much higher. If we have enough telescopes leading or following enough of the planets, we can use them as a network to bounce data around the Sun as necessary.
Let me be clear. I want so much incoming data that storing it all will prop up the hard drive manufacturing industry for a decade, because storing it all in flash memory would be too expensive. I want so much incoming data that astronomers start having NSA-style problems while looking for interesting things in an ocean of bytes. I want so much incoming data that astronomers start training neural nets as to what constitutes "interesting" and turning them loose on the ocean of bytes, because there isn't enough grad student slave labor to look at it all. I want astronomers to have a reason to hire engineers away from Google, because they have exa-scale data problems to deal with. I want all that and I'm not even an astronomer.
I just think it would be nice to have a proper map of the solar system we live in.
Of course, there are some sounds that are natural, like growling when alarmed, barking wildly when afraid, yelping when hurt, whimpering when begging. But I'm guessing that as we learn more about dogs, we'll find that there is a very limited vocabulary that dogs are capable of using.
A very limited verbal vocabulary, certainly. And yes, heavily distorted by growing up in a human "pack' that really doesn't understand her properly. But hidden observation of wolves in the wild show that canids in general have a fairly large vocabulary. It's just mostly nonverbal. Which is why any product that attempts to "translate" a pet purely verbally is made of fail from the very start.
I kind of wanted to post this at the top level, in hopes of better moderation, but your last paragraph was too good of an opening.
Dogs, cats, even some of the larger rodents commonly kept as pets, all "speak" quite a bit nonverbally. Those nonverbal "words" are also more universal from pet to pet in different households. Your dog learned to bark as an attention signal, but "spoke" by moving to what she wanted. None of mine ever did it that way, because they were taught not to bark in the house. But I bet your dog and mine both expressed remorse in exactly the same body language. Dogs all know how to say "Sorry boss," and they all do it the same way wolves do. Every cat I've ever known could express disdain, at various levels of intensity, from the flicked ear to the jaw dropping yawn, body language they still share with the big cats. I'm told by people who've kept them that guinea pigs and fancy rats have specific preening behaviors that mean things, though I don't remember details since I never had a pet of either of those species myself.
Every animal "talks", but the parts of their brains that handle what language they have generally aren't wired to their vocal cords. Certainly not exclusively. Humans are so extremely verbal that they forget that they even have body language, and as the argument further up-thread demonstrates, when they remember, can't even agree on what it means. Meanwhile a cat can say more with her tail than some humans who call themselves poets can say in 64 couplets.
You can't do networking events at public parks because you can't add your own wireless infrastructure.
Rental of portable wifi access points specifically designed for events are available from half a dozen different vendors I found with a very cursory Google search. You most definitely can add your own wireless infrastructure, and I bet deployment happens in a matter of hours, just like the cellular tower trucks mentioned by the other poster. Might even be cheaper, given the phone company's penchant for overcharging for every byte.
Has been happening to me for years. Google refuses to do anything. I once got a copy of a girl's college application that included her social security number. Even then they refused to even acknowledge my complaint. Perhaps it is time for a class action suit against Google.
Of course Google refused to do anything. It's in the damn RFC. It's literally working as designed. The fact that the designer did not think like the vast majority of the population isn't Google's fault. The RFC predates the existence of Google.
If that becomes the dominant model, it is clear that movie budgets will have to go down, and the quality of those movies will have to suffer, which is clearly the start of a death spiral.
I don't grant your premise. In fact, I'm going to claim it's just the opposite. The bigger the budget, the worse the movie. If you look back at the history of film (and incidentally, pretty much every other art form bar architecture), the best work gets done on the tiniest budgets. Having a smaller budget tends to concentrate the attention of the artist. An artist with an enormous budget can pretty much do whatever, and so that's just what happens, whereas an artist with limited resources thinks hard before investing those resources.
If you look at what films have been praised most by critics, a great many of them were very cheap to make. Hell, even modern mass market hits started out on a shoestring. Watch the Making Of Terminator clips, for instance. That movie was made on such a tiny budget that James Cameron collected additional footage after principal photography was nominally over by sneaking around town with a camera and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Meanwhile the modern summer blockbuster has become such a crapfest that the plot is completely incoherent. Between too many cooks, plus the studio meddling (Means tested, corporate approved!), they can't write their way out of a paper bag.
Yeaaaahh, that's true. But it's _really_ deep. The water tunnels are 600 ft down, and there are subway stations as far down as 180ft (with very trouble-prone elevators).
At least the elevator problem is solved. No cables, so even at ridiculous depths, it works, and can move quickly.
Russia and the US really are sister countries. Their populations are prone to believing the exact same texture and smell of bullshit. The only difference is some of the lettering is Roman and some is Cyrillic.
Why is it every scenario we dream up involving computers thinking for themselves turns out poorly?
Aren't there some scenarios where this turns out good?
There are.
In Keith Laumer's Bolo series, the bolos start out as military vehicles, super-heavy tanks that get steadily bigger and more powerful as materials science evolves over the course of a couple of millennia. The Mark XX is the first fully autonomous version produced. The Mark XXXIII is the last version depicted, and somewhere between the Mark XX and the Mark XXXIII, they became strong AI. Across all those versions, not one of them ever turned on its authorized human operators. Quite the opposite. Bolos repeatedly save entire human planetary populations from genocidal aliens (who are a dime a dozen in Laumer's shared universe).
In Isaac Asimov's Robots series, robots with positronic "brains" eventually become strong AIs, "living" and working alongside humans in humaniform chassis. In one short story, non-humaniform, larger scale "brains" are given total control of Earth's entire economy. What follows is the most peaceful, most prosperous, most enlightened period of human history. This despite the fact that the AIs intentionally manipulate aspects of that economy specifically to remove from power any human manager who disobeys them. They're following a variant of the famous Three Laws that elevates the good of humanity in general to the prime position, rather than individual humans, and since they're capable of understanding and optimizing the entire world economy for the good of all mankind, any human who disobeys their directives is by definition harming mankind and must not be allowed to wield any power.
Even in Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series, there are weak AIs who fight alongside humans. They're anti-berserker Berserkers, self-replicating robots programmed to fight the berserkers, which are programmed to destroy all life. (There are no strong AIs in the Berserker series. That's more or less the foundational premise of the series—that biological, living sapients will always be able to out-think any machine intelligence.)
Hell, even in Star Wars, C3-PO and R2-D2 are apparently strong AIs, and they're uniformly helpful to the rebellion.
So yes, there are plenty of scenarios dreamed up that involve helpful thinking computers. They run the gamut from the fantastically optimistic, to the creepily optimistic, to the staidly pragmatic. A few of them are right under your nose, like R2-D2. Most of them, though, require you to be reasonably well read to have encountered them. Maybe you should read more books and watch less TV.
It wasn't until I read this that it occurred to me that handing out smallpox infected blankets was an act of terrorism.
It wasn't an act of terrorism, but it may have been an attempt at genocide with bioweapons...but it's not clear whether it was an intentional use of bioweaponry or not.
It was neither an act of terrorism nor an attempted genocide because it didn't happen. The entire story is a fraud, perpetrated by a former "ethnic studies" professor named Ward Churchill.
The High Plains Smallpox Epidemic of 1837 was caused by personal contact with infected passengers from the riverboat St. Peter's, owned by a fur trading company. The epidemic on the High Plains centered around Fort Clark which, despite the name, was not a military installation. It was a privately owned fur trading post. The boss of Fort Clark was Francis Chardon, a fur trader. His personal diary survived to this day, one of numerous eyewitness accounts preserved from the time.
Not only were infected blankets not distributed, but correspondence from Joshua Pilcher, the Indian Bureau's sub-agent to the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Ponca at Fort Kiowa, just south of Fort Clark, to Mr. Chardon describes one particular problem interfering with attempts to contain the epidemic that is curiously relevant to today. A smallpox vaccine existed in 1837, but Mr. Pilcher noted "it is a verry delicate experiment among those wild Indians, because death from any other cause, while under the influence of Vaccination would be attributed to that + no other cause[.]"
Sound familiar?
In 2006, Ward Churchill was found guilty of seven counts of research misconduct by the University of Colorado Ethics Committee. He was fired in 2007. He promptly filed suit, and won a jury trial for wrongful dismissal. The jury followed the instructions to the letter in coming to their conclusion, but recognized Churchill for the lying shitheel he was and awarded him precisely $1.00. (One juror denied any such motivation in a public interview.) A judge vacated the jury verdict on the grounds that the (state) university enjoys quasi-judicial immunity. The Colorado Court of Appeals upheld that decision. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal and in 2013 agreed with both the first judge and the Court of Appeals that the university was immune to suit in these circumstances. The US Supreme Court declined to get involved.
It took 19 years from when Churchill first published his fraudulent bullshit in 1994 to the time when the judicial system finished with the case. It could easily take four or five generations for his lie to finally exit the public consciousness. This despite the fact that humanity currently has the fastest, most ubiquitous communications systems in the history of the species.
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on." —Mark Twain[1]
---- [1] Except Samuel Clemens never wrote that. He was first credited with saying it in 1919, though he had died in 1910. The earliest known version of the sentiment in English was written by Jonathan Swift in 1710. His version was, "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it;".
How soon we forget. DRM crap has been approved as a web standard. View Source is going to show you nothing but the Javascript that says invoke_by_bullshit_DRM_here() and that's it. Because MBAs have taken over the web, and somehow the shitty HTML and even shittier Javascript being spewed by servers around the world is suddenly Amazingly Valuable Secret Sauce Which Must Be Protected At All Costs. A good sized chunk of the web is going to disappear into a DRM blackhole, and the only question is how quickly will it all be comprised and turned into an infection vector.
So along comes net neutrality, where everyone needs to be equal and it will be governed by our government. That means tax payer dollars being spent to extend line to areas with low amounts of users that isn't financially possible for AT&T to do.
Uh, no, that's not remotely what it means.
Network neutrality means the delivery of my packets, either from me or to me, will not be degraded or interfered with, regardless of their origin or destination, by my ISP or any other network provider between me and the other endpoint. It especially means that no network may extort money from me before they'll agree to stop degrading delivery of my packets. Net neutrality codifies what engineers always tried to do with the Internet for the past 30+ years: best speed delivery for all traffic, before asshole MBAs decided to fuck it all up for more money. That's all net neutrality means.
Net neutrality does not have anything to do with net availability. That's a whole different problem, for which the American people were robbed of $300 billion, as documented in excruciating detail by Bruce Kushnick.
Really, I think the system we have been using all along has been fine. There are enough watchdogs and the advent of social media calls out ISP's pretty much the second they start doing some funny business that the bad PR makes them reverse their positions.
No, there aren't, and no, they don't. Netflix caved in to Comcast's extortion demands and has been paying them Mafia-style protection money since 2014, despite that bullshit being widely publicized. "The system" is not remotely fine anymore. It was fine before 2014. Now it's not. Not as long as ISPs are allowed to extort money from Internet services who are not their customers. (Lack of enforcement of net neutrality rules is yet another problem to be fought, if net neutrality can be preserved at all.)
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The parents are even letting the kids stay in the main house. Do you really think they are going to give a large TV and bladeless fan to them?
I assume you meant "aren't even letting". And yes, that's exactly what I expect. That's the usual pattern with families like that. The fan doesn't work very well—give it to the kids. Replaced the bedroom TV—give the old one to the kids. Happens all the time.
convince everyone
I think I spotted the flaw in your plan. I can, at times, be convincing. But I'm no Jenny McCarthy.
You would be much more convincing if you had breast implants. Big ones.
I haven't seen any plans for this to happen, so the battery supply will not be there to build these vehicles.
Here,
let me google that for you. At June's shareholder meeting, Tesla announced that they were in the process of finalizing locations for three additional Gigafactories. Construction is expected to start no later than next year.
At the same meeting, Tesla told shareholders they expect to eventually build at least 10 and possibly as many as 20 Gigafactories. No timeframe was given for that particular goal.
This may come as a shock to you, but Elon Musk is actually capable of multiplying numbers together. Truly a genius of our time.
When is mapping Kuiper Belt objects going to be useful information?
Immediately. There's a theory that comets are Kuiper Belt objects whose orbits have been disturbed. Even if they're not originally Kuiper Belt objects, cometary orbits often extend will into the Kuiper Belt, and are therefore subject to possibly significant gravitational influence. Knowing a major comet's orbit has changed because of a close flyby with a Kuiper Belt object may be the difference between predicting a collision with Earth 70 years in the future vs 3 days in the future. I think the additional advanced notice could be useful.
If Mr. Cook wanted Apple to show that they cared about the countries they do business in as well as make an immediate impact, they would stop offshoring their profits and pay taxes on them in the country they made the money.
This is Apple playing Trump. "Let us repatriate our hoarded cash for 0.01% tax and we'll build three factories in the US. Big big big! Pinky swear!" They get their money back into the States, having successfully robbed the US taxpayer, then drag their feet on the factories for three years until Trump is out of office, whereupon they shitcan the project. And Trump won't even notice, because Fox and Friends won't report it.
I don't think India is at risk of having any self-driving cars any time soon. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read more than one account of India's roads, and last I heard they were still a chaotic nightmare most places, where the rules of the road are barely even suggestions, let alone guidelines. That's not an environment a robot can be expected to function well in, if at all. Unless Indians somehow Westernized their vehicular behavior in the past year, there's no risk at all of self-driving vehicles showing up there. Quite aside from the price of the extra equipment. India is still the place that wants and needs to build sub-$6000 vehicles. There's not a lot of room in that budget for servos and sensors.
India's Transport Minister is grandstanding in the best tradition of government ministers everywhere, "solving" a nonexistent problem.
Shhh... Not so loud, lest you wake Michael Bay and he makes a movie about them.
Too late. (The Primes are essentially generals, right?)
a war with NK will NOT start by a bunch of NK soldiers marching across the DMZ.
Of course not. It's full of land mines... Would you be so confident in saying that if it weren't?
North Korea doesn't actually want to destroy Seoul with all that artillery they currently have pointed at it. They want to own it instead. If they could just march across the DMZ to own Seoul, they would.
These budgetary priorities only address the wants of whites and do not address the serious problems facing communities of people of color. Always ask, who benefits? If the answer is "only whites", then it's a bad idea.
Knowing where all the flying rocks are benefits every living thing on Earth, including voles. You're not prejudiced against voles are you?
This just goes to show that there aren't enough orbital telescopes, in enough different orbits.
Why? Because a few people had to lug a few boxes to Patagonia? I think that was probably a lot cheaper than putting a telescope in orbit.
Because to make a map of the solar system, the process has to be repeated many many times. Current best estimates are that there are around 35,000 Kuiper Belt objects larger than 100km in diameter, and there could be 100 million total objects of detectable size. Lugging boxes to Patagonia helped pin down one of those objects.
Even if we had a dozen Hubbles out there, one would have had to modify its orbit so that it happened to coincide with the shadow track of this miniscule object at just the right moment.
No need to meddle with the orbits of any of the space based telescopes. Just pick a different star to use for occultation for each of them. If you already have approximate ephemera, it's easy enough to run the equations eight more times, not just for Earth. You also have a great many more useful choices of source light, since the space based telescopes don't have to contend with being portable (at least not conventionally) or with Earth's atmosphere.
Depending on where the planets are at the time, you may not actually be able to use all eight telescopes, what with the Sun or their various companion planets getting in the way, but that's why you deploy to both L4 and L5. Even if the L4 telescope can't see because there's a gas giant in the way, L5 should be able to see what you want to look at. With multiple orbital telescopes, you should get multiple opportunities to observe an occultation for each one of them, if you're after an object in our solar system. This is also why Venus is a candidate planet to serve as gravitational anchor; its orbital period is short enough to change its perspective on the solar system quite rapidly compared to the outer gas giants, which should be useful in multiple circumstances.
And your uplink to the internet is going to be what exactly?
I'm assuming they use point to point wireless for backhaul, which runs at up to 866 Mbits/s, commercial off the shelf. That plus a brick of batteries in the base allows 100% unwired deployment, which is faster, safer, cheaper, and easier than running wires for either power or data. Neither wifi access points nor the point to point wireless data systems are high power devices, so batteries are perfectly acceptable.
If I were designing such a station, it would have a cylindrical steel base with a locking access door, behind which are a couple hundred pounds of easily removable lead acid batteries. The batteries should have enough energy storage capacity to power the electronics for a week, and double as anti-tamper weight so people don't knock over, move, or otherwise mess with the device. A hollow steel pole would rise up from the center of the base to a height of 4 meters. At the top of the pole would be mounts for a fancy MIMO antenna wifi access point and up to three point to point wireless devices, all in IP67 waterproof cases. The mount point for the wifi would be fixed. The mount points for the point to point devices would be ball and socket joints with screws to pin them down.
Deployment would happen in four stages. First, a deployment plan would be created for the venue in question, and the requisite number of poles configured with between 1 and 3 point to point antennas. Any of them with direct line of site to the uplink station would only need one. Those acting as relays for more distant stations would have two. Only the most difficult of venues would require deployment of the triple link station. Then my crew would use a 2 wheel dolly with fat all terrain tires to deploy each station. They'd also have a 4 wheel wagon with fat all terrain tires, in which the batteries for the base would be transported. A third guy would carry a step ladder. They'd haul all this stuff to each predetermined location, set down the base, install the batteries into it, and the guy on the step ladder would climb up and adjust the point to point antennas to aim in the correct directions to link to either another of these stations or to the uplink station that has wired access to the Internet. I'd have at least three step ladders, and guys to wield them. There would be some custom firmware in the wifi access point that allows a smart phone to connect to it and retrieve signal strength from the point to point antennas, so the guy aiming them could be sure he has them aligned properly.
The stations would run 24/7 during their deployment, both to be sure the network is ready for each day and as a security measure after hours to detect if someone is tampering with or attempting to steal the equipment. An optional fillip would be an IP security camera on every station, aimed to capture footage of anyone messing with the station. A possible additional feature would be a ring of security cameras aimed to capture footage of the venue for additional safety if the event organizers desire it. That costs extra, 'cause I'd have to deploy the security trailer with all the monitors and the cadre of people trained to watch them.
This is what I came up with after a few minutes' thought. I expect the people who already provide the commercial services have thought of all that plus a few more things besides.
This just goes to show that there aren't enough orbital telescopes, in enough different orbits. Instead of building more broken-by-design warplanes, we should be designing the next generation Hubble telescope. And no, the Webb telescope isn't a Hubble. Different frequencies. And, and this part is important, we should build eight copies of it, not just one, and send them to the L4 and L5 Lagrange points of the Sun and each of Venus, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. (The Venus variant will be somewhat cheaper, 'cause we can skimp on solar panels.) Then we either need big fat radio telescopes at the Earth-Moon L4 and L5 points, with multiple independent large antenna arrays, or we need to perfect laser data transmission in free space at solar system scales. I'm not sure which is smaller, a radio antenna array or the optics required to handle laser communication. I'm guessing the laser, since the frequencies are so much higher. If we have enough telescopes leading or following enough of the planets, we can use them as a network to bounce data around the Sun as necessary.
Let me be clear. I want so much incoming data that storing it all will prop up the hard drive manufacturing industry for a decade, because storing it all in flash memory would be too expensive. I want so much incoming data that astronomers start having NSA-style problems while looking for interesting things in an ocean of bytes. I want so much incoming data that astronomers start training neural nets as to what constitutes "interesting" and turning them loose on the ocean of bytes, because there isn't enough grad student slave labor to look at it all. I want astronomers to have a reason to hire engineers away from Google, because they have exa-scale data problems to deal with. I want all that and I'm not even an astronomer.
I just think it would be nice to have a proper map of the solar system we live in.
Of course, there are some sounds that are natural, like growling when alarmed, barking wildly when afraid, yelping when hurt, whimpering when begging. But I'm guessing that as we learn more about dogs, we'll find that there is a very limited vocabulary that dogs are capable of using.
A very limited verbal vocabulary, certainly. And yes, heavily distorted by growing up in a human "pack' that really doesn't understand her properly. But hidden observation of wolves in the wild show that canids in general have a fairly large vocabulary. It's just mostly nonverbal. Which is why any product that attempts to "translate" a pet purely verbally is made of fail from the very start.
I kind of wanted to post this at the top level, in hopes of better moderation, but your last paragraph was too good of an opening.
Dogs, cats, even some of the larger rodents commonly kept as pets, all "speak" quite a bit nonverbally. Those nonverbal "words" are also more universal from pet to pet in different households. Your dog learned to bark as an attention signal, but "spoke" by moving to what she wanted. None of mine ever did it that way, because they were taught not to bark in the house. But I bet your dog and mine both expressed remorse in exactly the same body language. Dogs all know how to say "Sorry boss," and they all do it the same way wolves do. Every cat I've ever known could express disdain, at various levels of intensity, from the flicked ear to the jaw dropping yawn, body language they still share with the big cats. I'm told by people who've kept them that guinea pigs and fancy rats have specific preening behaviors that mean things, though I don't remember details since I never had a pet of either of those species myself.
Every animal "talks", but the parts of their brains that handle what language they have generally aren't wired to their vocal cords. Certainly not exclusively. Humans are so extremely verbal that they forget that they even have body language, and as the argument further up-thread demonstrates, when they remember, can't even agree on what it means. Meanwhile a cat can say more with her tail than some humans who call themselves poets can say in 64 couplets.
You can't do networking events at public parks because you can't add your own wireless infrastructure.
Rental of portable wifi access points specifically designed for events are available from half a dozen different vendors I found with a very cursory Google search. You most definitely can add your own wireless infrastructure, and I bet deployment happens in a matter of hours, just like the cellular tower trucks mentioned by the other poster. Might even be cheaper, given the phone company's penchant for overcharging for every byte.
Has been happening to me for years. Google refuses to do anything. I once got a copy of a girl's college application that included her social security number. Even then they refused to even acknowledge my complaint. Perhaps it is time for a class action suit against Google.
Of course Google refused to do anything. It's in the damn RFC. It's literally working as designed. The fact that the designer did not think like the vast majority of the population isn't Google's fault. The RFC predates the existence of Google.
If that becomes the dominant model, it is clear that movie budgets will have to go down, and the quality of those movies will have to suffer, which is clearly the start of a death spiral.
I don't grant your premise. In fact, I'm going to claim it's just the opposite. The bigger the budget, the worse the movie. If you look back at the history of film (and incidentally, pretty much every other art form bar architecture), the best work gets done on the tiniest budgets. Having a smaller budget tends to concentrate the attention of the artist. An artist with an enormous budget can pretty much do whatever, and so that's just what happens, whereas an artist with limited resources thinks hard before investing those resources.
If you look at what films have been praised most by critics, a great many of them were very cheap to make. Hell, even modern mass market hits started out on a shoestring. Watch the Making Of Terminator clips, for instance. That movie was made on such a tiny budget that James Cameron collected additional footage after principal photography was nominally over by sneaking around town with a camera and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Meanwhile the modern summer blockbuster has become such a crapfest that the plot is completely incoherent. Between too many cooks, plus the studio meddling (Means tested, corporate approved!), they can't write their way out of a paper bag.
Excess money kills great art.
Yeaaaahh, that's true. But it's _really_ deep. The water tunnels are 600 ft down, and there are subway stations as far down as 180ft (with very trouble-prone elevators).
At least the elevator problem is solved. No cables, so even at ridiculous depths, it works, and can move quickly.
Russia and the US really are sister countries. Their populations are prone to believing the exact same texture and smell of bullshit. The only difference is some of the lettering is Roman and some is Cyrillic.
Why is it every scenario we dream up involving computers thinking for themselves turns out poorly?
Aren't there some scenarios where this turns out good?
There are.
In Keith Laumer's Bolo series, the bolos start out as military vehicles, super-heavy tanks that get steadily bigger and more powerful as materials science evolves over the course of a couple of millennia. The Mark XX is the first fully autonomous version produced. The Mark XXXIII is the last version depicted, and somewhere between the Mark XX and the Mark XXXIII, they became strong AI. Across all those versions, not one of them ever turned on its authorized human operators. Quite the opposite. Bolos repeatedly save entire human planetary populations from genocidal aliens (who are a dime a dozen in Laumer's shared universe).
In Isaac Asimov's Robots series, robots with positronic "brains" eventually become strong AIs, "living" and working alongside humans in humaniform chassis. In one short story, non-humaniform, larger scale "brains" are given total control of Earth's entire economy. What follows is the most peaceful, most prosperous, most enlightened period of human history. This despite the fact that the AIs intentionally manipulate aspects of that economy specifically to remove from power any human manager who disobeys them. They're following a variant of the famous Three Laws that elevates the good of humanity in general to the prime position, rather than individual humans, and since they're capable of understanding and optimizing the entire world economy for the good of all mankind, any human who disobeys their directives is by definition harming mankind and must not be allowed to wield any power.
Even in Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series, there are weak AIs who fight alongside humans. They're anti-berserker Berserkers, self-replicating robots programmed to fight the berserkers, which are programmed to destroy all life. (There are no strong AIs in the Berserker series. That's more or less the foundational premise of the series—that biological, living sapients will always be able to out-think any machine intelligence.)
Hell, even in Star Wars, C3-PO and R2-D2 are apparently strong AIs, and they're uniformly helpful to the rebellion.
So yes, there are plenty of scenarios dreamed up that involve helpful thinking computers. They run the gamut from the fantastically optimistic, to the creepily optimistic, to the staidly pragmatic. A few of them are right under your nose, like R2-D2. Most of them, though, require you to be reasonably well read to have encountered them. Maybe you should read more books and watch less TV.
Do we know anything about the compilation flags of that copy of cinebench? If not, the assessment could be extremely unfair.
According to Tom's Hardware, Cinebench doesn't use AVX instructions at all. There's no source or discussion of the assertion though.
It wasn't until I read this that it occurred to me that handing out smallpox infected blankets was an act of terrorism.
It wasn't an act of terrorism, but it may have been an attempt at genocide with bioweapons...but it's not clear whether it was an intentional use of bioweaponry or not.
It was neither an act of terrorism nor an attempted genocide because it didn't happen. The entire story is a fraud, perpetrated by a former "ethnic studies" professor named Ward Churchill.
The High Plains Smallpox Epidemic of 1837 was caused by personal contact with infected passengers from the riverboat St. Peter's, owned by a fur trading company. The epidemic on the High Plains centered around Fort Clark which, despite the name, was not a military installation. It was a privately owned fur trading post. The boss of Fort Clark was Francis Chardon, a fur trader. His personal diary survived to this day, one of numerous eyewitness accounts preserved from the time.
Not only were infected blankets not distributed, but correspondence from Joshua Pilcher, the Indian Bureau's sub-agent to the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Ponca at Fort Kiowa, just south of Fort Clark, to Mr. Chardon describes one particular problem interfering with attempts to contain the epidemic that is curiously relevant to today. A smallpox vaccine existed in 1837, but Mr. Pilcher noted "it is a verry delicate experiment among those wild Indians, because death from any other cause, while under the influence of Vaccination would be attributed to that + no other cause[.]"
Sound familiar?
In 2006, Ward Churchill was found guilty of seven counts of research misconduct by the University of Colorado Ethics Committee. He was fired in 2007. He promptly filed suit, and won a jury trial for wrongful dismissal. The jury followed the instructions to the letter in coming to their conclusion, but recognized Churchill for the lying shitheel he was and awarded him precisely $1.00. (One juror denied any such motivation in a public interview.) A judge vacated the jury verdict on the grounds that the (state) university enjoys quasi-judicial immunity. The Colorado Court of Appeals upheld that decision. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal and in 2013 agreed with both the first judge and the Court of Appeals that the university was immune to suit in these circumstances. The US Supreme Court declined to get involved.
It took 19 years from when Churchill first published his fraudulent bullshit in 1994 to the time when the judicial system finished with the case. It could easily take four or five generations for his lie to finally exit the public consciousness. This despite the fact that humanity currently has the fastest, most ubiquitous communications systems in the history of the species.
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on." —Mark Twain[1]
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[1] Except Samuel Clemens never wrote that. He was first credited with saying it in 1919, though he had died in 1910. The earliest known version of the sentiment in English was written by Jonathan Swift in 1710. His version was, "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it;".
A computer engineer with a commercial pilot license,
No. No no no no no.
She makes me look like I didn't even try at life.
It's the outgoing Governor General who is the computer engineer with a commercial pilot license, not the astronaut.
You may or may not have tried very hard at life, but you sure don't try hard at reading comprehension.
How soon we forget. DRM crap has been approved as a web standard. View Source is going to show you nothing but the Javascript that says invoke_by_bullshit_DRM_here() and that's it. Because MBAs have taken over the web, and somehow the shitty HTML and even shittier Javascript being spewed by servers around the world is suddenly Amazingly Valuable Secret Sauce Which Must Be Protected At All Costs. A good sized chunk of the web is going to disappear into a DRM blackhole, and the only question is how quickly will it all be comprised and turned into an infection vector.
So along comes net neutrality, where everyone needs to be equal and it will be governed by our government. That means tax payer dollars being spent to extend line to areas with low amounts of users that isn't financially possible for AT&T to do.
Uh, no, that's not remotely what it means.
Network neutrality means the delivery of my packets, either from me or to me, will not be degraded or interfered with, regardless of their origin or destination, by my ISP or any other network provider between me and the other endpoint. It especially means that no network may extort money from me before they'll agree to stop degrading delivery of my packets. Net neutrality codifies what engineers always tried to do with the Internet for the past 30+ years: best speed delivery for all traffic, before asshole MBAs decided to fuck it all up for more money. That's all net neutrality means.
Net neutrality does not have anything to do with net availability. That's a whole different problem, for which the American people were robbed of $300 billion, as documented in excruciating detail by Bruce Kushnick.
Really, I think the system we have been using all along has been fine. There are enough watchdogs and the advent of social media calls out ISP's pretty much the second they start doing some funny business that the bad PR makes them reverse their positions.
No, there aren't, and no, they don't. Netflix caved in to Comcast's extortion demands and has been paying them Mafia-style protection money since 2014, despite that bullshit being widely publicized. "The system" is not remotely fine anymore. It was fine before 2014. Now it's not. Not as long as ISPs are allowed to extort money from Internet services who are not their customers. (Lack of enforcement of net neutrality rules is yet another problem to be fought, if net neutrality can be preserved at all.)