. Maybe if someone can create an LED TV that is as good I'd be interested, but for the moment I'm worried that when my current plasma dies I'll be forced to downgrade.
LG is shipping AMOLED TVs, at long last, the first vendor to break from the pack and do it. They have true black, just like plasmas. The largest sizes are still fantastically expensive, but they are available, and they're UltraHD.
Yes, I am bemoaning the loss of the plasma screen, I still think it has the best blacks, but still.
LG is shipping OLED TVs, the first vendor to break from the pack. The largest sizes are fantastically expensive, but they have plasma-quality black/contrast ratio, and for the same reason. One supposes they will hold the price up for a while, since they have zero competition, but they're available.
Truth is, people have killed, stolen and raped each others forever, it has nothing to do with religion or politics, it's just how people are.
No it's not.
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." -- Steven Weinberg
Really Potsy? That's not legal so you can fuck off. You do not have license to modify the movie.
I don't need a license to modify the fucking movie. I need a license to modify and distribute the modification. It is legal for me to possess a movie and a modified copy of the same movie that I have not distributed. The person who performed the edit and distributed it did something currently illegal, but I am not doing anything illegal by having both.
Oddly enough, all we have to do is create a fully scriptable movie editor, and even the person creating the modified version would be doing something legal, as long as what he distributes is a script that will generate the modified version from the purchased media. He would, in fact, hold a copyright of his own to that script, completely independent of the movie copyright.
Do I have the legal right to tear pages out of a book I own? Yes I do. I have the identical right to rip scenes out of a movie I own.
Do I have the legal right to rip pages recommended by a friend out of a book I own? Yes I do. I have the identical right to rip scenes recommended by a friend out of a movie I own.
The security of most consumer devices is pathetic and useless. The security of medical devices has known to be almost non-existent for years now.
Agreed. And there have been exactly zero attempts to exploit that. Or at least so close to zero, it can successfully be concealed from the entire public. So no, not inevitable. This smells like FUD. The authors of malware take great pride in knowing about zero-day exploits. That's where the money is, generally speaking. This is the polar opposite. This is a 5 year exploit. Or possibly even older. And yet it hasn't been exploited. So what's going to be different in 2016? Short answer: nothing. This is FUD.
The types of criminals who will ransom your Word documents have already performed the calculus of risk and decided that being the test case for Murder By Remote is the very last thing they want to do. Law enforcement does exactly nothing about your Word docs. Law enforcement would pull out all the stops for that murder case, and criminals know it. Essentially all of those criminals are not psychotic. Sociopathic, yes, but not psychotic. This topic is a good illustration of the difference.
Humans are not intrinsically honest. It's time to stop pretending they are.
Humans in successful societies typically are intrinsically honest. The spontaneous first response is the honest response. And that's why the society works. The societies that work the most poorly are those that are the least honest. Books have been written about the reasons and the mechanisms, but that's what it boils down to.
b) Is hanging actually a legal way of killing somebody if he was gived a death sentence anywhere in the US? Just asking, since publically demanding a crime towards another citizen is illegal, at least in germany.
It's legal in two US states, in one case only if lethal injection isn't possible, and in the other only if the condemned requests it. In the US state in which Edward Snowden performed the majority of his illegal actions, the death penalty is not legal in any form.
Advocating a crime against another person in the US is only illegal in certain specific instances. In particular, advocating a crime against certain protected classes is illegal, the protected classes being ethnic minorities, persons with disabilities, and homosexual people. Advocating large scale property damage and theft (inciting to riot) is also illegal, but that isn't against a specific person. The right to free speech acknowledged in the first amendment of the US constitution applies, and applies very broadly.
Who is this guy and what has he done with Trump? Trump doesn't waffle. Trump doesn't dodge the question. Trump is balls to the wall, 'Murica! Fuck Yeah! in every interview. So who is this guy who won't just say it?
Wait, wait wait. Does Mr. Donald Trump think he's a viable candidate?? Ahahahahahaha
That's the thing about evil. It doesn't have an absolute definition...
Yes it does. Evil is that which is contrasurvival, for the individual, for the family unit, for the village, for the nation-state, or for the species. Daesh fails at every level of abstraction. It's evil from beginning to end. No religious book, not even a philosophical book is necessary to arrive by this definition. It's straight up Darwinism. We understand evil as children. It's only the endless sophistry that conceals evil. Let's rip away the veil.
If your religion mandates the death of 78% of your species, it is evil.
If your religion mandates the death of 99.5% of all nations, it is evil.
If your religion mandates the death of 100% of the villages that do not submit to your rule, it is evil.
If your religion mandates the death of your own sister if she is raped, it is evil.
If your religion mandates your own death, it is evil.
... and all internet and phone communications monitored?
Funny you should ask. Yes. Yes they were. Every phone call they made was logged. Every web site they visited was logged. Every email they sent was captured and stored. So were all of yours. Harper's government used equipment Cisco designed for the NSA, eagerly installed by Bell and Shaw and Rogers in datacenters across the entire country.
Some of the jobs we might have in a decade are VR fashion designers,
Got those, in Second Life. Worldwide demand: irrelevant. Not even a blip. The new VR? Existing game artists will shift to that role without even slowing down. Prospects of expansion, not great.
3D food printing designers,
Not happening, since 3D printed food that qualifies for the name is largely inedible.
online education coordinators,
Got those. Khan Academy, et al. A half dozen people can service a hundred million, and they're contracting, not expanding.
commercial drone delivery operators,
Will get automated even faster than driving trucks.
nanotech cleanup,
Nothing to clean up, and zero ways forward on that front. Eric Drexler's vision got us as far as MEMS and has stalled out.
virtual prostitute.
Got those. They're called cam girls. There's already a vast oversupply.
Use your imagination.
I've always been told my imagination is pretty good, and I've put quite a bit of thought into this, because anybody who succeeds gets rich, and being rich looks kinda nice. And here's the thing: whatever an imaginative person thinks of at this point, starts out automated. A handful of designers and engineers create something, and the production line required to bring it to the masses does not involve mass labor. It involves machines. Similarly for new services. For anything that isn't effectively prostitution, mass communications means a handful of people can fill worldwide demand. Your examples of SEO optimization consultants and online education consultants have already demonstrated this.
Leaving aside the question of what to do with the tens of millions who will never be qualified to be VR fashion designers and similarly creative jobs, because they have the design sensibilities of a brick, how do you employ the tens of millions who can learn, but have nothing to work on?
There has always been a new wave of jobs as the cost of what we're used to buying fell, and we found something new to buy. There will be this time too.
You state that as if it's a natural law, when it's anything but.
First wave automation was happening in an economy where most people were less well off than ancient Romans. Centuries of Dark Ages exacted a massive toll, and it wasn't hard to find things to sell to people who were starting from literally dirt floors and no running water. There are people still living today who remember not having running water in the structure they lived in, and using a hole in the ground to defecate. A population with that as the starting point can absorb enormous amounts of productivity, and did, for two centuries.
There are places where those conditions still prevail, but they're not relevant to this discussion. This discussion is about what to do in the economies of the world that have more than 3 billion people in them who already have all of the necessities of life and are to the point of replacing luxuries for the hell of it. What more can you make for them? 3 billion people already have more clothes than they can wear and more food than they can eat. 3 billion people either own personal transportation or have access to public transportation that can get them across their respective countries for a few hours' wages. 3 billion people have climate controlled dwellings with electricity and running water and sanitation. 3 billion people have TVs and smartphones and multiple other computers and heaps of children's toys and the ability to indulge any hobby they like. What are you going to sell them?
The necessities are done. The luxuries are done. What new thing is going to absorb the labor of hundreds of millions? It won't be a necessity. That's what the automation is doing. What luxury are you going to invent next? VR? Consumer electronics that will be in the hands of those 3 billion inside of 5 years, if they actually want it? (The smartphone being the bellwether for all future luxury consumer electronics.) So what is it going to be? Flying cars? Linux on the desktop?
Heard that Apple? With as little as 100 billions of cash you have on hand you can organise mission to Mars and have yours astronaut advertise your products on arrival. This type of advertisement will be in history books!!!
Microsoft will buy the contract to send Surfaces with the astronauts. And the commentators will call them iPads.
Apparently, warming has added mass via more snow, and the paper doesn't appear to address possible bedrock rebound from thinning ice. At some point, temperature will likely increase to the point where added snowfall can't keep up with the ice outflow. At the moment, the changing dynamic of the climate seems to be causing counterintuitive local changes, like added snowfall in the eastern US and eastern Antarctica, due to added water vapor in the air.
This is only counterintuitive to people who subscribe to the Church of Alarmism. To anybody paying attention, it's natural and expected. The Earth is naturally habitable. Despite massive traumatic perturbations over the course of the past several billion years, including cometary impacts and continental drift that has rearranged the Earth and its oceans again and again, Earth still supports life. It is not going to become Venus. It is not going to become Mars. It will remain livable. Is it always going to be perfectly comfortable for every animal and every person everywhere? Obviously not. It never has been that. But of all the things we have seen in the fossil record, a warmer Earth is the least of the threats. Life likes warmth, and Earth can be warmer, but doesn't get too warm, even with massive fluctuations in atmospheric carbon. What life on Earth fears, and what we as humans should fear to the exclusion of all else, is the return of the ice. Our current population can not live in an Ice Age. We as a species very nearly didn't make it through one Ice Age already. Ice is a threat. Warmth is not. Earth tends toward a kind of equilibrium. It's chaotic, but it's an equilibrium. If it wasn't and didn't, one of the astronomical mishaps of the ancient past would have pushed it into uninhabitability already.
The only things that will end life on Earth will be astronomical in nature. The cooling and congealing of Earth's core, and the subsequent collapse of the magnetic field, would eventually end life on Earth. The expansion of the Sun into a red giant will eventually end life on Earth, regardless of all other eventualities. But short of astronomical scale disasters, life on Earth will continue.
Can we take steps to keep things comfortable for us? Yes, obviously, because we have, and in much of the world, laws in place and enforced see to it that rivers no longer catch fire, forests are not willfully obliterated in their entirety, and large wild animals are not hunted to extinction. But let's face it, these are comfort measures, not habitability requirements. Flaming rivers eventually go out, forests eventually regrow, and wild animal populations expand everywhere humans are not, even in the face of pockets of outrageous radiation.
In the particular case of carbon, the last time all of the carbon that human activity is currently liberating was active in the biosphere, life on Earth was incredibly fecund and prolific. Megafauna walked the Earth for millions of years, millions of years, with all of that carbon circulating, and by all accounts, life was easy everywhere. This is not something to fear. Ice is. So don't be too happy about growing ice in the Antarctic.
The challenge: if social peace is to be achieved by subsidizing everyone up to a basic level of income, is there any way to do this without disincentivizing work by those on the job? Would Finnish culture degenerate into a society in which everyone is officially unemployed and drawing the basic dole, with motivated workers taking hidden side jobs for extra cash?
You missed a major prerequisite of the plan: it's a universal income. Work, don't work, you still get it. Working is still incentivized by money. But instead of being the only money, it's just more money. Which has all kinds of knock-on effects, many of which appear to be good. But work isn't disincentivized. Much of the current system remains just as it is today. People with special skills can still acquire quite large amounts of earned income, in addition to their basic income. In countries such as Finland which already support a myriad social programs, individual taxes on incomes higher than the basic income don't even change. Just how the money is distributed changes. Administrative overhead should be substantially reduced. For people earning well over the basic income, it may be implemented as simply a tax cut equal to the amount of the income. (Which may be a mistake.) Regardless, people will still do work and get paid for it.
I don't disagree, but what constitutes "the basics"? To my way of thinking the basics are...
Payment for this should be in the form of vouchers, rather than cash to the individuals.
You are completely and totally missing the point of a universal basic income. We have already tried it your way.
The current system is a hodgepodge of EBT cards, Obamaphones, bus passes, Medicare, low-income housing, and ten thousand other independent, dependent, and partially dependent systems which require a massive army of government workers to administer, because people like you demand that each and every nickel be tagged and tracked and audited and squeezed until Thomas Jefferson shrieks, resulting in endless cycles of stupidity of waiting in government offices to prove for the 14th time eligibility for some benefit or other that is worth so little that we're basically paying the beneficiary minimum wage to stand in line. Forever.
It's ridiculous.
A universal basic income, done right, dispenses with ALL of that. Nearly all of those government workers are laid off, the remainder doing the job of administering the new system, which consists of four questions: Are you a citizen? Are you alive? Have you reached the age of majority or are you an emancipated minor? What are your bank account details?
That's it. And every single person in the country, poor or rich, employed or not, including you, who can answer those three questions in the affirmative and provide their details, gets money every single month. Verify the questions once per year, and if somebody dies in the middle of the year, we don't care. Their heirs get to keep the extra payouts, because it's more trouble than it's worth to us to try to get it back.
And the laid off government workers? Instead of becoming homeless because they're jobless, they become beneficiaries of the plan, and most of them will go find a different job anyway, one that's actually productive. The people being paid to wait in line can now get jobs too, without endangering their benefits. Many of them will. Many marginal part time jobs will get filled that previously went begging, because they needed work done, but not enough work to live on. Now people can perform those jobs, and never miss work because of an appointment with some bureaucrat who wants to quibble over $12/week in EBT that they might not be eligible for anymore because they moved in with their significant other who has an Obamaphone, but might get to keep because of subsection d) of part 3) of rule e) of this year's new rules but it can only be backdated 3 months unless they've been beneficiaries for 6 months or less in which case it's 4 months blah blah blah...
There are two major questions to answer in the design of such a system. Should the minimum wage be eliminated? And should the benefit accrue to every natural person regardless of age, the benefits of minors being administered by their guardians?
Both answers depend quite heavily on the amount being considered. If the amount is inflation-indexed, using an honest valuation of inflation, and really does cover living expenses, then it's not just reasonable but actively desirable to eliminate minimum wage laws entirely. Marginal jobs can be filled by labor working for a mutually agreed price, with actual mutual agreement, instead of the one offering wielding the whip hand over the one accepting. I suspect this will drive a generational sea change in the attitudes of management to labor, where the flaming dickheads who enjoy being tinpot dictators will discover that no one at all wants to do the work they want done. Actual effective managers (not necessarily nice, but effective) will be able to get the workers they need, from the niche to the massive, and overall societal happiness will probably be measurably better.
If the amount being considered is enough to support minor dependents, only people who can answer the three questions
...but actual generation of heat by releasing it through energy production as waste heat. Solar energy doesn't help us with this because increased capture of solar radiation will increase waste heat on Earth.
Only if we're foolish enough to allow solar power satellites to actually happen. If all of the solar panels we use are on Earth, then this is not a problem at all. An earthly solar panel only converts energy. It doesn't create it or generate it out of nothing. The incoming energy is already there, in the sunlight. You actually end up with less heat at the point of collection than you otherwise would when a photovoltaic panel converts some of the energy in the photons of sunlight into electrons and ships it out over a wire.
Photovoltaics (commonly understood to be "solar power"), windmills, and dams are all the same type of thing. They're energy converters, not generators, and they're all converting solar energy. Photovoltaics do it directly from photons. Windmills and dams do it by squeezing the energy out of the motion of fluids like water and air. Fluids that are kept in motion by solar energy. None of them result in extra waste heat. They result in the same amount of waste heat that would have happened anyway, except instead, they get some useful work done first. The heat that didn't happen when a photovoltaic panel caught some sunlight instead happens when an electric motor uses that energy. It's the same amount of heat, just in a different place, and with batteries involved, at a different time.
Speaking of batteries... Batteries are 85% to 90% efficient. That 10% to 15% inefficiency? Heat. So a 22% efficient solar panel converts 22% of the energy in the sunlight hitting it into electrons. The other 78% is heat. If the solar panel wasn't there, it would have been 100% heat. The electrons created by the solar panel flow down a wire to a battery. The battery sucks them up, but it misses some, and produces some heat. A battery being charged is warmer than one that isn't being charged. Then when somebody wants power, they flip a switch, the battery gives up its electrons, and a motor uses them to make itself spin. The spinning happens in spite of friction, but friction extracts its price, and you get heat. The 90% of 22% of the heat that didn't happen underneath the solar panel is given up by the motor. All heat accounted for and nothing extra created. (Ok, not all heat accounted for. I left out wire heat. Wires aren't 100% efficient either, so they heat up too when the solar panel puts electrons through them. But you get the idea.)
Orbital solar power, on the other hand, is a seriously bad idea. It takes heat that was going to miss Earth and aims it at the planet. If we did too much of that, we could literally cook ourselves. Fortunately we're mostly unable to do it at all, and it's silly anyway when there's all this free sunlight around that's already hitting us.
(and I lived in Germany and the US - I know how crappy the grid in the US is in comparison)
The US grid is wildly inconsistent, and as usual comparing any individual European country to the US isn't very helpful. Compare to individual US states and you'll get somewhere.
But even within a state, the US grid is wildly inconsistent. My electricity comes from a co-op. They had some stability problems, a decade ago. They went on a campaign to clean things up, and now my power is considerably more stable than the for-profit company that serves the adjacent cities. While being substantially cheaper. That for-profit company drags down the reliability numbers of the state all by themselves. The US grid isn't "the grid." It's a wild collection of random companies and co-ops, from tiny to giant, lashed together with chewing gum and baling wire and any kind of whacky contract the MBAs can dream up. It's quite a lot like the US Internet. Parts of it are as reliable as anywhere in the world. Others, not so much.
People, for the most part, will obey gun laws -- except the burglars and killers.
Of all the possible crimes, you picked burglary? Burglars are violent only 7% of the time (plus or minus a point or two depending on the year). Of those violent burglars, only 12% of them had a gun at the time. (Just possession, not necessarily brandished or fired.) So burglars with guns? 0.8% of all burglaries.
You can take that to mean that the heightened penalties for armed burglary vs unarmed burglary have successfully dissuaded nearly all burglars from carrying guns.
Or you can just admit that burglary is a really bad example of a gun crime. Burglars are overwhelmingly non-confrontational criminals.
There is no denying VR sounds cool. In some cases it might actually be cool - I'm thinking particularly of racing / flight / space sims where you sit in a cockpit and the range of movements in game roughly correspond to real life - you sit in the game, you sit in real life, you have buttons and controls in the game, you have buttons and controls in real life.
But for other kinds of game I really don't see the benefit. Yeah it could be used for first person shooters (for example) but then the game has to somehow reconcile a person running, spinning, jumping, aiming, shooting, standing, crouching and throwing stuff to someone in real life sat on a couch. It's likely that it will be extremely disorientating and puke inducing.
And aside from FPSs what can we expect? Probably some lame jump scare horror games. Probably some table top style games. But nothing that particularly justifies the experience. I bet most games will work as well if not better in 2D.
I expect you're right about cockpit games, and I'd add giant robot cockpits to your list. They will work and work very well, and that might be enough to drive a major market.
I also agree that FPSs that are anything like modern FPSs just aren't going to work. There may be FPSs, but it will be like Rainbow Six with the realism turned up to 11, otherwise they will make you sick.
You left out a couple of major categories though.
God games? AWESOME in VR. You control the view, and you don't have to pan very fast across the map if you don't want to. You're looking down at the little buildings and little people doing your bidding. It should work quite well.
RTSs, same thing, though possibly with faster map motion that might not work for some people.
Many styles of MMOs should also work great in VR, especially first person MMOs. Third person should be fine too, and much like the god game/RTSs as far as experience is concerned.
There's a pretty large market, even of established categories. Undoubtedly there are significant adjustments required in terms of rendering and user interface, but all of that should be possible.
What's most interesting is what will be invented because it's possible in VR and just can't be done on a flat screen that doesn't convey a stereoscopic image. Nobody knows what that might be. It will take a lot more units in a lot more hands to find out. Oculus Rift may make that possible, and considering this price, it will probably happen. People easily spend that much on a new monitor or new TV, so why wouldn't they spend it on a Rift? It's another display device, like the others.
Dang it. I meant distributing. What slashdot? Still no edit button?
Nope. It fouls up the moderation system.
That's usually where the conversation ends, but we could actually consider that fact a moment. Ok, it fouls up the moderation system. Something that has been modded up could be edited after the fact into something totally different than what was originally modded. (And would be. Don't kid yourself.)
But this observation does uncover a perfectly reasonable modification. Allow editing until a post has been modded. That actually seems completely reasonable. And modding in this context should include the automatic +1 karma bonus, so if you want to edit your posts immediately after you post them, and you have good karma, then you'll have to disable your bonus. But once you get modded, up or down, it's committed and read-only.
Also if a post gets a reply, it is locked down. Otherwise the reply system gets fouled up. Replies can make reference to things in a parent post that no longer exist, and that's ridiculous and high maintenance. Now the replier has to go edit their post, etc. etc.
But no replies and no mods? Edits should be fair game.
Slashdot Mirror
. Maybe if someone can create an LED TV that is as good I'd be interested, but for the moment I'm worried that when my current plasma dies I'll be forced to downgrade.
LG is shipping AMOLED TVs, at long last, the first vendor to break from the pack and do it. They have true black, just like plasmas. The largest sizes are still fantastically expensive, but they are available, and they're UltraHD.
Yes, I am bemoaning the loss of the plasma screen, I still think it has the best blacks, but still.
LG is shipping OLED TVs, the first vendor to break from the pack. The largest sizes are fantastically expensive, but they have plasma-quality black/contrast ratio, and for the same reason. One supposes they will hold the price up for a while, since they have zero competition, but they're available.
Truth is, people have killed, stolen and raped each others forever, it has nothing to do with religion or politics, it's just how people are.
No it's not.
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." -- Steven Weinberg
The edited version is still a derivative work, and it is illegal without the permission of the copyright holder, even if you own the original.
It is illegal to distribute. It is not illegal to create a derivative work in your own home. That's definitely fair use.
Really Potsy? That's not legal so you can fuck off. You do not have license to modify the movie.
I don't need a license to modify the fucking movie. I need a license to modify and distribute the modification. It is legal for me to possess a movie and a modified copy of the same movie that I have not distributed. The person who performed the edit and distributed it did something currently illegal, but I am not doing anything illegal by having both.
Oddly enough, all we have to do is create a fully scriptable movie editor, and even the person creating the modified version would be doing something legal, as long as what he distributes is a script that will generate the modified version from the purchased media. He would, in fact, hold a copyright of his own to that script, completely independent of the movie copyright.
Do I have the legal right to tear pages out of a book I own? Yes I do. I have the identical right to rip scenes out of a movie I own.
Do I have the legal right to rip pages recommended by a friend out of a book I own? Yes I do. I have the identical right to rip scenes recommended by a friend out of a movie I own.
The security of most consumer devices is pathetic and useless. The security of medical devices has known to be almost non-existent for years now.
Agreed. And there have been exactly zero attempts to exploit that. Or at least so close to zero, it can successfully be concealed from the entire public. So no, not inevitable. This smells like FUD. The authors of malware take great pride in knowing about zero-day exploits. That's where the money is, generally speaking. This is the polar opposite. This is a 5 year exploit. Or possibly even older. And yet it hasn't been exploited. So what's going to be different in 2016? Short answer: nothing. This is FUD.
The types of criminals who will ransom your Word documents have already performed the calculus of risk and decided that being the test case for Murder By Remote is the very last thing they want to do. Law enforcement does exactly nothing about your Word docs. Law enforcement would pull out all the stops for that murder case, and criminals know it. Essentially all of those criminals are not psychotic. Sociopathic, yes, but not psychotic. This topic is a good illustration of the difference.
Humans are not intrinsically honest. It's time to stop pretending they are.
Humans in successful societies typically are intrinsically honest. The spontaneous first response is the honest response. And that's why the society works. The societies that work the most poorly are those that are the least honest. Books have been written about the reasons and the mechanisms, but that's what it boils down to.
b) Is hanging actually a legal way of killing somebody if he was gived a death sentence anywhere in the US? Just asking, since publically demanding a crime towards another citizen is illegal, at least in germany.
It's legal in two US states, in one case only if lethal injection isn't possible, and in the other only if the condemned requests it. In the US state in which Edward Snowden performed the majority of his illegal actions, the death penalty is not legal in any form.
Advocating a crime against another person in the US is only illegal in certain specific instances. In particular, advocating a crime against certain protected classes is illegal, the protected classes being ethnic minorities, persons with disabilities, and homosexual people. Advocating large scale property damage and theft (inciting to riot) is also illegal, but that isn't against a specific person. The right to free speech acknowledged in the first amendment of the US constitution applies, and applies very broadly.
I thought that military traitors were traditionally executed by firing squad in the US.
They are. Edward Snowden was never a member of the US military, or any other military. He was a civilian subcontractor.
Who is this guy and what has he done with Trump? Trump doesn't waffle. Trump doesn't dodge the question. Trump is balls to the wall, 'Murica! Fuck Yeah! in every interview. So who is this guy who won't just say it?
Wait, wait wait. Does Mr. Donald Trump think he's a viable candidate?? Ahahahahahaha
That's funny.
That's the thing about evil. It doesn't have an absolute definition...
Yes it does. Evil is that which is contrasurvival, for the individual, for the family unit, for the village, for the nation-state, or for the species. Daesh fails at every level of abstraction. It's evil from beginning to end. No religious book, not even a philosophical book is necessary to arrive by this definition. It's straight up Darwinism. We understand evil as children. It's only the endless sophistry that conceals evil. Let's rip away the veil.
If your religion mandates the death of 78% of your species, it is evil.
If your religion mandates the death of 99.5% of all nations, it is evil.
If your religion mandates the death of 100% of the villages that do not submit to your rule, it is evil.
If your religion mandates the death of your own sister if she is raped, it is evil.
If your religion mandates your own death, it is evil.
The new caliphate called ISIS is evil.
... and all internet and phone communications monitored?
Funny you should ask. Yes. Yes they were. Every phone call they made was logged. Every web site they visited was logged. Every email they sent was captured and stored. So were all of yours. Harper's government used equipment Cisco designed for the NSA, eagerly installed by Bell and Shaw and Rogers in datacenters across the entire country.
Are you starting to see the problem here?
Let's take 'em one at a time.
Some of the jobs we might have in a decade are VR fashion designers,
Got those, in Second Life. Worldwide demand: irrelevant. Not even a blip. The new VR? Existing game artists will shift to that role without even slowing down. Prospects of expansion, not great.
3D food printing designers,
Not happening, since 3D printed food that qualifies for the name is largely inedible.
online education coordinators,
Got those. Khan Academy, et al. A half dozen people can service a hundred million, and they're contracting, not expanding.
commercial drone delivery operators,
Will get automated even faster than driving trucks.
nanotech cleanup,
Nothing to clean up, and zero ways forward on that front. Eric Drexler's vision got us as far as MEMS and has stalled out.
virtual prostitute.
Got those. They're called cam girls. There's already a vast oversupply.
Use your imagination.
I've always been told my imagination is pretty good, and I've put quite a bit of thought into this, because anybody who succeeds gets rich, and being rich looks kinda nice. And here's the thing: whatever an imaginative person thinks of at this point, starts out automated. A handful of designers and engineers create something, and the production line required to bring it to the masses does not involve mass labor. It involves machines. Similarly for new services. For anything that isn't effectively prostitution, mass communications means a handful of people can fill worldwide demand. Your examples of SEO optimization consultants and online education consultants have already demonstrated this.
Leaving aside the question of what to do with the tens of millions who will never be qualified to be VR fashion designers and similarly creative jobs, because they have the design sensibilities of a brick, how do you employ the tens of millions who can learn, but have nothing to work on?
There has always been a new wave of jobs as the cost of what we're used to buying fell, and we found something new to buy. There will be this time too.
You state that as if it's a natural law, when it's anything but.
First wave automation was happening in an economy where most people were less well off than ancient Romans. Centuries of Dark Ages exacted a massive toll, and it wasn't hard to find things to sell to people who were starting from literally dirt floors and no running water. There are people still living today who remember not having running water in the structure they lived in, and using a hole in the ground to defecate. A population with that as the starting point can absorb enormous amounts of productivity, and did, for two centuries.
There are places where those conditions still prevail, but they're not relevant to this discussion. This discussion is about what to do in the economies of the world that have more than 3 billion people in them who already have all of the necessities of life and are to the point of replacing luxuries for the hell of it. What more can you make for them? 3 billion people already have more clothes than they can wear and more food than they can eat. 3 billion people either own personal transportation or have access to public transportation that can get them across their respective countries for a few hours' wages. 3 billion people have climate controlled dwellings with electricity and running water and sanitation. 3 billion people have TVs and smartphones and multiple other computers and heaps of children's toys and the ability to indulge any hobby they like. What are you going to sell them?
The necessities are done. The luxuries are done. What new thing is going to absorb the labor of hundreds of millions? It won't be a necessity. That's what the automation is doing. What luxury are you going to invent next? VR? Consumer electronics that will be in the hands of those 3 billion inside of 5 years, if they actually want it? (The smartphone being the bellwether for all future luxury consumer electronics.) So what is it going to be? Flying cars? Linux on the desktop?
Heard that Apple? With as little as 100 billions of cash you have on hand you can organise mission to Mars and have yours astronaut advertise your products on arrival. This type of advertisement will be in history books!!!
Microsoft will buy the contract to send Surfaces with the astronauts. And the commentators will call them iPads.
As for banning them, I personally think that most web pages do not take enough advantage of hyperlinks within the body of the pages.
Most web pages, once they have you on the page, don't want you to leave by any route that doesn't pay them. So the links are ads and nothing else.
Apparently, warming has added mass via more snow, and the paper doesn't appear to address possible bedrock rebound from thinning ice. At some point, temperature will likely increase to the point where added snowfall can't keep up with the ice outflow. At the moment, the changing dynamic of the climate seems to be causing counterintuitive local changes, like added snowfall in the eastern US and eastern Antarctica, due to added water vapor in the air.
This is only counterintuitive to people who subscribe to the Church of Alarmism. To anybody paying attention, it's natural and expected. The Earth is naturally habitable. Despite massive traumatic perturbations over the course of the past several billion years, including cometary impacts and continental drift that has rearranged the Earth and its oceans again and again, Earth still supports life. It is not going to become Venus. It is not going to become Mars. It will remain livable. Is it always going to be perfectly comfortable for every animal and every person everywhere? Obviously not. It never has been that. But of all the things we have seen in the fossil record, a warmer Earth is the least of the threats. Life likes warmth, and Earth can be warmer, but doesn't get too warm, even with massive fluctuations in atmospheric carbon. What life on Earth fears, and what we as humans should fear to the exclusion of all else, is the return of the ice. Our current population can not live in an Ice Age. We as a species very nearly didn't make it through one Ice Age already. Ice is a threat. Warmth is not. Earth tends toward a kind of equilibrium. It's chaotic, but it's an equilibrium. If it wasn't and didn't, one of the astronomical mishaps of the ancient past would have pushed it into uninhabitability already.
The only things that will end life on Earth will be astronomical in nature. The cooling and congealing of Earth's core, and the subsequent collapse of the magnetic field, would eventually end life on Earth. The expansion of the Sun into a red giant will eventually end life on Earth, regardless of all other eventualities. But short of astronomical scale disasters, life on Earth will continue.
Can we take steps to keep things comfortable for us? Yes, obviously, because we have, and in much of the world, laws in place and enforced see to it that rivers no longer catch fire, forests are not willfully obliterated in their entirety, and large wild animals are not hunted to extinction. But let's face it, these are comfort measures, not habitability requirements. Flaming rivers eventually go out, forests eventually regrow, and wild animal populations expand everywhere humans are not, even in the face of pockets of outrageous radiation.
In the particular case of carbon, the last time all of the carbon that human activity is currently liberating was active in the biosphere, life on Earth was incredibly fecund and prolific. Megafauna walked the Earth for millions of years, millions of years, with all of that carbon circulating, and by all accounts, life was easy everywhere. This is not something to fear. Ice is. So don't be too happy about growing ice in the Antarctic.
The challenge: if social peace is to be achieved by subsidizing everyone up to a basic level of income, is there any way to do this without disincentivizing work by those on the job? Would Finnish culture degenerate into a society in which everyone is officially unemployed and drawing the basic dole, with motivated workers taking hidden side jobs for extra cash?
You missed a major prerequisite of the plan: it's a universal income. Work, don't work, you still get it. Working is still incentivized by money. But instead of being the only money, it's just more money. Which has all kinds of knock-on effects, many of which appear to be good. But work isn't disincentivized. Much of the current system remains just as it is today. People with special skills can still acquire quite large amounts of earned income, in addition to their basic income. In countries such as Finland which already support a myriad social programs, individual taxes on incomes higher than the basic income don't even change. Just how the money is distributed changes. Administrative overhead should be substantially reduced. For people earning well over the basic income, it may be implemented as simply a tax cut equal to the amount of the income. (Which may be a mistake.) Regardless, people will still do work and get paid for it.
I don't disagree, but what constitutes "the basics"? To my way of thinking the basics are ...
Payment for this should be in the form of vouchers, rather than cash to the individuals.
You are completely and totally missing the point of a universal basic income. We have already tried it your way.
The current system is a hodgepodge of EBT cards, Obamaphones, bus passes, Medicare, low-income housing, and ten thousand other independent, dependent, and partially dependent systems which require a massive army of government workers to administer, because people like you demand that each and every nickel be tagged and tracked and audited and squeezed until Thomas Jefferson shrieks, resulting in endless cycles of stupidity of waiting in government offices to prove for the 14th time eligibility for some benefit or other that is worth so little that we're basically paying the beneficiary minimum wage to stand in line. Forever.
It's ridiculous.
A universal basic income, done right, dispenses with ALL of that. Nearly all of those government workers are laid off, the remainder doing the job of administering the new system, which consists of four questions: Are you a citizen? Are you alive? Have you reached the age of majority or are you an emancipated minor? What are your bank account details?
That's it. And every single person in the country, poor or rich, employed or not, including you, who can answer those three questions in the affirmative and provide their details, gets money every single month. Verify the questions once per year, and if somebody dies in the middle of the year, we don't care. Their heirs get to keep the extra payouts, because it's more trouble than it's worth to us to try to get it back.
And the laid off government workers? Instead of becoming homeless because they're jobless, they become beneficiaries of the plan, and most of them will go find a different job anyway, one that's actually productive. The people being paid to wait in line can now get jobs too, without endangering their benefits. Many of them will. Many marginal part time jobs will get filled that previously went begging, because they needed work done, but not enough work to live on. Now people can perform those jobs, and never miss work because of an appointment with some bureaucrat who wants to quibble over $12/week in EBT that they might not be eligible for anymore because they moved in with their significant other who has an Obamaphone, but might get to keep because of subsection d) of part 3) of rule e) of this year's new rules but it can only be backdated 3 months unless they've been beneficiaries for 6 months or less in which case it's 4 months blah blah blah...
There are two major questions to answer in the design of such a system. Should the minimum wage be eliminated? And should the benefit accrue to every natural person regardless of age, the benefits of minors being administered by their guardians?
Both answers depend quite heavily on the amount being considered. If the amount is inflation-indexed, using an honest valuation of inflation, and really does cover living expenses, then it's not just reasonable but actively desirable to eliminate minimum wage laws entirely. Marginal jobs can be filled by labor working for a mutually agreed price, with actual mutual agreement, instead of the one offering wielding the whip hand over the one accepting. I suspect this will drive a generational sea change in the attitudes of management to labor, where the flaming dickheads who enjoy being tinpot dictators will discover that no one at all wants to do the work they want done. Actual effective managers (not necessarily nice, but effective) will be able to get the workers they need, from the niche to the massive, and overall societal happiness will probably be measurably better.
If the amount being considered is enough to support minor dependents, only people who can answer the three questions
...but actual generation of heat by releasing it through energy production as waste heat. Solar energy doesn't help us with this because increased capture of solar radiation will increase waste heat on Earth.
Only if we're foolish enough to allow solar power satellites to actually happen. If all of the solar panels we use are on Earth, then this is not a problem at all. An earthly solar panel only converts energy. It doesn't create it or generate it out of nothing. The incoming energy is already there, in the sunlight. You actually end up with less heat at the point of collection than you otherwise would when a photovoltaic panel converts some of the energy in the photons of sunlight into electrons and ships it out over a wire.
Photovoltaics (commonly understood to be "solar power"), windmills, and dams are all the same type of thing. They're energy converters, not generators, and they're all converting solar energy. Photovoltaics do it directly from photons. Windmills and dams do it by squeezing the energy out of the motion of fluids like water and air. Fluids that are kept in motion by solar energy. None of them result in extra waste heat. They result in the same amount of waste heat that would have happened anyway, except instead, they get some useful work done first. The heat that didn't happen when a photovoltaic panel caught some sunlight instead happens when an electric motor uses that energy. It's the same amount of heat, just in a different place, and with batteries involved, at a different time.
Speaking of batteries... Batteries are 85% to 90% efficient. That 10% to 15% inefficiency? Heat. So a 22% efficient solar panel converts 22% of the energy in the sunlight hitting it into electrons. The other 78% is heat. If the solar panel wasn't there, it would have been 100% heat. The electrons created by the solar panel flow down a wire to a battery. The battery sucks them up, but it misses some, and produces some heat. A battery being charged is warmer than one that isn't being charged. Then when somebody wants power, they flip a switch, the battery gives up its electrons, and a motor uses them to make itself spin. The spinning happens in spite of friction, but friction extracts its price, and you get heat. The 90% of 22% of the heat that didn't happen underneath the solar panel is given up by the motor. All heat accounted for and nothing extra created. (Ok, not all heat accounted for. I left out wire heat. Wires aren't 100% efficient either, so they heat up too when the solar panel puts electrons through them. But you get the idea.)
Orbital solar power, on the other hand, is a seriously bad idea. It takes heat that was going to miss Earth and aims it at the planet. If we did too much of that, we could literally cook ourselves. Fortunately we're mostly unable to do it at all, and it's silly anyway when there's all this free sunlight around that's already hitting us.
(and I lived in Germany and the US - I know how crappy the grid in the US is in comparison)
The US grid is wildly inconsistent, and as usual comparing any individual European country to the US isn't very helpful. Compare to individual US states and you'll get somewhere.
But even within a state, the US grid is wildly inconsistent. My electricity comes from a co-op. They had some stability problems, a decade ago. They went on a campaign to clean things up, and now my power is considerably more stable than the for-profit company that serves the adjacent cities. While being substantially cheaper. That for-profit company drags down the reliability numbers of the state all by themselves. The US grid isn't "the grid." It's a wild collection of random companies and co-ops, from tiny to giant, lashed together with chewing gum and baling wire and any kind of whacky contract the MBAs can dream up. It's quite a lot like the US Internet. Parts of it are as reliable as anywhere in the world. Others, not so much.
You wouldn't download a house would you?
People, for the most part, will obey gun laws -- except the burglars and killers.
Of all the possible crimes, you picked burglary? Burglars are violent only 7% of the time (plus or minus a point or two depending on the year). Of those violent burglars, only 12% of them had a gun at the time. (Just possession, not necessarily brandished or fired.) So burglars with guns? 0.8% of all burglaries.
You can take that to mean that the heightened penalties for armed burglary vs unarmed burglary have successfully dissuaded nearly all burglars from carrying guns.
Or you can just admit that burglary is a really bad example of a gun crime. Burglars are overwhelmingly non-confrontational criminals.
Try "rapists and killers" next time.
There is no denying VR sounds cool. In some cases it might actually be cool - I'm thinking particularly of racing / flight / space sims where you sit in a cockpit and the range of movements in game roughly correspond to real life - you sit in the game, you sit in real life, you have buttons and controls in the game, you have buttons and controls in real life.
But for other kinds of game I really don't see the benefit. Yeah it could be used for first person shooters (for example) but then the game has to somehow reconcile a person running, spinning, jumping, aiming, shooting, standing, crouching and throwing stuff to someone in real life sat on a couch. It's likely that it will be extremely disorientating and puke inducing.
And aside from FPSs what can we expect? Probably some lame jump scare horror games. Probably some table top style games. But nothing that particularly justifies the experience. I bet most games will work as well if not better in 2D.
I expect you're right about cockpit games, and I'd add giant robot cockpits to your list. They will work and work very well, and that might be enough to drive a major market.
I also agree that FPSs that are anything like modern FPSs just aren't going to work. There may be FPSs, but it will be like Rainbow Six with the realism turned up to 11, otherwise they will make you sick.
You left out a couple of major categories though.
God games? AWESOME in VR. You control the view, and you don't have to pan very fast across the map if you don't want to. You're looking down at the little buildings and little people doing your bidding. It should work quite well.
RTSs, same thing, though possibly with faster map motion that might not work for some people.
Many styles of MMOs should also work great in VR, especially first person MMOs. Third person should be fine too, and much like the god game/RTSs as far as experience is concerned.
There's a pretty large market, even of established categories. Undoubtedly there are significant adjustments required in terms of rendering and user interface, but all of that should be possible.
What's most interesting is what will be invented because it's possible in VR and just can't be done on a flat screen that doesn't convey a stereoscopic image. Nobody knows what that might be. It will take a lot more units in a lot more hands to find out. Oculus Rift may make that possible, and considering this price, it will probably happen. People easily spend that much on a new monitor or new TV, so why wouldn't they spend it on a Rift? It's another display device, like the others.
Seriously, Mecha would be a great place...
I agree, a pilgrimage site devoted to giant robots is a really great idea. Where should we build it though?
Dang it. I meant distributing. What slashdot? Still no edit button?
Nope. It fouls up the moderation system.
That's usually where the conversation ends, but we could actually consider that fact a moment. Ok, it fouls up the moderation system. Something that has been modded up could be edited after the fact into something totally different than what was originally modded. (And would be. Don't kid yourself.)
But this observation does uncover a perfectly reasonable modification. Allow editing until a post has been modded. That actually seems completely reasonable. And modding in this context should include the automatic +1 karma bonus, so if you want to edit your posts immediately after you post them, and you have good karma, then you'll have to disable your bonus. But once you get modded, up or down, it's committed and read-only.
Also if a post gets a reply, it is locked down. Otherwise the reply system gets fouled up. Replies can make reference to things in a parent post that no longer exist, and that's ridiculous and high maintenance. Now the replier has to go edit their post, etc. etc.
But no replies and no mods? Edits should be fair game.