That's the thing I don't understand. What's the point of colonies on Mars and Venus when you can't actually use all that land surface without building structures that practically cover the entire land surface in use (to keep people, livestock, plants etc alive)? It's not like surrounding a large area with fencing/walls and letting the cows/crops just grow. You have to cover all those areas or your crops/livestock will die. And the soil might not even be that productive.
For that same cost you might as well have colonies in space, and mine asteroids. Then you don't have the inconvenience and expense of being stuck in an inhospitable gravity well.
I suspect very bad weather damaging your buildings in Mars/Venus is more likely than your space colony being damaged by very bad solar weather or asteroid strikes.
So why would having a colony in Venus or Mars actually be better than a colony in space?
I just use different browsers that are run using different restricted users. That way if my Slashdot browser gets pwned it doesn't affect my banking browsers. Nor does it affect my main user account.
Yes these pwn2own guys probably have zero day privilege escalation exploits, but as the joke goes, I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun Joe Average. And Joe Average will never do something like this. Especially since the browser won't have enough privileges to update itself normally - I have to use another account for updating the browser. It's not that inconvenient or difficult for me. Just launch the update browser and do the updating. But you can't expect Joe Average to do that regularly (probably have to automate it for them).
If a skilled hacker specifically target me I'd be pwned but why would they bother?
That's why a funding for a follow up research is needed.
You often can't conclusively find things out because there isn't enough $$$$ to do a conclusive study, so you start on a media friendly one first, get publicity etc, hopefully get more $$$$ for a followup or two.
The problem is you end up with lots of studies that are useless on their own. And you might not even be able to easily use them properly in a meta study - since their shortcomings are in in those little details like you mentioned.
I doubt most of them are stupid. I believe they're just not _allowed_ to use their brains and discretion in those circumstances, or at least strongly discouraged to do so.
Given Microsoft's resources and Ballmer proclaiming they were "All In" on Azure, what they could have done after the leap year bug was to set up test systems that are replicas of production shards/clusters but with the time set to one week ahead or so. Then have the test systems run the usual regression tests 24/7.
Then if stuff fails because of leap years, expiration or other time related stuff, it's more likely to fail in a test system first and they'll have a week to fix the problem before their users notice.
This is a pretty frigging obvious thing to do right? If they really are "All In" they'd have the money, resources and people to do this and it would already have been done by now.
So given that this failed publicly and the failure wasn't in some fringe beta feature (which would have been somewhat excusable) it just reinforces my long held opinion that Azure is not ready for serious use.
There are plenty of very smart people working for Microsoft but they didn't or weren't able to help prevent this problem despite Microsoft supposedly being "All In" on Azure so I think Microsoft needs to fix itself too, or they're not really "All In" on Azure.
It's already long known that a lot of the seeing is done in the brain. When someone draws something on your hand or other part of the body you can still "see it" even if you are blindfolded. The resolution is just isn't as good. Humans can learn to see with their tongues: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/1946/description/The_Seeing_Tongue
This transplant experiment isn't very useful in my opinion. Yeah it shows that if you grow an eye on a different spot on a tadpole it can sometimes kind of work. But how useful is that? The artificial eye experiments on humans are far more useful.
It can be useful in situations where say you have to use info in document A and document B to decide what data to copy from document C to document D, or whether to change the data in D instead.
If you don't encounter such situations then it won't be that helpful. But one day you might. I've had to do similar things before.
Sometimes due to application behaviour it is faster to copy from document X to notepad to transform the data to plaintext then copy that data to target document Y as plaintext. Some applications allow you to set the default copy and paste behaviour or provide a different shortcut for paste as plaintext, but others don't. And you might need to alternate between copy "everything" (formatting etc) and copy as plaintext. In which case if you need plaintext you copy to notepad first otherwise you don't.
As for complaining and options, one annoying thing I've noticed about most GUIs is they don't help in this scenario: Say you have application "A" open and are working on a particular file "X", you save that file, and now you want to open it with (or send it to) application "B" or you want to copy it to location "C" (but retain the original saved position in "A").
It requires extra steps that don't have to be there if the OS/GUI/Apps cooperated better. You already know the file you want and where you want it to be. The applications know where their open files are. The OS might also know too. So why not make it easy? At worst the UI should allow you to copy the URL of the file so that you can easily locate/open it with another application.
But instead you are forced to go through a File Browser to "look" for the file again. Even if you already know exactly where it is.
So yeah Microsoft has been rather disappointing - after so much time and resources spent and Windows 8 is the best they can give to us? Meh.
I wonder if GNOME and KDE have made that scenario easier. I haven't been keeping in touch. I remember KDE had stuff like kioslaves which were great.
You set it with alt+0. Then it stays that way till you change it with alt+0 or the other methods (see docs). The assigned windows don't keep changing.
So a quick way to set things would be to click the windows you want to work with in reverse order (ending with the window you want to be #1) then press alt+0. Then from that on alt+number always brings up the same window that was assigned at that time.
You can work with a group of up to 9 windows for a while then quickly switch to working with another group of 9 windows by just repeating the assignation process.
If you somehow need to keep working with two or more groups of many windows there is actually a bank switching feature. I don't use that, but perhaps one day there might be someone who will find it useful.
I'm aware of the win+n cycling but I find it clunkier.
Seriously though, I can't help you with the "within document" stuff but for switching from document to document I wrote a utility for Windows ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkkey/ ) that allows me to press alt+1 to raise window #1, alt+3 = window #3 and so on. Numbers are assigned when you press alt+0, then #1 is the current foreground window at that point in time, #2 = the previous foreground window, #3 the one before that.
It's useful if you only have one laptop screen. While it's not as intuitive as just turning your head to look at something, it has the advantage of putting the relevant window in focus so that if you need you can copy stuff from it without too much mouse or keyboard work.
Windows 7 does have something similar with winkey+[number] but that's by application so it doesn't help if you have multiple docs opened for a particular app. I did try to get Microsoft to have Windows do it the way linkkey does it, but they said their way is better, and before that I suggested it to GNOME and KDE (in 2006).
I personally believe it's not impressive to have an OS that only runs a few processes at the same time, but it is impressive if it can run thousands of processes. So similarly it should not be impressive to have a GUI that only allows people to easily manage a few tasks at the same time. What would be impressive is a GUI that allows people (expert level) to handle dozens or even hundreds of tasks. while still being good at allowing non-expert people to easily handle a few tasks.
The problem is which second to pick out of 86400? If the cost of storage is low, recording the entire day is better while marking the segments you want to keep at high res.
If Brain-Computer Interfaces become better you could associate arbitrary thought patterns with that memory and recall it just by thinking of it (aka those patterns).
It means Italy needs to have large amounts of US dollars in order to buy that oil and Kuwait will end up with large amounts of US dollars after selling oil. And the price lists are done in US dollars. So when the US prints trillions of US dollars that oil becomes cheaper for the USA, till someone goes "hey hang on I should be charging more".
More importantly the billions of US dollars that Italy and Kuwait have to buy oil and other stuff becomes worth less. This is because there now are more US dollars in the world, and they hold relatively less of it. They then have to buy more US dollars in order to buy stuff (and thus increasing the value of the US dollar). While the USA can simply buy the oil with their newly created dollars.
Now assume a world where all international trade is done in Euros. If everyone was selling oil in Euros, even when the US prints trillions of US dollars, that oil still remains the same price in Euros. The US would have to buy Euros with their US dollars. This does not make the Euros that Italy is holding go down in value. It makes it go up in value relative to the US dollar as the traders of currency notice the increased demand for Euros vs the US Dollar.
And if the rest of the world doesn't buy as much from the USA as the US buys from them, that means the rest of the world doesn't need to buy US dollars as much as the US needs to buy Euros. And that makes the US dollars go down in value.
At a certain point of course it means the US made goods would be cheaper and people might start buying more from the USA. But by that time it would also mean the US people would be poorer compared to the rest of the world - they won't be able to buy as many French handbags, Australian Wine, German cars or Chinese toys as they used to be able to.
The US can keep its trade deficit for so long and still print money without the US dollar collapsing in value because the OPEC sells oil in US dollars. The US Gov prints US Dollars. The countries around the world buy the US Dollars, then use the dollars to buy oil, which they then burn to keep their economies alive. So there's always a demand for US dollars. Same goes for other consumable commodities sold in US dollars.
Also, it does not seem as if the zircons rode to Mauritius on the wind, says Robert Duncan, a marine geologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. âoeThereâ(TM)s a remote possibility that they were wind blown, but theyâ(TM)re probably too large to have done so,â he adds.
But how is that worse from now, where you have PR campaigns to justify the leaders decision on who lives and dies?
At least with this the leaders have to put their necks on the line too. And when the mob suffers they agreed to it. Isn't that more just than now? In case you haven't noticed the mob also end up dying and suffering in wars (in addition to the people they attack).
One of their arguments against robots is the lack of accountability. This proposal increases accountability. All the way to the leaders themselves.
If a leader claims the war is worth dying and killing for, then I say "You first, you are the leader after all" and "Put up or shut up".
It is a red herring. The problem is not robots in war. There's no big difference between using robots and drones in wars compared to using cruise missiles in wars. And only a slight difference between using soldiers that have been conditioned/brainwashed to follow orders unquestioningly.
In the old days kings used to lead their soldiers into battle. In modern times this is impractical and counterproductive.
But you can still have leaders lead the frontline in spirit.
Basically, if leaders are going to send troops on an _offensive_ war/battle (not defensive war) there must be a referendum on the war.
If there are not enough votes for the war, those leaders get put on deathrow.
At a convenient time later, a referendum is held to redeem each leader. Leaders that do not get enough votes get executed. For example if too many people stay at home and don't bother voting - the leaders get executed.
If it turns out later that the war was justified, a fancy ceremony is held, and the executed leaders are awarded a purple heart or equivalent, and you have people say nice things about them, cry and that sort of thing.
If it turns out later that the leaders tricked the voters, a referendum can be held (need to get enough signatories to start such a referendum, just to prevent nutters from wasting everyone else's time).
This proposal has many advantages: 1) Even leaders who don't really care about those "young soldiers on the battlefield" will not consider starting a war lightly. 2) The soldiers will know that the leaders want a war enough to risk their own lives for it. 3) The soldiers will know that X% of the population want the war. 4) Those being attacked will know that X% of the attackers believe in the war - so they want a war, they get a war - for sufficiently high X, collateral damage becomes insignificant. They might even be justified in using WMD and other otherwise dubious tactics. If > 90% of the country attacking you want to kill you and your families, what is so wrong about you using WMD as long as it does not affect neighbouring countries?
I think if this was implemented it would be much better than banning robots. I'm biased of course;).
Well he's wrong. Since it's not just energy we depend on and it's not just energy we _want_.
every product is as valuable as the energy used to craft it
Tell that to stamp collectors. Tell that to art collectors. Tell that to the buyers of luxury goods.
There are lots of scarcities in this world that are not determined by energy unless you really stretch things to the point that they are useless in predicting or understanding stuff.
As for the US currency, it's not actually holding value - it is actually depreciating because of inflation. But that's not necessarily a problem for the USA (see below).
Why some economists recommendation of "printing money" to solve financial problems works at least for the USA is because the US dollar is used by the majority of countries in the world to buy and sell petroleum, wheat, CPUs, edible oils, milk, manufacturing equipment, toys, etc from each other.
Because of that when the USA prints money, the USA is actually transferring wealth from the rest of the world that holds positive amounts of US dollars (whether as assets, cash, goods or loans to others).
Basically when the USA prints money it taxes the rest of the world. If the US Gov gives enough of the printed money to the US citizens the US citizens will benefit overall. And hence the US financial problems are solved at the expense of the rest of the world.
In contrast if you are Zimbabwe you can do as much Quantitative Easing as you want and the rest of the world will just laugh at you. BUT IF the Zimbabwe government printed money and invested it into projects that benefit Zimbabwe with good ROI then yes printing money would have helped Zimbabwe. It would just be like another tax on the Zimbabwe residents but used productively. The big problem is getting good ROI or at least better ROI than not taxing the residents. And that's not always easy.
So it should now be obvious that it is much easier to make your country wealthier if you can tax the whole world rather than just the residents of your country. Then you don't even need projects with good ROI. Just take wealth from the rest of the world and hand it to yourself and your people.
And that should help explain why printing money works in some cases and not others.
I see lots of clueless US people (not just economists;) ) talking about going to the gold standard, the USA not being able to pay back debts, stupid stuff like China owns the USA, etc.
The USA owes most of its debts in US dollars. Not gold. It can create as much US dollars as it needs! The Federal Reserve loaned out trillions from "thin air" in 2008+. But note that strangely some of the trillions went into bailing out foreign banks! The US people should realize that it only works for them if enough of the printed money goes to them...
You should now see why going to the gold standard or the other alternatives would hurt the USA a lot.
After the infamous Feb 29th incident MS should have set up an Azure cluster identical to production stuff but with all the clocks set to 1 week or more ahead. Have it continuously running regression tests. Certs even getting close to 3 days before expiring is stupid.
Microsoft has billions of dollars, so if this 12 hour downtime is the best MS can do when they're "All In" (Ballmer's words not mine), it's not a good sign.
As a tech advance I actually don't care much about Virtual Reality. The VR stuff would be nice for some games and maybe porn, but I doubt it'll be everywhere any time soon. Augmented reality would be nice (but latency for this won't be as big a problem). What I'd want is human augmentation ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3478821&cid=42956909 ).
It'll be nice if you could have a minimap in your vision that updates with locations of stuff of interest, cool HUD sort info, and other fancy tech (as mentioned in my post). But who would want their vision completely replaced with a virtual reality for every day stuff, so will it ever be everywhere?
Slashdot Mirror
That's the thing I don't understand. What's the point of colonies on Mars and Venus when you can't actually use all that land surface without building structures that practically cover the entire land surface in use (to keep people, livestock, plants etc alive)? It's not like surrounding a large area with fencing/walls and letting the cows/crops just grow. You have to cover all those areas or your crops/livestock will die. And the soil might not even be that productive.
For that same cost you might as well have colonies in space, and mine asteroids. Then you don't have the inconvenience and expense of being stuck in an inhospitable gravity well.
I suspect very bad weather damaging your buildings in Mars/Venus is more likely than your space colony being damaged by very bad solar weather or asteroid strikes.
So why would having a colony in Venus or Mars actually be better than a colony in space?
Makes more sense to be a power than a device.
Peter Parker could have become a very rich man by just by licensing his webshooter technology.
How about a pizza with spider-goat cheese?
Wonder how stringy the cheese will be...
I've been wondering if Google has a Financial arm/division that makes a lot of money from this sort of thing.
Being able to figure what a lot of investors/speculators are going to buy/sell can make you a lot of money.
I just use different browsers that are run using different restricted users. That way if my Slashdot browser gets pwned it doesn't affect my banking browsers. Nor does it affect my main user account.
Yes these pwn2own guys probably have zero day privilege escalation exploits, but as the joke goes, I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun Joe Average. And Joe Average will never do something like this. Especially since the browser won't have enough privileges to update itself normally - I have to use another account for updating the browser. It's not that inconvenient or difficult for me. Just launch the update browser and do the updating. But you can't expect Joe Average to do that regularly (probably have to automate it for them).
If a skilled hacker specifically target me I'd be pwned but why would they bother?
That's why a funding for a follow up research is needed.
You often can't conclusively find things out because there isn't enough $$$$ to do a conclusive study, so you start on a media friendly one first, get publicity etc, hopefully get more $$$$ for a followup or two.
The problem is you end up with lots of studies that are useless on their own. And you might not even be able to easily use them properly in a meta study - since their shortcomings are in in those little details like you mentioned.
I doubt most of them are stupid. I believe they're just not _allowed_ to use their brains and discretion in those circumstances, or at least strongly discouraged to do so.
Reminds me of this: Later Than You Think :)
Click on quick view on the PDF
Given Microsoft's resources and Ballmer proclaiming they were "All In" on Azure, what they could have done after the leap year bug was to set up test systems that are replicas of production shards/clusters but with the time set to one week ahead or so. Then have the test systems run the usual regression tests 24/7.
Then if stuff fails because of leap years, expiration or other time related stuff, it's more likely to fail in a test system first and they'll have a week to fix the problem before their users notice.
This is a pretty frigging obvious thing to do right? If they really are "All In" they'd have the money, resources and people to do this and it would already have been done by now.
So given that this failed publicly and the failure wasn't in some fringe beta feature (which would have been somewhat excusable) it just reinforces my long held opinion that Azure is not ready for serious use.
There are plenty of very smart people working for Microsoft but they didn't or weren't able to help prevent this problem despite Microsoft supposedly being "All In" on Azure so I think Microsoft needs to fix itself too, or they're not really "All In" on Azure.
I'd think it takes two.
And from what I see humans have applied selection pressure on the dogs more than the other way around.
On a related note:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
Oops that seeing tongue link is paywalled.
Try this one instead: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=device-lets-blind-see-with-tongues
It's already long known that a lot of the seeing is done in the brain. When someone draws something on your hand or other part of the body you can still "see it" even if you are blindfolded. The resolution is just isn't as good. Humans can learn to see with their tongues: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/1946/description/The_Seeing_Tongue
They can also see with sound - either echolocation or pitch vs left-right volume. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLziFMF4DHA
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/
This transplant experiment isn't very useful in my opinion. Yeah it shows that if you grow an eye on a different spot on a tadpole it can sometimes kind of work. But how useful is that? The artificial eye experiments on humans are far more useful.
Maybe most of the good ones got booted out during jury selection... ;)
It can be useful in situations where say you have to use info in document A and document B to decide what data to copy from document C to document D, or whether to change the data in D instead.
If you don't encounter such situations then it won't be that helpful. But one day you might. I've had to do similar things before.
Sometimes due to application behaviour it is faster to copy from document X to notepad to transform the data to plaintext then copy that data to target document Y as plaintext. Some applications allow you to set the default copy and paste behaviour or provide a different shortcut for paste as plaintext, but others don't. And you might need to alternate between copy "everything" (formatting etc) and copy as plaintext. In which case if you need plaintext you copy to notepad first otherwise you don't.
As for complaining and options, one annoying thing I've noticed about most GUIs is they don't help in this scenario:
Say you have application "A" open and are working on a particular file "X", you save that file, and now you want to open it with (or send it to) application "B" or you want to copy it to location "C" (but retain the original saved position in "A").
It requires extra steps that don't have to be there if the OS/GUI/Apps cooperated better. You already know the file you want and where you want it to be. The applications know where their open files are. The OS might also know too. So why not make it easy? At worst the UI should allow you to copy the URL of the file so that you can easily locate/open it with another application.
But instead you are forced to go through a File Browser to "look" for the file again. Even if you already know exactly where it is.
So yeah Microsoft has been rather disappointing - after so much time and resources spent and Windows 8 is the best they can give to us? Meh.
I wonder if GNOME and KDE have made that scenario easier. I haven't been keeping in touch. I remember KDE had stuff like kioslaves which were great.
You set it with alt+0. Then it stays that way till you change it with alt+0 or the other methods (see docs). The assigned windows don't keep changing.
So a quick way to set things would be to click the windows you want to work with in reverse order (ending with the window you want to be #1) then press alt+0. Then from that on alt+number always brings up the same window that was assigned at that time.
You can work with a group of up to 9 windows for a while then quickly switch to working with another group of 9 windows by just repeating the assignation process.
If you somehow need to keep working with two or more groups of many windows there is actually a bank switching feature. I don't use that, but perhaps one day there might be someone who will find it useful.
I'm aware of the win+n cycling but I find it clunkier.
How about VR goggles so that the screen is as big as you want? And a brain-computer-interface ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_consumer_brain%E2%80%93computer_interfaces ) so that you can teleport to different work locations in that VR space just by thinking? ;)
Seriously though, I can't help you with the "within document" stuff but for switching from document to document I wrote a utility for Windows ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkkey/ ) that allows me to press alt+1 to raise window #1, alt+3 = window #3 and so on. Numbers are assigned when you press alt+0, then #1 is the current foreground window at that point in time, #2 = the previous foreground window, #3 the one before that.
It's useful if you only have one laptop screen. While it's not as intuitive as just turning your head to look at something, it has the advantage of putting the relevant window in focus so that if you need you can copy stuff from it without too much mouse or keyboard work.
Windows 7 does have something similar with winkey+[number] but that's by application so it doesn't help if you have multiple docs opened for a particular app. I did try to get Microsoft to have Windows do it the way linkkey does it, but they said their way is better, and before that I suggested it to GNOME and KDE (in 2006).
I personally believe it's not impressive to have an OS that only runs a few processes at the same time, but it is impressive if it can run thousands of processes. So similarly it should not be impressive to have a GUI that only allows people to easily manage a few tasks at the same time. What would be impressive is a GUI that allows people (expert level) to handle dozens or even hundreds of tasks. while still being good at allowing non-expert people to easily handle a few tasks.
The problem is which second to pick out of 86400? If the cost of storage is low, recording the entire day is better while marking the segments you want to keep at high res.
See 1) in: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3478821&cid=42956909
If Brain-Computer Interfaces become better you could associate arbitrary thought patterns with that memory and recall it just by thinking of it (aka those patterns).
It's porn for girls. Porn sells.
It means Italy needs to have large amounts of US dollars in order to buy that oil and Kuwait will end up with large amounts of US dollars after selling oil. And the price lists are done in US dollars. So when the US prints trillions of US dollars that oil becomes cheaper for the USA, till someone goes "hey hang on I should be charging more".
More importantly the billions of US dollars that Italy and Kuwait have to buy oil and other stuff becomes worth less. This is because there now are more US dollars in the world, and they hold relatively less of it. They then have to buy more US dollars in order to buy stuff (and thus increasing the value of the US dollar). While the USA can simply buy the oil with their newly created dollars.
Now assume a world where all international trade is done in Euros. If everyone was selling oil in Euros, even when the US prints trillions of US dollars, that oil still remains the same price in Euros. The US would have to buy Euros with their US dollars. This does not make the Euros that Italy is holding go down in value. It makes it go up in value relative to the US dollar as the traders of currency notice the increased demand for Euros vs the US Dollar.
And if the rest of the world doesn't buy as much from the USA as the US buys from them, that means the rest of the world doesn't need to buy US dollars as much as the US needs to buy Euros. And that makes the US dollars go down in value.
At a certain point of course it means the US made goods would be cheaper and people might start buying more from the USA. But by that time it would also mean the US people would be poorer compared to the rest of the world - they won't be able to buy as many French handbags, Australian Wine, German cars or Chinese toys as they used to be able to.
The US can keep its trade deficit for so long and still print money without the US dollar collapsing in value because the OPEC sells oil in US dollars. The US Gov prints US Dollars. The countries around the world buy the US Dollars, then use the dollars to buy oil, which they then burn to keep their economies alive. So there's always a demand for US dollars. Same goes for other consumable commodities sold in US dollars.
Also, it does not seem as if the zircons rode to Mauritius on the wind, says Robert Duncan, a marine geologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. âoeThereâ(TM)s a remote possibility that they were wind blown, but theyâ(TM)re probably too large to have done so,â he adds.
How big is too large? Apparently dust gets blown quite far: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100809/full/news.2010.396.html
Or could they be from an asteroid?
But how is that worse from now, where you have PR campaigns to justify the leaders decision on who lives and dies?
At least with this the leaders have to put their necks on the line too. And when the mob suffers they agreed to it. Isn't that more just than now? In case you haven't noticed the mob also end up dying and suffering in wars (in addition to the people they attack).
One of their arguments against robots is the lack of accountability. This proposal increases accountability. All the way to the leaders themselves.
If a leader claims the war is worth dying and killing for, then I say "You first, you are the leader after all" and "Put up or shut up".
It is a red herring. The problem is not robots in war. There's no big difference between using robots and drones in wars compared to using cruise missiles in wars. And only a slight difference between using soldiers that have been conditioned/brainwashed to follow orders unquestioningly.
The real problem is the ease of starting wars that only benefit a very few people. Hence my proposal: http://slashdot.org/~TheLink/journal/208853
In the old days kings used to lead their soldiers into battle. In modern times this is impractical and counterproductive.
But you can still have leaders lead the frontline in spirit.
Basically, if leaders are going to send troops on an _offensive_ war/battle (not defensive war) there must be a referendum on the war.
If there are not enough votes for the war, those leaders get put on deathrow.
At a convenient time later, a referendum is held to redeem each leader. Leaders that do not get enough votes get executed. For example if too many people stay at home and don't bother voting - the leaders get executed.
If it turns out later that the war was justified, a fancy ceremony is held, and the executed leaders are awarded a purple heart or equivalent, and you have people say nice things about them, cry and that sort of thing.
If it turns out later that the leaders tricked the voters, a referendum can be held (need to get enough signatories to start such a referendum, just to prevent nutters from wasting everyone else's time).
This proposal has many advantages:
1) Even leaders who don't really care about those "young soldiers on the battlefield" will not consider starting a war lightly.
2) The soldiers will know that the leaders want a war enough to risk their own lives for it.
3) The soldiers will know that X% of the population want the war.
4) Those being attacked will know that X% of the attackers believe in the war - so they want a war, they get a war - for sufficiently high X, collateral damage becomes insignificant. They might even be justified in using WMD and other otherwise dubious tactics. If > 90% of the country attacking you want to kill you and your families, what is so wrong about you using WMD as long as it does not affect neighbouring countries?
I think if this was implemented it would be much better than banning robots. I'm biased of course ;).
Well he's wrong. Since it's not just energy we depend on and it's not just energy we _want_.
every product is as valuable as the energy used to craft it
Tell that to stamp collectors. Tell that to art collectors. Tell that to the buyers of luxury goods.
There are lots of scarcities in this world that are not determined by energy unless you really stretch things to the point that they are useless in predicting or understanding stuff.
As for the US currency, it's not actually holding value - it is actually depreciating because of inflation. But that's not necessarily a problem for the USA (see below).
Why some economists recommendation of "printing money" to solve financial problems works at least for the USA is because the US dollar is used by the majority of countries in the world to buy and sell petroleum, wheat, CPUs, edible oils, milk, manufacturing equipment, toys, etc from each other.
Because of that when the USA prints money, the USA is actually transferring wealth from the rest of the world that holds positive amounts of US dollars (whether as assets, cash, goods or loans to others).
Basically when the USA prints money it taxes the rest of the world. If the US Gov gives enough of the printed money to the US citizens the US citizens will benefit overall. And hence the US financial problems are solved at the expense of the rest of the world.
In contrast if you are Zimbabwe you can do as much Quantitative Easing as you want and the rest of the world will just laugh at you. BUT IF the Zimbabwe government printed money and invested it into projects that benefit Zimbabwe with good ROI then yes printing money would have helped Zimbabwe. It would just be like another tax on the Zimbabwe residents but used productively. The big problem is getting good ROI or at least better ROI than not taxing the residents. And that's not always easy.
So it should now be obvious that it is much easier to make your country wealthier if you can tax the whole world rather than just the residents of your country. Then you don't even need projects with good ROI. Just take wealth from the rest of the world and hand it to yourself and your people.
And that should help explain why printing money works in some cases and not others.
I see lots of clueless US people (not just economists ;) ) talking about going to the gold standard, the USA not being able to pay back debts, stupid stuff like China owns the USA, etc.
The USA owes most of its debts in US dollars. Not gold. It can create as much US dollars as it needs! The Federal Reserve loaned out trillions from
"thin air" in 2008+. But note that strangely some of the trillions went into bailing out foreign banks! The US people should realize that it only works for them if enough of the printed money goes to them...
You should now see why going to the gold standard or the other alternatives would hurt the USA a lot.
After the infamous Feb 29th incident MS should have set up an Azure cluster identical to production stuff but with all the clocks set to 1 week or more ahead. Have it continuously running regression tests. Certs even getting close to 3 days before expiring is stupid.
Microsoft has billions of dollars, so if this 12 hour downtime is the best MS can do when they're "All In" (Ballmer's words not mine), it's not a good sign.
As a tech advance I actually don't care much about Virtual Reality. The VR stuff would be nice for some games and maybe porn, but I doubt it'll be everywhere any time soon. Augmented reality would be nice (but latency for this won't be as big a problem). What I'd want is human augmentation ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3478821&cid=42956909 ).
It'll be nice if you could have a minimap in your vision that updates with locations of stuff of interest, cool HUD sort info, and other fancy tech (as mentioned in my post). But who would want their vision completely replaced with a virtual reality for every day stuff, so will it ever be everywhere?