I don't know any of my tech friends who are breathlessly awaiting 4K monitors. If I go to staples to replace my monitors some day and see that the 4K one is $50 more than the regular one, then OK I'll happily buy one. But it if it is $200 more then, no, I'll wait.
I am not saying that 4K is a stupid idea, or that I hate 4K, if it turned out that one of my present monitors had a switch on the back that would switch it to 4K I would be delighted, but when it comes to budgeting my money there are a huge number of things that would make my workflow a whole lot better that I would rather spend my money on. 4K is nice but just not needed. I think that I speak for most people who aren't doing video editing.
But I suspect that for the next 3-5 years that I am going to be reading various tech blogs and they will breathlessly review the latest 4K monitors as they drop lower and lower in price. But again the spread between regular and 4K will have to be pretty small before I will make the jump.
A 4K TV on the other hand would be pretty cool and I think that Netflix has some programming 4K ready so I would probably make that leap long before a monitor.
Yes my technical experience with this was watching IT people fight for Novell. There was this one IT asshole where I worked and he liked to brag that he had well over $20,000 worth of Novell certifications. So he called me with great excitement when a new very powerful server was delivered from Dell. I was admiring it as he struggled to get Novell on it. So he called the Dell uber support line and they laughed and said that none of their new machines were tested for Novell compatibility.
I should have looked on his wall to see if his framed certifications wilted a little bit that minute. But even after I quit a year or so later he was still fighting the Novell fight. I would not be surprised if he now works for some government agency maintaining some creaky old Novell system.
My guess is that they are trying to build a profile database. They can then make a nice list of your interests and those of your friends and your friends friends etc. This way if they are considering you for a judgeship and it looks like you don't like the police abusing people or have activist friends then you won't be a judge. But if it looks like all your friends are "throw away the key types" just like you, then you will pass all the security checks when considered for a judgeship.
Basically they don't get to pick who is a judge but they do get to do the background check, and with control of this information they basically get to pick who doesn't get to be a judge. After a while you end up with a judicial system that is very police friendly.
Also on more mundane issues if they thing someone is a suspect in a crime they could quickly look up to see who their friends are and any other internet activity that might be of interest.
Lastly they could search for thought crimes. So people looking up "How to bug the premier's office" could be hunted down and stopped.
Are these people looking for stagnation? I suspect that new technology will produce all kinds of horrors (think synth and drum machines in the 80s) but all kinds of interesting things will no doubt come out. The music and the technology that make the music should be an endless dance. Acapella continues to amaze and that is about as technology free as possible, yet some acapella is generated by having a single singer and playing games in the recording studio.
Some painters use amazing techniques to blend and layer very complex paints and lacquers to great result; yet Picasso apparently used a common house paint for some of his greatest works.
Often the medium is the message. For instance if a wood carver is working with wood they might allow changes in the grain of the wood to dictate what they are doing potentially resulting in beautiful art. Yet putting a block of wood into a CAM machine and allowing a 3D design to be precisely cut can generate a whole different and also pleasing result. One or the other is not necessarily wrong, just different.
So if a purist wants to be pure then they should have fun with whatever purists that want to play with them; but the moment that they tell another artist to stop what they are doing then it is no longer art but a stagnant religion.
Actually the financial math is all about amortizing those costs over the life of the product. So if Apple sold 4 iPhones they would have to allocate 500,000 man hours to each phone. The same with all those developments over time. Modern PCB technology is actually quite cool and no doubt took some serious development, but it has been amortized over a zillion PCBs. Apple would actually be paying those amortized costs as well in that any recent developments would still be including those costs when some company uses a recent development to supply them with a part.
But the key to amortizing a cost is that it eventually effectively hits zero. So the costs from Industrial Revolution developments were long ago reduced to zero. Although many times the amortization is a curve that is asymptotically zero; thus to be pedantic it is possible that some impossibly small portion of an iPhone is still paying off the development time spent 100's of years ago. From an economics point of view this is not actually impossible. There could be an area that specialized in say, fine machining, 300 years ago to a point where the same companies are in the same area still leaders in that field. Thus apple would have bought some of their manufacturing equipment from that company. Examples of this abound in Germany where there are plenty of companies that are from the Prussian Empire or before that are world leaders in their area of expertise; so good they survived Napoleon, WWI, and WWII. Krupp I believe is around 400 years old.
I think that it was never about child porn, it is about their more petty searches such as whistleblowers, protesters, NGOs, political opponents, and the fishing expeditions that they probably found as making it easier to ruin people's lives with blackmail information. I can just see the police threatening to show your browser history to friends, family, and work. If you don't "help" them with their investigation.
I find that with a rotation of admins, various screwups, machine upgrades, damaged media, etc. That legacy data tends to just lie around for decades. Generally most data security is during disposal with various mandates such as old hard drives being fed into atomic shredders. But if the server was pulled from the rack and put into a to-be-refurbished pile then it can easily exist in the back of the admin's closet. Or someone doing an inventory will say, "Hey, here is machine 53B, this machine doesn't exist in our list, I wonder what is on it?"
Think of the poor bureaucrats and how they will now actually have to prove that they have a reason for these invasive abuses. They blah blah about abducted children and whatnot but I am fairly sure that if they go into a judge and say "abducted child" that the judge will be pretty free with the information and might not even mind being woken up in the middle of the night. But if they say, "Hunting a journalist investigating the RCMP" that the judge will tell them to go to hell.
I the UK during the early days of cars they had a law:
Secondly, one of such persons, while any locomotive is in motion, shall precede such locomotive on foot by not less than sixty yards, and shall carry a red flag constantly displayed, and shall warn the riders and drivers of horses of the approach of such locomotives, and shall signal the driver thereof when it shall be necessary to stop, and shall assist horses, and carriages drawn by horses, passing the same,
So basically it limited all cars to the speed of someone walking in front. Oddly enough not much of the early history of the automobile was written in the UK during that time period. What I am waiting for is a false flag operation on the part of the drivers where they pretend to be an Uber driver and then proceed to do the worst trip ever, and then post the results to Youtube. What they are forgetting is that it all boils down to a simple fact, if people didn't like Uber, then people wouldn't use Uber. But at the same time, under their proposed rules; if people don't like London cabs then too bad.
I have watch awesome newer teachers have opportunities ripped from them by horrific teachers who had "seniority" not only is this unfair but probably results in the loss of newer better teachers along with the fact that fewer great teachers would even enter the educational system. But this seniority would not only serve to protect horrible teachers but probably attracts them as they would know that in many other lines of business they would actually have to perform.
My problem with this would be if there were a blurry picture which then matched a few dozen people in the area. Then when the mugshots that all somewhat look like the guy are shown to the witnesses of course they are going to say, "Yup that looks like him."
Basically this system is going to be excellent at finding both the correct people and their doppelgängers. I certainly hope that in this case they were able to find some solid evidence.
But if they extended their database search a bit further into the Driver's licence photos, then it gets far more dangerous. Now they might find a few people who are a good match to their fuzzy photos and get warrants to kick down some doors.
So if I were a judge I would ask, "What else do you have?" after they showed me their sloppy detective work that hardly exceeded a google search in complexity.
There is a huge difference. Are they going with opensource textbooks and whatnot, or are they merely paying the textbook companies massive amounts of money for even less?
So far in the 23 years of schooling that my two daughters have attended there is a grand total of 1 textbook that came close to impressing me. Overall the textbook mostly sucked but its approach was refreshingly good and I suspect would have a very high long term retention rate.
At the same time I could make a fairly good list of some excellent math books and resources that would blast various subjects right into the students' skulls in short order, nearly all of which are tablet friendly.
A year or so ago I complained about Netflix using silverlight. I said that it was a stupid choice and that Silverlight was a Microsoft also-ran. A few people replied that they knew programmers at Netflix and that they were very smart and knew far more than some simpleton like me.
But the proof will be in the pudding. I suspect that with silverlight gone that people like me will finally be able to watch Netflix on their macs as I was 100% opposed to installing anything microsoft based on my machines, and absolutely 100% opposed to a browser plugin from a company like MS.
To me this is a classic case of technical people who are out of touch with the core business that they are doing IT for. I suspect that they could write a 100 page report supporting their use of this horrible technology. But I could find more than 1 million people who would write a two word report as to why they weren't going to use it.
How is it that slashdot gets manipulated into posting this self promoting crap? This is just some sleazebag SAS guy trying to Guru certify himself. What's next, used car salesmen asking what is the funniest car you ever drove to work? Real-estate agents saying, what's the funniest house you've bought in the valley?
We can moderate this stuff up and down but we really need to be able to moderate a pile of steaming excrement like this off the front page.
I have always thought of the Singularity as a stupid concept. I suspect that we will soon have more brain implants as treatment for more interesting diseases. Right now we have fairly primitive electrical stimulation being played with for depression, a pretty good one for Parkinson's, implants for deaf people, and probably soon something interesting for blind people. These will no doubt progress further and further as our technology gets better and our understanding of the brain gets better. But we are a long way from where any of these implants are going to be used in a healthy person to improve their existing functionality. It will be a long time before we can upload a brain. Augment a brain. Or basically anything a brain that is practical.
Looking at this from the computer angle it is the same thing. Right now we have ML which I thing is a terrible name full of hype and over promise. I would call it Dynamic Statistics instead. We also have computers becoming fantastically powerful which is allowing computer to do some very interesting tricks. One of the scariest is near perfect facial recognition. Combine Dynamic Statistics and awesome facial recognition and with very few cameras a very comprehensive picture of a person's relationship with the world can easily be established; that is something that scares the shit out of me.
One of the other areas that ML and things like Watson are going to become scary good at are things that require vast databases of trivia to answer questions. So most of medical diagnostics will be no longer a profession. Plus as they are starting to show that even interesting recipe creation is becoming automated. This is going to eat into many white collar jobs. But there will still be a complete lack of common sense requiring people need to coddle the inputs and outputs along; so no to cyanide pudding. I am willing to bet that if Watson were put in charge of narcotic prescriptions that the nation's addicts would rejoice, in little time at all they would learn the motions to go through where Watson would prescribe them more pills than they would know what to do with.
But after generations of Watsons and similar systems are optimized, put onto better hardware, and combined, a system will appear that is going to be fairly useful as a Sci-fi AI. But not in a world destroying way but more of the ultimate butler that will do things like remember where you put your keys and the name of that guy who was on a grade 11 sports team that you are about to bump into.
But yes there will be a point where we do finally figure out how to simulate a brain that is fully self aware and yes who the hell will know what will happen at that point. But the reality is that along the way we will go through so many tiny increments of smarter tools that it won't catch us off guard at all.
Exhibit A: My daughter sits at a table not far from me asking Siri to do first and second derivatives; Siri being a voice interactive central cluster of computers that are interacting with a glowing tiny computer via a global communications system. To her, she simply doesn't understand how the hell it was possible to get through highschool without the internet. In 1989 Siri would be hard core Science Fiction material.
To me the singularity is a big blurry mess of a definition where we may not even be at the fuzziest edge.
People blah blah about machines designing machines that we don't understand. The chip companies use algorithms that arrange their CPUs into optimal arrangements right now. Is that machines designing machines? As I say, it is all a fuzzy situation.
If you want to point a robotic finger at anything it would be the continual eroding of our privacy and/or the massive and growing list of jobs lost to automation.
Quite simply I don't care if google glass cures cancer, I don't want a bunch of Glassholes wandering around reporting on my every move. Google and many companies just like it have over and over been found to be scooping up as much data as they possibly can. So here we have people wandering around with a mobile video feed plugged straight into the google servers.
So how about no. I want these things outright banned. My right to privacy far outweighs these people's right to be assholes.
I think it all boils down to the two points where a driverless car is first statistically better than an average human driver. And then at the point where a driverless car is better than all but a few lucky drivers who have never had an accident.
But a huge number of traffic flow and accident problems are caused by the worst of the worst. So eliminating them will be great. But when looking at millions of drivers there will still be benefits for getting rid of the worst 99.999% of drivers.
Obviously we are going to need to be able to override driverless cars for when we want them to do something that they will refuse. For instance I might want to park it in tall grass and it thinks that I am driving it into a wall. Or at a construction site I might need to just go all over the place avoiding what I know to be bad but it can't figure out.
So the most likely time that I can "crash" a driverless car will be in manual mode. So why not limit manual mode to 2 MPH if you aren't a licensed driver?
There problems solved.
I would actually say the problem is: What is the youngest age you should send kids off alone? Do you load the driverless car up with an infant and send it to daycare? Or say none less than age 12? It seems that sending your 12 year old to school in a driverless car is fine but what about on a NYC to LA trip?
I suspect that there will need to be a single cut-off of where children can't be alone in a driverless car but beyond that it would be more a standard case of child neglect for the stranger edge cases.
Actually they build the cars here, and many of the parts are different. For years before the US our cars had the ignition interlock, day time running lights, and a handful of other things.
US cars bound for hot countries have double radiators, double the oil capacity, and air conditioning that could cause hell to freeze over.
So no our cars are very often different. I suspect that the E85 protection is a pain in the ass and would be something they would skip if possible.
My parents took our Canadian car to Florida, which generally is not designed for E85. The mechanic showed me that it basically turned nearly every rubber bit into mush. There were many hoses where you could push your finger through the hose with not much effort. Luckily most of those hoses were available off a wrecker so for very little they just replaced every single hose. Where the mechanic was worried was what things like the fuel pumps or whatnot might look like.
I have a distinct feeling that my parents car would not be the only Canadian car to spend time in the US.
This breathless sales pitch for a way too wide screen does not woo me at all over productivity.
The bezel is not a problem, and if anything, is an asset. It allows me to maximize a program on the left, and maximize a program on the right and keep the two separated in my mind. Few programs need such a wide space and will just waste it when maximized. Anything where you have to try and screw with dividing the screen manually sounds like it would be a productivity eater.
I suspect that there are a few applications where such an individual wide screen might be nice, first person shooters would probably benefit from it. But my IDE, my accounting, Photoshop, terminal window, or browser would all be lost and not only wasting the space but just mean that now I would have critical elements on the left so very far away from critical elements on the right.
So nope, these things are extremely niche and while probably get oohs and aahs in showrooms are probably destined for a future like the 17" laptop.
I find that company support rarely is any good. Right off the bat if you call all they want is feedback for their MBAs, where did you buy it, when did you buy it, are you considering buying another in the next 6 months, how many people work at your company, etc. All this to ask how to reset the router to factory settings.
Or I can google "How to reset my ABC router to factory settings."
Then you get the brain dead people who just don't care. The other day I was a bell aliant and I asked them if their FiberOp has a real IP..... "what is an IP?" Then "Yes it probably does."
I think that these bacteria like something about baking soda. When I started adding it to my baths I stopped smelling. PH maybe? Or the baking soda was a bacteria vitamin?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know any of my tech friends who are breathlessly awaiting 4K monitors. If I go to staples to replace my monitors some day and see that the 4K one is $50 more than the regular one, then OK I'll happily buy one. But it if it is $200 more then, no, I'll wait.
I am not saying that 4K is a stupid idea, or that I hate 4K, if it turned out that one of my present monitors had a switch on the back that would switch it to 4K I would be delighted, but when it comes to budgeting my money there are a huge number of things that would make my workflow a whole lot better that I would rather spend my money on. 4K is nice but just not needed. I think that I speak for most people who aren't doing video editing.
But I suspect that for the next 3-5 years that I am going to be reading various tech blogs and they will breathlessly review the latest 4K monitors as they drop lower and lower in price. But again the spread between regular and 4K will have to be pretty small before I will make the jump.
A 4K TV on the other hand would be pretty cool and I think that Netflix has some programming 4K ready so I would probably make that leap long before a monitor.
Yes my technical experience with this was watching IT people fight for Novell. There was this one IT asshole where I worked and he liked to brag that he had well over $20,000 worth of Novell certifications. So he called me with great excitement when a new very powerful server was delivered from Dell. I was admiring it as he struggled to get Novell on it. So he called the Dell uber support line and they laughed and said that none of their new machines were tested for Novell compatibility.
I should have looked on his wall to see if his framed certifications wilted a little bit that minute. But even after I quit a year or so later he was still fighting the Novell fight. I would not be surprised if he now works for some government agency maintaining some creaky old Novell system.
My guess is that they are trying to build a profile database. They can then make a nice list of your interests and those of your friends and your friends friends etc. This way if they are considering you for a judgeship and it looks like you don't like the police abusing people or have activist friends then you won't be a judge. But if it looks like all your friends are "throw away the key types" just like you, then you will pass all the security checks when considered for a judgeship.
Basically they don't get to pick who is a judge but they do get to do the background check, and with control of this information they basically get to pick who doesn't get to be a judge. After a while you end up with a judicial system that is very police friendly.
Also on more mundane issues if they thing someone is a suspect in a crime they could quickly look up to see who their friends are and any other internet activity that might be of interest.
Lastly they could search for thought crimes. So people looking up "How to bug the premier's office" could be hunted down and stopped.
Are these people looking for stagnation? I suspect that new technology will produce all kinds of horrors (think synth and drum machines in the 80s) but all kinds of interesting things will no doubt come out. The music and the technology that make the music should be an endless dance. Acapella continues to amaze and that is about as technology free as possible, yet some acapella is generated by having a single singer and playing games in the recording studio.
Some painters use amazing techniques to blend and layer very complex paints and lacquers to great result; yet Picasso apparently used a common house paint for some of his greatest works.
Often the medium is the message. For instance if a wood carver is working with wood they might allow changes in the grain of the wood to dictate what they are doing potentially resulting in beautiful art. Yet putting a block of wood into a CAM machine and allowing a 3D design to be precisely cut can generate a whole different and also pleasing result. One or the other is not necessarily wrong, just different.
So if a purist wants to be pure then they should have fun with whatever purists that want to play with them; but the moment that they tell another artist to stop what they are doing then it is no longer art but a stagnant religion.
Actually the financial math is all about amortizing those costs over the life of the product. So if Apple sold 4 iPhones they would have to allocate 500,000 man hours to each phone. The same with all those developments over time. Modern PCB technology is actually quite cool and no doubt took some serious development, but it has been amortized over a zillion PCBs. Apple would actually be paying those amortized costs as well in that any recent developments would still be including those costs when some company uses a recent development to supply them with a part.
But the key to amortizing a cost is that it eventually effectively hits zero. So the costs from Industrial Revolution developments were long ago reduced to zero. Although many times the amortization is a curve that is asymptotically zero; thus to be pedantic it is possible that some impossibly small portion of an iPhone is still paying off the development time spent 100's of years ago. From an economics point of view this is not actually impossible. There could be an area that specialized in say, fine machining, 300 years ago to a point where the same companies are in the same area still leaders in that field. Thus apple would have bought some of their manufacturing equipment from that company. Examples of this abound in Germany where there are plenty of companies that are from the Prussian Empire or before that are world leaders in their area of expertise; so good they survived Napoleon, WWI, and WWII. Krupp I believe is around 400 years old.
I think that it was never about child porn, it is about their more petty searches such as whistleblowers, protesters, NGOs, political opponents, and the fishing expeditions that they probably found as making it easier to ruin people's lives with blackmail information. I can just see the police threatening to show your browser history to friends, family, and work. If you don't "help" them with their investigation.
I find that with a rotation of admins, various screwups, machine upgrades, damaged media, etc. That legacy data tends to just lie around for decades. Generally most data security is during disposal with various mandates such as old hard drives being fed into atomic shredders. But if the server was pulled from the rack and put into a to-be-refurbished pile then it can easily exist in the back of the admin's closet. Or someone doing an inventory will say, "Hey, here is machine 53B, this machine doesn't exist in our list, I wonder what is on it?"
Think of the poor bureaucrats and how they will now actually have to prove that they have a reason for these invasive abuses. They blah blah about abducted children and whatnot but I am fairly sure that if they go into a judge and say "abducted child" that the judge will be pretty free with the information and might not even mind being woken up in the middle of the night. But if they say, "Hunting a journalist investigating the RCMP" that the judge will tell them to go to hell.
I the UK during the early days of cars they had a law:
Secondly, one of such persons, while any locomotive is in motion, shall precede such locomotive on foot by not less than sixty yards, and shall carry a red flag constantly displayed, and shall warn the riders and drivers of horses of the approach of such locomotives, and shall signal the driver thereof when it shall be necessary to stop, and shall assist horses, and carriages drawn by horses, passing the same,
So basically it limited all cars to the speed of someone walking in front. Oddly enough not much of the early history of the automobile was written in the UK during that time period. What I am waiting for is a false flag operation on the part of the drivers where they pretend to be an Uber driver and then proceed to do the worst trip ever, and then post the results to Youtube. What they are forgetting is that it all boils down to a simple fact, if people didn't like Uber, then people wouldn't use Uber. But at the same time, under their proposed rules; if people don't like London cabs then too bad.
I have watch awesome newer teachers have opportunities ripped from them by horrific teachers who had "seniority" not only is this unfair but probably results in the loss of newer better teachers along with the fact that fewer great teachers would even enter the educational system. But this seniority would not only serve to protect horrible teachers but probably attracts them as they would know that in many other lines of business they would actually have to perform.
My problem with this would be if there were a blurry picture which then matched a few dozen people in the area. Then when the mugshots that all somewhat look like the guy are shown to the witnesses of course they are going to say, "Yup that looks like him."
Basically this system is going to be excellent at finding both the correct people and their doppelgängers. I certainly hope that in this case they were able to find some solid evidence.
But if they extended their database search a bit further into the Driver's licence photos, then it gets far more dangerous. Now they might find a few people who are a good match to their fuzzy photos and get warrants to kick down some doors.
So if I were a judge I would ask, "What else do you have?" after they showed me their sloppy detective work that hardly exceeded a google search in complexity.
There is a huge difference. Are they going with opensource textbooks and whatnot, or are they merely paying the textbook companies massive amounts of money for even less?
So far in the 23 years of schooling that my two daughters have attended there is a grand total of 1 textbook that came close to impressing me. Overall the textbook mostly sucked but its approach was refreshingly good and I suspect would have a very high long term retention rate.
At the same time I could make a fairly good list of some excellent math books and resources that would blast various subjects right into the students' skulls in short order, nearly all of which are tablet friendly.
A year or so ago I complained about Netflix using silverlight. I said that it was a stupid choice and that Silverlight was a Microsoft also-ran. A few people replied that they knew programmers at Netflix and that they were very smart and knew far more than some simpleton like me.
But the proof will be in the pudding. I suspect that with silverlight gone that people like me will finally be able to watch Netflix on their macs as I was 100% opposed to installing anything microsoft based on my machines, and absolutely 100% opposed to a browser plugin from a company like MS.
To me this is a classic case of technical people who are out of touch with the core business that they are doing IT for. I suspect that they could write a 100 page report supporting their use of this horrible technology. But I could find more than 1 million people who would write a two word report as to why they weren't going to use it.
How is it that slashdot gets manipulated into posting this self promoting crap? This is just some sleazebag SAS guy trying to Guru certify himself. What's next, used car salesmen asking what is the funniest car you ever drove to work? Real-estate agents saying, what's the funniest house you've bought in the valley?
We can moderate this stuff up and down but we really need to be able to moderate a pile of steaming excrement like this off the front page.
Why give these guys money? Start afresh like the BSD guys are doing. I suspect they don't want to lose their juicy consulting gigs.
I have always thought of the Singularity as a stupid concept. I suspect that we will soon have more brain implants as treatment for more interesting diseases. Right now we have fairly primitive electrical stimulation being played with for depression, a pretty good one for Parkinson's, implants for deaf people, and probably soon something interesting for blind people. These will no doubt progress further and further as our technology gets better and our understanding of the brain gets better. But we are a long way from where any of these implants are going to be used in a healthy person to improve their existing functionality. It will be a long time before we can upload a brain. Augment a brain. Or basically anything a brain that is practical.
Looking at this from the computer angle it is the same thing. Right now we have ML which I thing is a terrible name full of hype and over promise. I would call it Dynamic Statistics instead. We also have computers becoming fantastically powerful which is allowing computer to do some very interesting tricks. One of the scariest is near perfect facial recognition. Combine Dynamic Statistics and awesome facial recognition and with very few cameras a very comprehensive picture of a person's relationship with the world can easily be established; that is something that scares the shit out of me.
One of the other areas that ML and things like Watson are going to become scary good at are things that require vast databases of trivia to answer questions. So most of medical diagnostics will be no longer a profession. Plus as they are starting to show that even interesting recipe creation is becoming automated. This is going to eat into many white collar jobs. But there will still be a complete lack of common sense requiring people need to coddle the inputs and outputs along; so no to cyanide pudding. I am willing to bet that if Watson were put in charge of narcotic prescriptions that the nation's addicts would rejoice, in little time at all they would learn the motions to go through where Watson would prescribe them more pills than they would know what to do with.
But after generations of Watsons and similar systems are optimized, put onto better hardware, and combined, a system will appear that is going to be fairly useful as a Sci-fi AI. But not in a world destroying way but more of the ultimate butler that will do things like remember where you put your keys and the name of that guy who was on a grade 11 sports team that you are about to bump into.
But yes there will be a point where we do finally figure out how to simulate a brain that is fully self aware and yes who the hell will know what will happen at that point. But the reality is that along the way we will go through so many tiny increments of smarter tools that it won't catch us off guard at all.
Exhibit A: My daughter sits at a table not far from me asking Siri to do first and second derivatives; Siri being a voice interactive central cluster of computers that are interacting with a glowing tiny computer via a global communications system. To her, she simply doesn't understand how the hell it was possible to get through highschool without the internet. In 1989 Siri would be hard core Science Fiction material.
To me the singularity is a big blurry mess of a definition where we may not even be at the fuzziest edge.
People blah blah about machines designing machines that we don't understand. The chip companies use algorithms that arrange their CPUs into optimal arrangements right now. Is that machines designing machines? As I say, it is all a fuzzy situation.
If you want to point a robotic finger at anything it would be the continual eroding of our privacy and/or the massive and growing list of jobs lost to automation.
Quite simply I don't care if google glass cures cancer, I don't want a bunch of Glassholes wandering around reporting on my every move. Google and many companies just like it have over and over been found to be scooping up as much data as they possibly can. So here we have people wandering around with a mobile video feed plugged straight into the google servers.
So how about no. I want these things outright banned. My right to privacy far outweighs these people's right to be assholes.
Good for gaming, don't care I want them gone.
I think it all boils down to the two points where a driverless car is first statistically better than an average human driver. And then at the point where a driverless car is better than all but a few lucky drivers who have never had an accident.
But a huge number of traffic flow and accident problems are caused by the worst of the worst. So eliminating them will be great. But when looking at millions of drivers there will still be benefits for getting rid of the worst 99.999% of drivers.
Obviously we are going to need to be able to override driverless cars for when we want them to do something that they will refuse. For instance I might want to park it in tall grass and it thinks that I am driving it into a wall. Or at a construction site I might need to just go all over the place avoiding what I know to be bad but it can't figure out.
So the most likely time that I can "crash" a driverless car will be in manual mode. So why not limit manual mode to 2 MPH if you aren't a licensed driver?
There problems solved.
I would actually say the problem is: What is the youngest age you should send kids off alone? Do you load the driverless car up with an infant and send it to daycare? Or say none less than age 12? It seems that sending your 12 year old to school in a driverless car is fine but what about on a NYC to LA trip?
I suspect that there will need to be a single cut-off of where children can't be alone in a driverless car but beyond that it would be more a standard case of child neglect for the stranger edge cases.
Actually they build the cars here, and many of the parts are different. For years before the US our cars had the ignition interlock, day time running lights, and a handful of other things.
US cars bound for hot countries have double radiators, double the oil capacity, and air conditioning that could cause hell to freeze over.
So no our cars are very often different. I suspect that the E85 protection is a pain in the ass and would be something they would skip if possible.
My parents took our Canadian car to Florida, which generally is not designed for E85. The mechanic showed me that it basically turned nearly every rubber bit into mush. There were many hoses where you could push your finger through the hose with not much effort. Luckily most of those hoses were available off a wrecker so for very little they just replaced every single hose. Where the mechanic was worried was what things like the fuel pumps or whatnot might look like.
I have a distinct feeling that my parents car would not be the only Canadian car to spend time in the US.
I actually did elucidate. He simply didn't know what an IP was, period.
This breathless sales pitch for a way too wide screen does not woo me at all over productivity.
The bezel is not a problem, and if anything, is an asset. It allows me to maximize a program on the left, and maximize a program on the right and keep the two separated in my mind. Few programs need such a wide space and will just waste it when maximized. Anything where you have to try and screw with dividing the screen manually sounds like it would be a productivity eater.
I suspect that there are a few applications where such an individual wide screen might be nice, first person shooters would probably benefit from it. But my IDE, my accounting, Photoshop, terminal window, or browser would all be lost and not only wasting the space but just mean that now I would have critical elements on the left so very far away from critical elements on the right.
So nope, these things are extremely niche and while probably get oohs and aahs in showrooms are probably destined for a future like the 17" laptop.
I find that company support rarely is any good. Right off the bat if you call all they want is feedback for their MBAs, where did you buy it, when did you buy it, are you considering buying another in the next 6 months, how many people work at your company, etc. All this to ask how to reset the router to factory settings.
Or I can google "How to reset my ABC router to factory settings."
Then you get the brain dead people who just don't care. The other day I was a bell aliant and I asked them if their FiberOp has a real IP..... "what is an IP?" Then "Yes it probably does."
I think that these bacteria like something about baking soda. When I started adding it to my baths I stopped smelling. PH maybe? Or the baking soda was a bacteria vitamin?