By your own admission, AI *might* eventually be capable of the kind of "malice that people seem to be afraid of". And that malicious developers can cause destruction even sooner.
Not the GP, but yep, bad things are possible. Yay!
However...
And the laws of physics clearly predict that strong AI is possible. or do you consider intelligence to be some kind of supernatural quality?
Invoking "the laws of physics allow it" as an argument that we should actually be worried about something happening here on earth in the near future is pretty slim evidence, no? I mean, the laws of physics allow a LOT of stuff to be possible.
That said, this isn't really about the laws of physics -- it's about basic biological systems here on earth which have intelligent properties. So, it's a lot easier to create intelligent life than invoking the laws of physics. (People have babies all the time.) The question is how long it will take us humans to figure out a way to create something that has certain intelligence properties... and that could be next year, next decade, next century, next millennium....
Also it is the experts in AI who are predicting that AI will be possible and achieved in a matter of decades. Why would you even come out and pretend that it isn't?
Because the "experts in AI" have a pretty bad track record for predicting advances -- the cynic in me would say probably because many of them get their grants funded by predicting major advances.
Back in the 1950s, the "experts in AI" predicted that a group of 10 smart dudes could get together and solve all the major problems of AI (like natural language comprehension, true adaptive learning, etc.) in 2 months over the summer. Over fifty years later, we're nowhere close to solving most of their identified problems -- most of our advances are due to better searching algorithms, faster hardware, and more data. Not really significant advances in true adaptive learning.
Alan Turing, in the same era, predicted by the year 2000 that we'd have machines so fluent in natural language that we'd have to debate the word choices that could be substituted in Shakespearean sonnets to tell the difference between a human and a computer. Instead, we get crap reported again and again and again that the "Turing test" was "passed" by some idiotic program that pretends to be a retarded non-English-speaking teenager who's acting like a 5-year-old.
How low our "bar" has sunk that we need to have such declarations every year or two to keep proving to ourselves that we have great "AI."
No -- we don't. We've barely squeaked by with any significant advances toward the kinds of goals articulated in the 50s about strong AI.
Now, I'm sure you're all going to talk about Deep Blue and chess. But how do these chess programs win? By doing exhaustive searches far ahead of what humans are capable of and having exhaustive libraries of games and strategies far greater than any human is capable of. I'm not saying these computers aren't significant advances in SOMETHING. But they aren't exhibiting the kind of efficient adaptive intelligence that the original "strong AI" proponents thought would happen when they proposed chess as a worthy goal for AI. It's like comparing someone with a high-IQ, advanced math and logic skills solving a complex problem in 5 steps with another guy who brute-forced the problem on a supercomputer and ran quadrillions of simulations until he came up with the right answer by elimination of oth
Unless you work at a hospital, or are a soldier in a war.
We are a people more disconnected from death than any in history.
This has to be one of the most insightful comments here. Want more specific? How about the distinctive sound of a child with a serious and potentially fatal case of whooping cough?
Oh wait, the anti vaccination wackos are intent on bringing that one back....
I don't think anyone in the scientific community has any doubts that there was life there at one time. It's just a matter of proving it.
I certainly hope you're wrong in this statement. Otherwise, it implies the "scientific community" is no better than a bunch of religious wackos when it comes to evaluating evidence.
There is absolutely no reason to believe one way or another that life should exist or should have existed on Mars. If you go back to the Drake equation, we have only one datapoint regarding the probability of abiogenesis. It could be that life spontaneously appears on every random planet and is even multiple places in our solar system. But, based on current evidence, it could also be that life only appears on 1 in 100 planets that seem to have "good" conditions to us based on our really vague theories about how it happened. Or it could be 1 in 1000 or 1 in a million or 1 in a quadrillion.
We have one data point. I sincerely hope that there are some in the scientific community who still allow for the possibilty that there may NOT be life on Mars... maybe even not elsewhere in our solar system... maybe even not elsewhere in our galaxy. Maybe it's really common. But we have absolutely no reason to think so at this time, and thus it is really not a very "scientific" attitude to have no "doubts" about it.
It's not about cost. It's about design. They used to build things to last.... [snip]...It lowers cost and means you buy a new electric carving knife every couple of years.
Speaking about design, why the heck are you using an electric carving knife in the first place? Just buy a decent actual (non-electric) slicing knife, and keep it sharp. You can probably use it for a half-century and then will it to the grandkids. Learning how to keep quality knives sharp is an easy skill and will save you hours in the kitchen, not to mention probable injuries. (Dull knives make any cutting or chopping take much longer and require more effort, and they are much more prone to slipping when you try to force them, thus creating accidents.)
I can't stand cooking at most other people's houses, because they often have no knives that are actually sharp. Food prep is annoying with bad tools, and I understand why most people just give up and rarely cook with tools like that.
Anyhow, the reason for this short rant about old-fashioned knife maintenance is because part of our "design" problem these days is that we think we need some "gadget" to do everything. Yes, many gadgets are helpful. But a lot of times they replace a perfectly straightforward non-complex tool that would last for years with a complicated electronic device or at least something with a very special design, a bunch of breakable plastic parts, and no easy way to repair when it fails.
If you asked me to a choose a useless gadget that I'd NEVER bother replacing because I could just use a simple tool that will last for generations, the electric carving knife would be near the top of my list.
Fine, do you know how to churn your own butter or butcher your own chickens? My grandfather did all of these things, but my dad (who is still a farmer) has no idea how to do either. And even if you are one of the rare ones who knows how to do those things, I doubt almost all of your generation can.
I don't mean to be a jerk about this, but THESE are the two things you bring out regarding examples of difficult things your dad couldn't figure out how to do??
Churning butter only takes cream and agitation. You can do it in a mixer. You can even do it in a sealed jar just by shaking (though it will take longer). Eventually the proteins will separate from the whey, and you just form them into a glob, squeeze it out, and you have butter. That's it. There's no "secret" to churning butter.
As for "butchering" a chicken, I don't know if you're referring to the complete act of killing and prepping, or merely the work most butchers do these days, which is mostly a small amount of prep and then perhaps cutting the whole chicken into pieces like breasts and thighs. That later thing is anything any competent cook can do, and I could show you how to do it in about five minutes.
As for slaughtering, well, chickens are relatively easy. You can go for the messy way and just chop the head off, but if you prefer less mess and a calmer chicken, just use a killing cone, hang upside down, slit the throat, let the blood drain for a couple minutes. Dunk in scalding water, pluck feathers. The only mildly hard part is getting out the viscera, and that's only because you don't want to puncture the intestines (and get feces all over) -- so make a cut in the right place, then use you hand gently to yank them out. Cut off the feet and neck, and you're basically done.
Again, other than having someone show you how to cut to get the viscera out, this is a really easy process you can probably figure out pretty easily. It's not as hard as processing a large animal, where you actually want to produce useful cuts and such.
Sheesh. I mean, I understand that maybe your dad has no idea how to do these things, but he could basically become an expert on both of them in a couple hours. These aren't insanely complex tasks or anything that requires a lot of intuition and analysis coming from long experience.
I personally see no reason why a single language, and particularly English, SHOULDN'T replace other languages eventually.
Because it is inadequate for use in other cultures.
THIS. Individual languages develop around culture and then take an active role in shaping it, though most people within that culture don't realize it until they step outside of their language and culture. It can lead to concepts that are truly untranslatable, in the sense that there is no single word or short phrase that could convey the concept precisely in another language.
Most people who argue that we wouldn't lose much if we all spoke the same language also seem to believe in the "dictionary model" of meaning, where atomic words with exact meanings are combined together to make language. But that's NOT how meaning actually works; it's just an illusion created by dictionary organization. (If it were true, we would have also solved the automatic computer translation problem decades ago.)
In reality, language and meaning is a complex network of associations, where word choice often conveys subtleties of meaning because of the various connotations and connected concepts in a language. Everyone makes a big deal about mostly mythical ideas like languages that could have dozens of words for snow or something... But it's not only the specialist technical terms where the distinctive character of a language resides. (And those can often be borrowed directly into other languages.)
Instead, languages often make subtle connections in even the basic core vocabulary. For some perspective on this, take a look at a comparative dictionary of Indo-European languages sometime. You would quickly see that while many basic ideas in a language may derive from the same roots, a specific concept may have a number of different strands of development in different languages. For example, three languages may all have different primary words derived from different roots for concept X, each with their own distinctive set of connotations. While it may seem like there's a simple A=B=C equivalence between words, the meaning that is conveyed in translation could be significantly changed or lacking in nuance.
In many cases, this may be a small thing -- but the reality is that language does shape thought and even perception of the world. If it's easier to make a particular connection between concepts in one language because of this network of meaning relationships, it can actually change the way people are able to discover new things or consider new possible ideas. Of course, it's not impossible to do this in another language... It's just less intuitive and thus perhaps less easy for people in another language to see the connection.
It was badly worded but it's pretty obvious that the GP was referring to the well known and documented phenomenon of iOS upgrades causing devices to slow down. You can of course not upgrade, but the real issue is why the OS gets slower over time.
And of course there are the battery issues too. I know three people personally who have had an iPhone with a battery that would last them for a week or more with low usage, but they made the mistake of upgrading the OS. Suddenly they had to recharge their phone multiple times per day. I and other people have often refused to upgrade to avoid such potential issues, which often leads to problems because Apple will stop supporting things unless you upgrade, leaving you in a place where either some important system apps no longer work or you roll the dice and upgrade to discover you have a slow brick that can't go more than 8 hours without a charge. (For the record, I don't buy iPhones myself, but I inherit them when other family members upgrade; I would never voluntarily buy an Apple product for many of these reasons.)
I won't go so far to say that Apple degrades battery performance deliberately. Maybe it does, or maybe they don't give a crap anymore about testing such things on older generations before releasing the OS. Either way, all the Apple BS about how "we limit our hardware choices so we can give you a better user experience" clearly goes out the window when your device is more than a year or two old.
The quality of removable storage media, especially SD cards (and derivative formats) varies drastically. Apple likes to ensure a consistent ecosystem so that all users have as consistent an experience as possible.
Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I mean, there's no way it could have anything to do with the fact that flash memory prices have dropped significantly and the only way Apple can get away with charging its ridiculous premiums for slightly more memory is to prevent users from easily adding their own. (With micro SD prices now, I could find something costing less than $1/gigabyte, or if Apple supported USB OTG, I could even use a flash drive for about 30 cents/GB, but instead I have to pay about $2/GB if I want an iPad or whatever with more memory.)
And it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that those ridiculous premiums for lots of memory cause consumers to buy cheaper models rather than spending a couple hundred more dollars on an already way overpriced piece of hardware, and then are forced to upgrade to a new generation device in a couple years when they realize they don't have enough space.
Yeah, I'm sure you're right -- the huge profit motive here has nothing to do with it... It's just Apple being a good citizen and helping its users not up have to put up with some inferior piece of freakin' flash memory they might buy.
The original statute was written in 1710 with the title
No, it wasn't. TFA is talking about American copyright law, which dates to the first copyright act of 1790. The statute you're citing applied in England, but it was certainly not the first copyright statute, whose concept dates back to the late 1400s in various Italian cities where certain publishers or writers were granted exclusive writes to publication, usually for periods of 7-10 years.
I completely agree with you that 20ish years is plenty before a work enters public domain. The original 1790 statute which had a default period of 14 years was also plenty.
However, I think there are some things overlooked in your arguments...
It sounds plenty fucking fair. Architects & engineers don't get paid royalties for years & years on work we did ages ago.
That's because you have a choice to get paid up-front. Most artists/creators don't. If someone offered you a contract: "Hey -- you can design my building for me, and I'll give you X% of the rents for the next Y years, but I'll pay you nothing now," would you do it? What if the building was in the middle of nowhere in a completely untested market? What if your design was also very unconventional and you didn't even know if it would work?
Those are the kinds of things a novelist or even a non-fiction author, say, has to deal with all the time. They invest their time and effort spending months or perhaps years generating a work, often with no money up-front. And unless they're an established author, they're often breaking new ground, perhaps trying out something new which may or may not sell well.
I suspect most architects and engineers here wouldn't take such a risky deal. They'd prefer to actually get paid when they do their work, as do most people. Most creators take much bigger risks in the hope that MAYBE some day down the line they might recoup their expenses and time.
And -- of course -- the vast majority DON'T. For every creator who makes millions of dollars off of their books or songs or screenplays or whatever, there are thousands of creators who never really make a profit. But they try anyway, and maybe they get something back.
We certainly don't continue to get paid after we're dead.
I don't know why everyone is so obsessed with deaths of authors.
Look -- copyright is broken, but it's effectively a contract between creators and the public. If you signed onto a deal like I offered you above, where you got no money up-front, but I said you'd get a share of the rents on the building you designed for 20 years, that contract generally wouldn't void at your death. The rents would be paid to your estate or your heirs for the original term of 20 years.
Why should it be any different? The few creators who do actually make money often have kids to feed. If I spent a year writing a novel and with my family suffering without enough money expecting X years of possible revenue from my novel, why should they not get the expected years of revenue if I drop dead from a heart attack the minute after my book is published? Copyright terms should be fixed and short -- whatever they are. The death of the artist is irrelevant.
And if we fuck up, things fall apart. People can get hurt. People can die. If a screenwriter fucks up, nothing of any consequence happens.
Not sure what this has to do with anything. Are you saying that we shouldn't pay anyone anything if they don't do something "essential" enough or something? Why the heck do we pay sports players or actors or whatever? Most people spend significant portions of their days listening to music, watching TV, etc. Just because something is viewed by you as "entertainment" or something doesn't mean that it isn't hugely important to you or society -- and if we don't have a system that rewards creators, art gets worse. Good artists choose to do something else with their time. And there are also writers who contribute significantly to new ideas, knowledge, etc. -- if these people won't get compensation, they may not choose to do it. That's potentially "somethign of consequence" happening.
If you did the work 20 years ago, tough shit. Welcome to the world of everybody else.
Again, I think most artists/creators would LOVE to take a deal like most people and get paid up-front.
What you consider 'many' is for others just a drop in the ocean.
Really? A list like this is just a "drop in the ocean"? And that's just Catholic clerics who made scientific contributions; it doesn't include other non-ordained folks supported by the church over the centuries. People who founded entire new major ideas in science (Copernicus, Mendel, Mersenne, Roger Bacon, etc., if you include non-clerics, people like Lavoisier, Descartes, Pasteur, etc.) are just a "drop in the ocean"?
During the times you mention the 'scientific' disciveries of the catholic church is dwarfed by islamic, indian and chineese research and discoveries...
The "times [I] mention" were the past 1000 years. It's true that European scientific advances were slower for maybe the first 500 years of that or so, and activity outside Europe was often greater. But the Catholic Church was the "best game in town" for supporting science and production of new research into nature, mathematics, etc. during Europe of that time.
But you'll also notice many, many scientists (mostly Jesuits) listed in the link above from the past couple centuries too. During the "Age of Discovery" in the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s, Catholic missionaries were a huge network of people who shared and then distributed new knowledge and findings around the world. There's also a reason why dozens of craters on the moon are named after Jesuit scientists -- who were incredibly active in astronomy for centuries (despite the common myths in the Galileo story about Carholics who supposedly refused to look through telescopes and believe what they saw).
Look -- even if you believe that all of this is just a "drop in the ocean" of scientific discovery, I wasn't trying to argue that the Catholic Church was solely responsible for scientific discovery -- only that it has not been vehemently anti-science throughout its history, as some people seem to imply.
You want to know what is really a "drop in the ocean"? Give me a list of scientists who were supposedly actively persecuted by the Catholic Church during its history for their "scientific" findings. You have Galileo and maybe Bruno (if you even count him as a "scientist" -- his ideas were pretty wacky and his "methods" were more of speculative philosophy than anything like "science"). That's two people. Maybe a few other incidents in a thousand years, but somehow that's all most people seem to know about the Catholic Church and science. How does that square with the list of people in my links above? Church persecution and suppression of science is a "drop in the ocean" compared to its consistent support of science over the centuries.
Never thought I would see the day when the head of the the Catholic church represents a beacon of scientific rationalism dragging the rest of the first world into the modern era.
Well, for most of the past 1000 years, the Catholic Church has been a leading force in scientific advancements of knowledge -- numerous scientific discoveries and theories came from priests, monks, and other church affiliates, and the church played a major role in the dissemination of knowledge. It's really only in the past 150 years or so that the church's role in science has significantly decreased. For every Galileo affair (which, though inexcusable, was more about politics and freedom of speech than scientific progress), there are dozens of other examples of significant scientists or ideas coming from Catholic sources.
(Full disclosure: I'm not a Catholic, but I have done significant research on the history of science. Want more info? Start here.)
Obviously there are issues where the Catholic Church seems "backward," but -- in contrast with many other conservative religious groups -- it has embraced things like evolution, the Big Bang theory was actually first proposed by a Belgian priest, etc. So while this may be a great announcement from the Pope, it isn't really a significant change from most Catholic roles in science. The idea that somehow the Catholic Church is opposed to science was created by radical revisionist historians in the 19th century. But it's not really accurate.
TV shows are selected based on legitimacy. They're selected based on whether or not they are likely to get people to watch advertisements.
I'm assuming you meant "aren't" in that first sentence, and in that case, obviously you're right. Most TV is obviously fiction, for example.
On the other hand, reality TV trades on the illusion of realism -- and if no one thought the people in those shows were actually in scary situations, potentially involving supernatural phenomena, then no one would watch them... And they wouldn't be able to sell advertising.
I personally love a good ghost story, like I love a good fantasy or sci-fi story, but I'm able to enjoy the unrealistic aspects of such stories because I know they are fiction, and I accept that this is some sort of alternative world where weird things are possible. But I can't stand to watch "documentaries" or "reality" shows about ghosts because it's so obvious that they're complete BS. If you can't get past that and allow the possibility of belief (I.e. legitimacy), why would you watch?
What I find weird is that the kajillion-fold increase in personal video recording devices over the past few decades seems to have scared away all the UFOs. Why, a week hardly went by in the 1980s without a flap, but now...
Yeah, except... Take a look at the number of "real ghost-hunters" reality TV shows, for example, to see how a "kajillion-fold increase in personal video recording devices" has clearly contributed to people claiming to find all sorts of recorded "evidence" of weird crap. It's broadcast on TV every freakin' day, and clearly somebody must think some aspect of it is legit, or there wouldn't be so many shows about it.
Interest in UFOs was a particular kind of fad. Everything from the clear increases in human technology (making many UFOs more likely to be human origin, even to the average person) to various conspiracy theories to the X-Files has probably changed the way people pay attention to odd objects in the sky these days.
But, if anything, the interest in various kinds of cheap recording technology has led to even more wacky made-up supernatural crap, so much these days that there are entire reality TV genres devoted to it. Just because UFOs aren't of as much interest in the past few years doesn't mean there isn't stuff out there. (And actually, poke around on the internet -- you'll clearly find loads of people out there with new UFO reports all the time.)
Just want to say thanks for a adding something of substance to this discussion, even if it didn't get modded p. I think our copyright system needs a lot of reform, and things should go into the public domain much more quickly, but those who just blindly that copyright is a completely irrational concept generally haven't thought at all about issues you bring up or their consequences.
And while yes, it is really nice that T-Bone accidents were reduced, I persoonally find it difficult to think how wonderful it is to be rear ended, end be pleased that some insurance company thought it was preferable. I don't consider an increase in accidents acceptable.
I agree. However....
It's like the only thing they count is th ebodies, not people who are suddenly High risk, and get dropped from insurance.
Under these circumstances, the person found at fault will almost always be the person who rear-ended the car in front. If the car in front of you is stopping to avoid a red light, and you haven't allowed adequate distance to stop so you are forced to rear-end them, guess what? You are already a "high-risk" tailgating driver.
(And that's regardless of the stupid and insane manipulation of yellows that should cause any public official involved in it to be put in prison.)
Tailgating causes a huge number of accidents, from minor to major pile-ups on the highway. No one is "suddenly high-risk" if they were tailgating -- they were already doing "high-risk" driving and just happened to be a situation where they were caught due to someone else trying to comply with the law. I can absolutely see why insurance companies would be pleased, because in this scenario, they get to catch people who have demonstrably behaved in a manner that often causes accidents, so it allows them to detect these people and potentially offset their bad driving with higher premiums or dropping them altogether (though the latter would probably require previous evidence of high-risk behavior).
either dumb it down some more, or use a better book like Apostol. either way, that goddam tome is an anachronistic brick.
I agree. "Tommy I" and "Tommy II" are decent actual intros to calc. (To the non-math geeks out there, these are common names for Apostol's books.)
For those not ready to take the plunge into real calc with Apostol, better to do a simpler intro version first... Stewart's book is like the MS Word of calc textbooks -- bloated and trying to serve everybody. Most people would be better off with either something like Wordpad/text editor or using a real typesetting/layout app for serious formatting.
Thanks for taking one word from my post without the requisite context and using it as a basis for an ill-informed rant (or, rather, an informed rant about something different from what I was talking about).
Look, I hate the textbook edition nonsense as much as you, but my post was specifically about what usually happens when A NEW AUTHOR is added. I know major textbook authors personally. I've seen generational shifts where a new co-author is added onto a textbook. Usually that is when revision is most likely to happen, since the new author will often have a few choice tidbits to add or put their own spin on a few chapters. My post was actually intending to insult these co-authors for the little work they sometimes do when taking over, but you seem to have taken it as though I was somehow praising them or implying they do more than they do.
Whatever. Take a break from your lunatic thermo rant and go sit in on a reading comprehension class sometime.
Sure extrapolation is always risky, seems a far better to bet than going with super intelligent robots that don't exist at all on the only planet we know that has life on it.
"Extrapolation" implies some sort of trend or data. You don't have a trend or even data; you have a single datum. On that basis, I don't think anything can really be said to be "a far better bet."
Having passed away, since Mr Stewart can no longer update the textbook every year or so, does this mean that this Calculus text will finally stabilize, stop being updated, and the prices would drop?
Uh, no. When this happens, publishers just find another "co-author" to add on to the title page. If it's like most textbooks, the new author will make a few minor tweaks here and there, rewrite only one chapter in any significant way (or simply add a new chapter somewhere), and then move back to the standard "renumber the pages and exercises" for subsequent "revised" editions.
The reasoning is that natural gas releases less carbon than coal, so if we switch from coal to natural gas, then we'll reduce climate change.
Yes, I'm perfectly aware of that, and unlike you I know the science behind it. The problem is the next sentence of my post that you conveniently left out of your quote -- which is, if we don't actually reduce energy demand, we'll eventually run out of natural gas and have to burn the coal/oil anyway. So we just end up in the same place, just a few decades later.
Also note my primary objection is to the beginning of TFS which implies we could STOP climate change by this substitution, which is in fact idiocy if anyone thought it true.
The solution to climate change isn't finding ever-more-exotic carbon to extact and burn - it's to stop burning carbon as soon as possible.
Agreed. TFS has got to be one of the most "duh"-provoking things I've seen posted here (and that's saying something). What kind of idiot thought we'd reduce climate change (which most scientists agree has something to do with carbon released from fossil fuel production) by switching to another fossil fuel that still emits carbon when burned? Unless we stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere, we'll still be dumping carbon into the atmosphere. We need an article to tell us this? What we need are other reasonable ways to harness and use energy and/or radically cut energy consumption until we only need renewables; until we have that, gas isn't solving our problem of using coal and oil: it's merely postponing our usage of that coal and oil.
Considering the impact on the environment of pods that just ends up in the garbage there's now two reasons not to buy them.
OK, the coffee they make isn't bad, but what's wrong with an ordinary espresso machine?
(1) A Keurig doesn't make espresso -- its pressure is nowhere high enough. (2) Cost: if you really want espresso worth making at home, you're going to pay a LOT more than it costs for a Keurig. (Well, in the short-term anyway; if you keep buying the K-cups, maybe not.)
Anyhow, I would never have bought one of these things myself, but I was given one by a family member something like 6 or 7 years ago. She had used it, but had some trouble with hard water clogging things up, and eventually she got Keurig to send a replacement. But they requested that she remove the insert that allowed you to actually use K-cups, rather than sending the whole thing back.
The flaw in that scheme was that Keurig makes a different sort of permanent plastic "cup" that could be refilled with coffee grounds, allowing you to brew whatever kind of coffee you wanted. But in order to use it -- guess what? -- you needed to remove the insert.
Anyhow, after they had already sent the replacement, it too malfunctioned briefly, and this family member tried cleaning the old one -- and now it worked! (But obviously they didn't have the "DRM" insert to actually use K-cups with it, so they could only brew with actual coffee grounds.) Later they got the new one working again, so now they just had a spare sitting around... which was given to me.
It still works, 7 years later. I've never bought a single proprietary K-cup or even any off-brand ones. I've only ever used it to brew whatever coffee I grind at home.
I would sometimes use it for a fast cup of coffee, but eventually I grew tired of the inferior flavor and went back to a french press.
Point is -- at least with older models, you could brew with your own coffee grounds if you removed the insert and bought the special reusable thing for the grounds (which maybe cost $10 -- an amount you'd save even after a couple boxes of K-cups).
In that case, the environmental impact is really quite minimal and probably better than some other traditional home-brewing methods, since you only heat up enough water for a single serving at a time, rather than people who tend to make a pot of coffee in their drip coffee pot and then never finish the pot or let it sit on the burner keeping warm for hours.
(Just to be clear, I'm sure that we DO make word choices on the basis of words we're more familiar with. But that really has little to do with the specific distribution concept called Zipf's law.)
Slashdot Mirror
By your own admission, AI *might* eventually be capable of the kind of "malice that people seem to be afraid of". And that malicious developers can cause destruction even sooner.
Not the GP, but yep, bad things are possible. Yay!
However...
And the laws of physics clearly predict that strong AI is possible. or do you consider intelligence to be some kind of supernatural quality?
Invoking "the laws of physics allow it" as an argument that we should actually be worried about something happening here on earth in the near future is pretty slim evidence, no? I mean, the laws of physics allow a LOT of stuff to be possible.
That said, this isn't really about the laws of physics -- it's about basic biological systems here on earth which have intelligent properties. So, it's a lot easier to create intelligent life than invoking the laws of physics. (People have babies all the time.) The question is how long it will take us humans to figure out a way to create something that has certain intelligence properties... and that could be next year, next decade, next century, next millennium....
Also it is the experts in AI who are predicting that AI will be possible and achieved in a matter of decades. Why would you even come out and pretend that it isn't?
Because the "experts in AI" have a pretty bad track record for predicting advances -- the cynic in me would say probably because many of them get their grants funded by predicting major advances.
Back in the 1950s, the "experts in AI" predicted that a group of 10 smart dudes could get together and solve all the major problems of AI (like natural language comprehension, true adaptive learning, etc.) in 2 months over the summer. Over fifty years later, we're nowhere close to solving most of their identified problems -- most of our advances are due to better searching algorithms, faster hardware, and more data. Not really significant advances in true adaptive learning.
Alan Turing, in the same era, predicted by the year 2000 that we'd have machines so fluent in natural language that we'd have to debate the word choices that could be substituted in Shakespearean sonnets to tell the difference between a human and a computer. Instead, we get crap reported again and again and again that the "Turing test" was "passed" by some idiotic program that pretends to be a retarded non-English-speaking teenager who's acting like a 5-year-old.
How low our "bar" has sunk that we need to have such declarations every year or two to keep proving to ourselves that we have great "AI."
No -- we don't. We've barely squeaked by with any significant advances toward the kinds of goals articulated in the 50s about strong AI.
Now, I'm sure you're all going to talk about Deep Blue and chess. But how do these chess programs win? By doing exhaustive searches far ahead of what humans are capable of and having exhaustive libraries of games and strategies far greater than any human is capable of. I'm not saying these computers aren't significant advances in SOMETHING. But they aren't exhibiting the kind of efficient adaptive intelligence that the original "strong AI" proponents thought would happen when they proposed chess as a worthy goal for AI. It's like comparing someone with a high-IQ, advanced math and logic skills solving a complex problem in 5 steps with another guy who brute-forced the problem on a supercomputer and ran quadrillions of simulations until he came up with the right answer by elimination of oth
Unless you work at a hospital, or are a soldier in a war.
We are a people more disconnected from death than any in history.
This has to be one of the most insightful comments here. Want more specific? How about the distinctive sound of a child with a serious and potentially fatal case of whooping cough?
Oh wait, the anti vaccination wackos are intent on bringing that one back....
I don't think anyone in the scientific community has any doubts that there was life there at one time. It's just a matter of proving it.
I certainly hope you're wrong in this statement. Otherwise, it implies the "scientific community" is no better than a bunch of religious wackos when it comes to evaluating evidence.
There is absolutely no reason to believe one way or another that life should exist or should have existed on Mars. If you go back to the Drake equation, we have only one datapoint regarding the probability of abiogenesis. It could be that life spontaneously appears on every random planet and is even multiple places in our solar system. But, based on current evidence, it could also be that life only appears on 1 in 100 planets that seem to have "good" conditions to us based on our really vague theories about how it happened. Or it could be 1 in 1000 or 1 in a million or 1 in a quadrillion.
We have one data point. I sincerely hope that there are some in the scientific community who still allow for the possibilty that there may NOT be life on Mars... maybe even not elsewhere in our solar system... maybe even not elsewhere in our galaxy. Maybe it's really common. But we have absolutely no reason to think so at this time, and thus it is really not a very "scientific" attitude to have no "doubts" about it.
It's not about cost. It's about design. They used to build things to last. ... [snip] ...It lowers cost and means you buy a new electric carving knife every couple of years.
Speaking about design, why the heck are you using an electric carving knife in the first place? Just buy a decent actual (non-electric) slicing knife, and keep it sharp. You can probably use it for a half-century and then will it to the grandkids. Learning how to keep quality knives sharp is an easy skill and will save you hours in the kitchen, not to mention probable injuries. (Dull knives make any cutting or chopping take much longer and require more effort, and they are much more prone to slipping when you try to force them, thus creating accidents.)
I can't stand cooking at most other people's houses, because they often have no knives that are actually sharp. Food prep is annoying with bad tools, and I understand why most people just give up and rarely cook with tools like that.
Anyhow, the reason for this short rant about old-fashioned knife maintenance is because part of our "design" problem these days is that we think we need some "gadget" to do everything. Yes, many gadgets are helpful. But a lot of times they replace a perfectly straightforward non-complex tool that would last for years with a complicated electronic device or at least something with a very special design, a bunch of breakable plastic parts, and no easy way to repair when it fails.
If you asked me to a choose a useless gadget that I'd NEVER bother replacing because I could just use a simple tool that will last for generations, the electric carving knife would be near the top of my list.
Fine, do you know how to churn your own butter or butcher your own chickens? My grandfather did all of these things, but my dad (who is still a farmer) has no idea how to do either. And even if you are one of the rare ones who knows how to do those things, I doubt almost all of your generation can.
I don't mean to be a jerk about this, but THESE are the two things you bring out regarding examples of difficult things your dad couldn't figure out how to do??
Churning butter only takes cream and agitation. You can do it in a mixer. You can even do it in a sealed jar just by shaking (though it will take longer). Eventually the proteins will separate from the whey, and you just form them into a glob, squeeze it out, and you have butter. That's it. There's no "secret" to churning butter.
As for "butchering" a chicken, I don't know if you're referring to the complete act of killing and prepping, or merely the work most butchers do these days, which is mostly a small amount of prep and then perhaps cutting the whole chicken into pieces like breasts and thighs. That later thing is anything any competent cook can do, and I could show you how to do it in about five minutes.
As for slaughtering, well, chickens are relatively easy. You can go for the messy way and just chop the head off, but if you prefer less mess and a calmer chicken, just use a killing cone, hang upside down, slit the throat, let the blood drain for a couple minutes. Dunk in scalding water, pluck feathers. The only mildly hard part is getting out the viscera, and that's only because you don't want to puncture the intestines (and get feces all over) -- so make a cut in the right place, then use you hand gently to yank them out. Cut off the feet and neck, and you're basically done.
Again, other than having someone show you how to cut to get the viscera out, this is a really easy process you can probably figure out pretty easily. It's not as hard as processing a large animal, where you actually want to produce useful cuts and such.
Sheesh. I mean, I understand that maybe your dad has no idea how to do these things, but he could basically become an expert on both of them in a couple hours. These aren't insanely complex tasks or anything that requires a lot of intuition and analysis coming from long experience.
I personally see no reason why a single language, and particularly English, SHOULDN'T replace other languages eventually.
Because it is inadequate for use in other cultures.
THIS. Individual languages develop around culture and then take an active role in shaping it, though most people within that culture don't realize it until they step outside of their language and culture. It can lead to concepts that are truly untranslatable, in the sense that there is no single word or short phrase that could convey the concept precisely in another language.
Most people who argue that we wouldn't lose much if we all spoke the same language also seem to believe in the "dictionary model" of meaning, where atomic words with exact meanings are combined together to make language. But that's NOT how meaning actually works; it's just an illusion created by dictionary organization. (If it were true, we would have also solved the automatic computer translation problem decades ago.)
In reality, language and meaning is a complex network of associations, where word choice often conveys subtleties of meaning because of the various connotations and connected concepts in a language. Everyone makes a big deal about mostly mythical ideas like languages that could have dozens of words for snow or something... But it's not only the specialist technical terms where the distinctive character of a language resides. (And those can often be borrowed directly into other languages.)
Instead, languages often make subtle connections in even the basic core vocabulary. For some perspective on this, take a look at a comparative dictionary of Indo-European languages sometime. You would quickly see that while many basic ideas in a language may derive from the same roots, a specific concept may have a number of different strands of development in different languages. For example, three languages may all have different primary words derived from different roots for concept X, each with their own distinctive set of connotations. While it may seem like there's a simple A=B=C equivalence between words, the meaning that is conveyed in translation could be significantly changed or lacking in nuance.
In many cases, this may be a small thing -- but the reality is that language does shape thought and even perception of the world. If it's easier to make a particular connection between concepts in one language because of this network of meaning relationships, it can actually change the way people are able to discover new things or consider new possible ideas. Of course, it's not impossible to do this in another language... It's just less intuitive and thus perhaps less easy for people in another language to see the connection.
It was badly worded but it's pretty obvious that the GP was referring to the well known and documented phenomenon of iOS upgrades causing devices to slow down. You can of course not upgrade, but the real issue is why the OS gets slower over time.
And of course there are the battery issues too. I know three people personally who have had an iPhone with a battery that would last them for a week or more with low usage, but they made the mistake of upgrading the OS. Suddenly they had to recharge their phone multiple times per day. I and other people have often refused to upgrade to avoid such potential issues, which often leads to problems because Apple will stop supporting things unless you upgrade, leaving you in a place where either some important system apps no longer work or you roll the dice and upgrade to discover you have a slow brick that can't go more than 8 hours without a charge. (For the record, I don't buy iPhones myself, but I inherit them when other family members upgrade; I would never voluntarily buy an Apple product for many of these reasons.)
I won't go so far to say that Apple degrades battery performance deliberately. Maybe it does, or maybe they don't give a crap anymore about testing such things on older generations before releasing the OS. Either way, all the Apple BS about how "we limit our hardware choices so we can give you a better user experience" clearly goes out the window when your device is more than a year or two old.
The quality of removable storage media, especially SD cards (and derivative formats) varies drastically. Apple likes to ensure a consistent ecosystem so that all users have as consistent an experience as possible.
Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I mean, there's no way it could have anything to do with the fact that flash memory prices have dropped significantly and the only way Apple can get away with charging its ridiculous premiums for slightly more memory is to prevent users from easily adding their own. (With micro SD prices now, I could find something costing less than $1/gigabyte, or if Apple supported USB OTG, I could even use a flash drive for about 30 cents/GB, but instead I have to pay about $2/GB if I want an iPad or whatever with more memory.)
And it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that those ridiculous premiums for lots of memory cause consumers to buy cheaper models rather than spending a couple hundred more dollars on an already way overpriced piece of hardware, and then are forced to upgrade to a new generation device in a couple years when they realize they don't have enough space.
Yeah, I'm sure you're right -- the huge profit motive here has nothing to do with it... It's just Apple being a good citizen and helping its users not up have to put up with some inferior piece of freakin' flash memory they might buy.
That MUST be it. Thanks for telling us.
(Obviously I meant "rights" not "writes.")
The original statute was written in 1710 with the title
No, it wasn't. TFA is talking about American copyright law, which dates to the first copyright act of 1790. The statute you're citing applied in England, but it was certainly not the first copyright statute, whose concept dates back to the late 1400s in various Italian cities where certain publishers or writers were granted exclusive writes to publication, usually for periods of 7-10 years.
I completely agree with you that 20ish years is plenty before a work enters public domain. The original 1790 statute which had a default period of 14 years was also plenty.
However, I think there are some things overlooked in your arguments...
It sounds plenty fucking fair. Architects & engineers don't get paid royalties for years & years on work we did ages ago.
That's because you have a choice to get paid up-front. Most artists/creators don't. If someone offered you a contract: "Hey -- you can design my building for me, and I'll give you X% of the rents for the next Y years, but I'll pay you nothing now," would you do it? What if the building was in the middle of nowhere in a completely untested market? What if your design was also very unconventional and you didn't even know if it would work?
Those are the kinds of things a novelist or even a non-fiction author, say, has to deal with all the time. They invest their time and effort spending months or perhaps years generating a work, often with no money up-front. And unless they're an established author, they're often breaking new ground, perhaps trying out something new which may or may not sell well.
I suspect most architects and engineers here wouldn't take such a risky deal. They'd prefer to actually get paid when they do their work, as do most people. Most creators take much bigger risks in the hope that MAYBE some day down the line they might recoup their expenses and time.
And -- of course -- the vast majority DON'T. For every creator who makes millions of dollars off of their books or songs or screenplays or whatever, there are thousands of creators who never really make a profit. But they try anyway, and maybe they get something back.
We certainly don't continue to get paid after we're dead.
I don't know why everyone is so obsessed with deaths of authors.
Look -- copyright is broken, but it's effectively a contract between creators and the public. If you signed onto a deal like I offered you above, where you got no money up-front, but I said you'd get a share of the rents on the building you designed for 20 years, that contract generally wouldn't void at your death. The rents would be paid to your estate or your heirs for the original term of 20 years.
Why should it be any different? The few creators who do actually make money often have kids to feed. If I spent a year writing a novel and with my family suffering without enough money expecting X years of possible revenue from my novel, why should they not get the expected years of revenue if I drop dead from a heart attack the minute after my book is published? Copyright terms should be fixed and short -- whatever they are. The death of the artist is irrelevant.
And if we fuck up, things fall apart. People can get hurt. People can die. If a screenwriter fucks up, nothing of any consequence happens.
Not sure what this has to do with anything. Are you saying that we shouldn't pay anyone anything if they don't do something "essential" enough or something? Why the heck do we pay sports players or actors or whatever? Most people spend significant portions of their days listening to music, watching TV, etc. Just because something is viewed by you as "entertainment" or something doesn't mean that it isn't hugely important to you or society -- and if we don't have a system that rewards creators, art gets worse. Good artists choose to do something else with their time. And there are also writers who contribute significantly to new ideas, knowledge, etc. -- if these people won't get compensation, they may not choose to do it. That's potentially "somethign of consequence" happening.
If you did the work 20 years ago, tough shit. Welcome to the world of everybody else.
Again, I think most artists/creators would LOVE to take a deal like most people and get paid up-front.
What you consider 'many' is for others just a drop in the ocean.
Really? A list like this is just a "drop in the ocean"? And that's just Catholic clerics who made scientific contributions; it doesn't include other non-ordained folks supported by the church over the centuries. People who founded entire new major ideas in science (Copernicus, Mendel, Mersenne, Roger Bacon, etc., if you include non-clerics, people like Lavoisier, Descartes, Pasteur, etc.) are just a "drop in the ocean"?
During the times you mention the 'scientific' disciveries of the catholic church is dwarfed by islamic, indian and chineese research and discoveries ...
The "times [I] mention" were the past 1000 years. It's true that European scientific advances were slower for maybe the first 500 years of that or so, and activity outside Europe was often greater. But the Catholic Church was the "best game in town" for supporting science and production of new research into nature, mathematics, etc. during Europe of that time.
But you'll also notice many, many scientists (mostly Jesuits) listed in the link above from the past couple centuries too. During the "Age of Discovery" in the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s, Catholic missionaries were a huge network of people who shared and then distributed new knowledge and findings around the world. There's also a reason why dozens of craters on the moon are named after Jesuit scientists -- who were incredibly active in astronomy for centuries (despite the common myths in the Galileo story about Carholics who supposedly refused to look through telescopes and believe what they saw).
Look -- even if you believe that all of this is just a "drop in the ocean" of scientific discovery, I wasn't trying to argue that the Catholic Church was solely responsible for scientific discovery -- only that it has not been vehemently anti-science throughout its history, as some people seem to imply.
You want to know what is really a "drop in the ocean"? Give me a list of scientists who were supposedly actively persecuted by the Catholic Church during its history for their "scientific" findings. You have Galileo and maybe Bruno (if you even count him as a "scientist" -- his ideas were pretty wacky and his "methods" were more of speculative philosophy than anything like "science"). That's two people. Maybe a few other incidents in a thousand years, but somehow that's all most people seem to know about the Catholic Church and science. How does that square with the list of people in my links above? Church persecution and suppression of science is a "drop in the ocean" compared to its consistent support of science over the centuries.
Never thought I would see the day when the head of the the Catholic church represents a beacon of scientific rationalism dragging the rest of the first world into the modern era.
Well, for most of the past 1000 years, the Catholic Church has been a leading force in scientific advancements of knowledge -- numerous scientific discoveries and theories came from priests, monks, and other church affiliates, and the church played a major role in the dissemination of knowledge. It's really only in the past 150 years or so that the church's role in science has significantly decreased. For every Galileo affair (which, though inexcusable, was more about politics and freedom of speech than scientific progress), there are dozens of other examples of significant scientists or ideas coming from Catholic sources.
(Full disclosure: I'm not a Catholic, but I have done significant research on the history of science. Want more info? Start here.)
Obviously there are issues where the Catholic Church seems "backward," but -- in contrast with many other conservative religious groups -- it has embraced things like evolution, the Big Bang theory was actually first proposed by a Belgian priest, etc. So while this may be a great announcement from the Pope, it isn't really a significant change from most Catholic roles in science. The idea that somehow the Catholic Church is opposed to science was created by radical revisionist historians in the 19th century. But it's not really accurate.
TV shows are selected based on legitimacy. They're selected based on whether or not they are likely to get people to watch advertisements.
I'm assuming you meant "aren't" in that first sentence, and in that case, obviously you're right. Most TV is obviously fiction, for example.
On the other hand, reality TV trades on the illusion of realism -- and if no one thought the people in those shows were actually in scary situations, potentially involving supernatural phenomena, then no one would watch them... And they wouldn't be able to sell advertising.
I personally love a good ghost story, like I love a good fantasy or sci-fi story, but I'm able to enjoy the unrealistic aspects of such stories because I know they are fiction, and I accept that this is some sort of alternative world where weird things are possible. But I can't stand to watch "documentaries" or "reality" shows about ghosts because it's so obvious that they're complete BS. If you can't get past that and allow the possibility of belief (I.e. legitimacy), why would you watch?
What I find weird is that the kajillion-fold increase in personal video recording devices over the past few decades seems to have scared away all the UFOs. Why, a week hardly went by in the 1980s without a flap, but now...
Yeah, except... Take a look at the number of "real ghost-hunters" reality TV shows, for example, to see how a "kajillion-fold increase in personal video recording devices" has clearly contributed to people claiming to find all sorts of recorded "evidence" of weird crap. It's broadcast on TV every freakin' day, and clearly somebody must think some aspect of it is legit, or there wouldn't be so many shows about it.
Interest in UFOs was a particular kind of fad. Everything from the clear increases in human technology (making many UFOs more likely to be human origin, even to the average person) to various conspiracy theories to the X-Files has probably changed the way people pay attention to odd objects in the sky these days.
But, if anything, the interest in various kinds of cheap recording technology has led to even more wacky made-up supernatural crap, so much these days that there are entire reality TV genres devoted to it. Just because UFOs aren't of as much interest in the past few years doesn't mean there isn't stuff out there. (And actually, poke around on the internet -- you'll clearly find loads of people out there with new UFO reports all the time.)
Just want to say thanks for a adding something of substance to this discussion, even if it didn't get modded p. I think our copyright system needs a lot of reform, and things should go into the public domain much more quickly, but those who just blindly that copyright is a completely irrational concept generally haven't thought at all about issues you bring up or their consequences.
And while yes, it is really nice that T-Bone accidents were reduced, I persoonally find it difficult to think how wonderful it is to be rear ended, end be pleased that some insurance company thought it was preferable. I don't consider an increase in accidents acceptable.
I agree. However....
It's like the only thing they count is th ebodies, not people who are suddenly High risk, and get dropped from insurance.
Under these circumstances, the person found at fault will almost always be the person who rear-ended the car in front. If the car in front of you is stopping to avoid a red light, and you haven't allowed adequate distance to stop so you are forced to rear-end them, guess what? You are already a "high-risk" tailgating driver.
(And that's regardless of the stupid and insane manipulation of yellows that should cause any public official involved in it to be put in prison.)
Tailgating causes a huge number of accidents, from minor to major pile-ups on the highway. No one is "suddenly high-risk" if they were tailgating -- they were already doing "high-risk" driving and just happened to be a situation where they were caught due to someone else trying to comply with the law. I can absolutely see why insurance companies would be pleased, because in this scenario, they get to catch people who have demonstrably behaved in a manner that often causes accidents, so it allows them to detect these people and potentially offset their bad driving with higher premiums or dropping them altogether (though the latter would probably require previous evidence of high-risk behavior).
either dumb it down some more, or use a better book like Apostol. either way, that goddam tome is an anachronistic brick.
I agree. "Tommy I" and "Tommy II" are decent actual intros to calc. (To the non-math geeks out there, these are common names for Apostol's books.)
For those not ready to take the plunge into real calc with Apostol, better to do a simpler intro version first... Stewart's book is like the MS Word of calc textbooks -- bloated and trying to serve everybody. Most people would be better off with either something like Wordpad/text editor or using a real typesetting/layout app for serious formatting.
Rewrite? As in actually revise the text? No way.
Thanks for taking one word from my post without the requisite context and using it as a basis for an ill-informed rant (or, rather, an informed rant about something different from what I was talking about).
Look, I hate the textbook edition nonsense as much as you, but my post was specifically about what usually happens when A NEW AUTHOR is added. I know major textbook authors personally. I've seen generational shifts where a new co-author is added onto a textbook. Usually that is when revision is most likely to happen, since the new author will often have a few choice tidbits to add or put their own spin on a few chapters. My post was actually intending to insult these co-authors for the little work they sometimes do when taking over, but you seem to have taken it as though I was somehow praising them or implying they do more than they do.
Whatever. Take a break from your lunatic thermo rant and go sit in on a reading comprehension class sometime.
Sure extrapolation is always risky, seems a far better to bet than going with super intelligent robots that don't exist at all on the only planet we know that has life on it.
"Extrapolation" implies some sort of trend or data. You don't have a trend or even data; you have a single datum. On that basis, I don't think anything can really be said to be "a far better bet."
Having passed away, since Mr Stewart can no longer update the textbook every year or so, does this mean that this Calculus text will finally stabilize, stop being updated, and the prices would drop?
Uh, no. When this happens, publishers just find another "co-author" to add on to the title page. If it's like most textbooks, the new author will make a few minor tweaks here and there, rewrite only one chapter in any significant way (or simply add a new chapter somewhere), and then move back to the standard "renumber the pages and exercises" for subsequent "revised" editions.
The reasoning is that natural gas releases less carbon than coal, so if we switch from coal to natural gas, then we'll reduce climate change.
Yes, I'm perfectly aware of that, and unlike you I know the science behind it. The problem is the next sentence of my post that you conveniently left out of your quote -- which is, if we don't actually reduce energy demand, we'll eventually run out of natural gas and have to burn the coal/oil anyway. So we just end up in the same place, just a few decades later.
Also note my primary objection is to the beginning of TFS which implies we could STOP climate change by this substitution, which is in fact idiocy if anyone thought it true.
The solution to climate change isn't finding ever-more-exotic carbon to extact and burn - it's to stop burning carbon as soon as possible.
Agreed. TFS has got to be one of the most "duh"-provoking things I've seen posted here (and that's saying something). What kind of idiot thought we'd reduce climate change (which most scientists agree has something to do with carbon released from fossil fuel production) by switching to another fossil fuel that still emits carbon when burned? Unless we stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere, we'll still be dumping carbon into the atmosphere. We need an article to tell us this? What we need are other reasonable ways to harness and use energy and/or radically cut energy consumption until we only need renewables; until we have that, gas isn't solving our problem of using coal and oil: it's merely postponing our usage of that coal and oil.
Considering the impact on the environment of pods that just ends up in the garbage there's now two reasons not to buy them.
OK, the coffee they make isn't bad, but what's wrong with an ordinary espresso machine?
(1) A Keurig doesn't make espresso -- its pressure is nowhere high enough. (2) Cost: if you really want espresso worth making at home, you're going to pay a LOT more than it costs for a Keurig. (Well, in the short-term anyway; if you keep buying the K-cups, maybe not.)
Anyhow, I would never have bought one of these things myself, but I was given one by a family member something like 6 or 7 years ago. She had used it, but had some trouble with hard water clogging things up, and eventually she got Keurig to send a replacement. But they requested that she remove the insert that allowed you to actually use K-cups, rather than sending the whole thing back.
The flaw in that scheme was that Keurig makes a different sort of permanent plastic "cup" that could be refilled with coffee grounds, allowing you to brew whatever kind of coffee you wanted. But in order to use it -- guess what? -- you needed to remove the insert.
Anyhow, after they had already sent the replacement, it too malfunctioned briefly, and this family member tried cleaning the old one -- and now it worked! (But obviously they didn't have the "DRM" insert to actually use K-cups with it, so they could only brew with actual coffee grounds.) Later they got the new one working again, so now they just had a spare sitting around... which was given to me.
It still works, 7 years later. I've never bought a single proprietary K-cup or even any off-brand ones. I've only ever used it to brew whatever coffee I grind at home.
I would sometimes use it for a fast cup of coffee, but eventually I grew tired of the inferior flavor and went back to a french press.
Point is -- at least with older models, you could brew with your own coffee grounds if you removed the insert and bought the special reusable thing for the grounds (which maybe cost $10 -- an amount you'd save even after a couple boxes of K-cups).
In that case, the environmental impact is really quite minimal and probably better than some other traditional home-brewing methods, since you only heat up enough water for a single serving at a time, rather than people who tend to make a pot of coffee in their drip coffee pot and then never finish the pot or let it sit on the burner keeping warm for hours.
(Just to be clear, I'm sure that we DO make word choices on the basis of words we're more familiar with. But that really has little to do with the specific distribution concept called Zipf's law.)