So, the first crash of a self-driving car will have a huge impact on the industry. If the computer screwed up, the industry will be set back a few months. (They have good PR, don't think they won't defend themselves). If they can prove it was the other car, insurance companies and legislators will be very interested.
Public opinion will be slow to change, though. People will need to be in a computer-driven car, and see it react to a hazard before they could have. You could (relatively) safely put them in this sort of situation with computer driven go-karts, or similar vehicles - safe, slow, but exciting.
An educationalist is someone who researches education, or shapes education policy. It's somewhere in between "education expert" and "education policy czar / ivory tower education academic" in flamebaitness. "Educationalist" *is* a word, in relatively common use (Google tells me it's about half as common as "critical theory" (in quotes) on the web), unlike flamebaitness which I just made up.
I won't be pedantic, and go into any detail as to what the definition of "word" is, as there are several different meanings, one of which ("a word in common use") which makes some kind of sense in the way you are using it.
I've lived in China, and found it to be cheap but crappy for internet, but good *and* cheap for mobiles. Support was clueless, but they tried to make an effort. By effort, I mean, came onsight to figure out what was wrong with my configuration. By clueless, I mean, they couldn't figure out why a Mac couldn't use crappy Windows dialing software. For Chinese Windows, they'd probably be pretty good.
As opposed to Australia, where you don't even get cheap, and mobile reception sucks; and support is often a guy in a developing country who takes half an hour to answer the phone, and lacks training. Because obviously telecommuters in developing countries are just too expensive to train properly, and you don't want to hire so many of them that they might be able to twiddle their thumbs between customers.
If it "bones the economy on a grand scale", that would be because it's costing so much, greatly reducing carbon emissions, right?
As for the "we are only 1%" argument, that's kind of BS. We are basically the worst in the world, per capita. We also screwed up global efforts, by dragging our feet on Kyoto (though the US had more of an impact), despite having *very* generous terms.
For a complete sociopath's point of view, we should do everything we can to get out of having any responsibilities. We are a small fish, and no-one really cares what happens here. But from the same point of view, China should invade us for our coal and ore reserves. I'm rather glad that sort of behaviour is frowned upon.
Right, because simple neo-liberal economics *always* works when once-in-a-century events happen. If the market was really free, OPEC members would be allowed to massively cut production to keep oil in the ground (and would be run by long-term thinkers, not populists trying to please the both US overlords, and the mobs with AKs).
The danger is, there can be a long lead time on "nuclear, solar, wind, hamsters on wheels, and all that other green jazz". Trying to change the whole world's fuel source in a short time period could be catastrophic. Maybe not for everyone, but if energy prices double then food prices in poor countries will go through the roof.
People *are* looking into alternatives, but there's no serious funding. Everyone knows that the groundbreaking discoveries will go down in the history books, but not make a mint. Someone will then copy the technology, sidestep IP rights (through work-arounds, or lawyering, or some emergency degree annulling energy patents), find a way to make it 1/2 the price, and roll it out everywhere.
There's no point doing research, if commercial applications won't be there for decades. The patents will expire, and the technological advantage will fade. Industry needs price signals, which are being suppressed by governments who want to burn up as much of our finite resources as possible before they have to run for re-election.
So, what we really have is a shortage on people with management skills - financial analysis, problem solving, risk assessment, supply chain planning, and so on. But when universities churn out more management graduates, they can't get jobs because people with good numerical skills are getting hired as managers, not engineers.
Perhaps we need to change business degrees, to increase the mathematical abilities that students have. It's funning seeing economics students (who are really just studying the mathematics of money) in slack-jawed amazement at how elasticity (basic differential calculus) works. Then blow steam out their ears when they need to do econometrics (applied linear algebra and statistics - think the first five minutes of a machine learning course).
Certainly. There's a world of difference between IPCC conclusions, and stuff that Green Peace will say. The IPCC tends to be, well, scientific. There's some bias in the IPCC - they tend to be believers, and tend to eliminating errors that work against them but not the errors in their favor. On the other hand, the whole organization is incredibly conservative - they don't buy the whole "precautionary principle" thing.
The problem is, the CEO of Office, Inc. shouldn't be allowed to tell the founders of Courier to disband their startup just because it would be too hard to port Office's product to their new machine.
No, that's not it at all. It's the fundamentalist Christians (and at times, Catholics) that are out of hand. Fundamentalist atheists are just a reaction against them.
Tell a Hindu that the Earth doesn't sit on a turtle. They'll either laugh, or get offended that you stereotype them as a superstitious savage. Tell a Christian that the world is over a billion years old, and they will tell you that scientists only say that to get funding.
The scientific method *did* benefit from the immense skepticism against new discoveries. Arguing with Jesuits did have some benefit. But only once science started to get the upper hand. Before that point, we had the Dark Ages.
And *anything* can be habit forming, but it's a bit dodgy to call a habit an addiction. Dopamine can be involved, but unless you are talking about stuff that really exploits it (slashdot, farming games, poker machines, MMORPGS), then silly to call a habit an addiction. We have different words for "habits" and "addictions" for a reason - they are different phenomena. OK, there's some overlap, in extreme cases, but if you have a bad habit of taking a hit of heroin ever week, or are addicted to tasty cheese to the point where you would sell your grandmother for another hit of Roquefort then the term might apply.
But trying to confound terms just for the point of argument is both vacuos and disingenuous. I shake my head when people say marijuana is addictive simply because it is habit forming. And I can't stand people saying anti-drug campaigners are hypocrites if they drink coffee (as both are "drugs"). It's vacuos and disingenuous.
Pot has its problems. So does alcohol and cigarettes. But so does criminalizing drugs, as it channels money into gangs.
If the ethical version would already be produced to meet demand (as is the case for bike parts, diamonds, and tritium), then segregating the market probably won't do anything (unless almost everyone jumps on board, which can happen but not too often). It won't be much different price wise, as you aren't really changing anything. You just pay for the sticker, and the warm feeling.
If the ethical version would *not* be produced (as is the case for RHEL, fair trade coffee, free range eggs) then buying it will make a difference, even if one person does so. It will both increase demand for the ethical version, and decrease demand for the unethical version. But it will be more expensive than the alternative. That's the cost of actually making a difference.
It sounds like an earnest effort. But I really doubt that even China would employ 1 million people to do try to do this.
There's about 2 million soldiers in China. There's about 2 million police. There's no way in *hell* that busting counterfeit handbags is going to be 1/2 as important as defence, or law and order.
Perhaps there's 1 million chengguan - city administrators. These are basically police deputies who maintain public order, by clearing away illegal or unregistered businesses. That's a charitable definition. I expect that stopping the sale of counterfeit products has simply been added to the chengguan's duties / excuses to shake down businesses. But China is trying to make it sound much more of a crackdown.
And there's farming. Agriculture uses a lot of energy, and with raising oil prices they might find a way to substitute energy for oil. Not immediately, but oil is only going to get exponentially more expensive as it all runs out and demand still grows.
Ah yes, If the pig will eat it, I will give it to him.
The problem is, stuff that appeals in the short term can drive away loyalty. People realise that it's a waste of time, and start quitting. But then, slashdot has spend about 10 years feeding the trolls, so it's not like they are risking much.
Why do you need a 2960XM Extreme 2.7GHz? If you really are a power user, you should have RAM and SSD (or HDD) requirements as well. OK, you can buy parts and swap, but it's really annoying. That said, the System 76 gives you a lot of choices on memory too and is *way* better value than the Macs.
*MY* biggest concerns are the screen, speakers, and touchpad. Macs are pretty damn good at all 3. I notice that System 76 gives multi-touch pads, with 2 finger scrolling, sweet.
However, you are right that there needs to be more randomized, long term experiments. At the moment, there's short-term optimizations (what grade 6 methodology will get Johnny to do his grade 6 exam better?), and unrandomized longitudinal stuff.
10L of air (the inside of a SCUBA tank) weights 12g. A SCUBA tank can hold 400 atm, and weighs about 15kg (note, this is generous). Everything involving pressure tanks scales linearly, so you could have a 10L tank holding 1 atm and weighing 37 grams, displacing 12 grams of air, for a net of -25 grams of lift.
So you need materials about 3 times the strength/weight of good SCUBA gear, preferably 6 times (so you can actually get a noticeable amount of lift). That's assuming there's no challenges in manufacturing much thinner but much lighter tanks. Oh, and that buckling won't be an issue (since we've moved from tension to compression) - that can be solved my making really small tanks, but then you are trying to make the walls very very thin.
Slashdot Mirror
So, the first crash of a self-driving car will have a huge impact on the industry. If the computer screwed up, the industry will be set back a few months. (They have good PR, don't think they won't defend themselves). If they can prove it was the other car, insurance companies and legislators will be very interested.
Public opinion will be slow to change, though. People will need to be in a computer-driven car, and see it react to a hazard before they could have. You could (relatively) safely put them in this sort of situation with computer driven go-karts, or similar vehicles - safe, slow, but exciting.
What if your work standardizes on IE6?
So does your rolodex belong to your company? What about your linked-in profile? Where is the line drawn?
Are you a lawyer? I doubt it. I'm not either, but anyone should know that courts do have special powers to collect evidence.
Imagine a website where you could hire hit-men. The TOS says they can't reveal their paymaster, so even if they get caught it can never trace you.
An educationalist is someone who researches education, or shapes education policy. It's somewhere in between "education expert" and "education policy czar / ivory tower education academic" in flamebaitness. "Educationalist" *is* a word, in relatively common use (Google tells me it's about half as common as "critical theory" (in quotes) on the web), unlike flamebaitness which I just made up.
I won't be pedantic, and go into any detail as to what the definition of "word" is, as there are several different meanings, one of which ("a word in common use") which makes some kind of sense in the way you are using it.
I've lived in China, and found it to be cheap but crappy for internet, but good *and* cheap for mobiles. Support was clueless, but they tried to make an effort. By effort, I mean, came onsight to figure out what was wrong with my configuration. By clueless, I mean, they couldn't figure out why a Mac couldn't use crappy Windows dialing software. For Chinese Windows, they'd probably be pretty good.
As opposed to Australia, where you don't even get cheap, and mobile reception sucks; and support is often a guy in a developing country who takes half an hour to answer the phone, and lacks training. Because obviously telecommuters in developing countries are just too expensive to train properly, and you don't want to hire so many of them that they might be able to twiddle their thumbs between customers.
The problem is, educationalists now believe that everything should be marked, as students try harder when they are micro-managed with incentives.
As a consequence, either group learning is bad, or cheating is OK.
If it "bones the economy on a grand scale", that would be because it's costing so much, greatly reducing carbon emissions, right?
As for the "we are only 1%" argument, that's kind of BS. We are basically the worst in the world, per capita. We also screwed up global efforts, by dragging our feet on Kyoto (though the US had more of an impact), despite having *very* generous terms.
For a complete sociopath's point of view, we should do everything we can to get out of having any responsibilities. We are a small fish, and no-one really cares what happens here. But from the same point of view, China should invade us for our coal and ore reserves. I'm rather glad that sort of behaviour is frowned upon.
1) Start a business. ... ?
2) Send spam, ostensibly advertising your competitors.
3)
4) Profit!
Right, because simple neo-liberal economics *always* works when once-in-a-century events happen. If the market was really free, OPEC members would be allowed to massively cut production to keep oil in the ground (and would be run by long-term thinkers, not populists trying to please the both US overlords, and the mobs with AKs).
The danger is, there can be a long lead time on "nuclear, solar, wind, hamsters on wheels, and all that other green jazz". Trying to change the whole world's fuel source in a short time period could be catastrophic. Maybe not for everyone, but if energy prices double then food prices in poor countries will go through the roof.
People *are* looking into alternatives, but there's no serious funding. Everyone knows that the groundbreaking discoveries will go down in the history books, but not make a mint. Someone will then copy the technology, sidestep IP rights (through work-arounds, or lawyering, or some emergency degree annulling energy patents), find a way to make it 1/2 the price, and roll it out everywhere.
There's no point doing research, if commercial applications won't be there for decades. The patents will expire, and the technological advantage will fade. Industry needs price signals, which are being suppressed by governments who want to burn up as much of our finite resources as possible before they have to run for re-election.
So, what we really have is a shortage on people with management skills - financial analysis, problem solving, risk assessment, supply chain planning, and so on. But when universities churn out more management graduates, they can't get jobs because people with good numerical skills are getting hired as managers, not engineers.
Perhaps we need to change business degrees, to increase the mathematical abilities that students have. It's funning seeing economics students (who are really just studying the mathematics of money) in slack-jawed amazement at how elasticity (basic differential calculus) works. Then blow steam out their ears when they need to do econometrics (applied linear algebra and statistics - think the first five minutes of a machine learning course).
Exactly - you don't need to keep a secret. The aim is to broadcast verified identities as widely as possible.
Certainly. There's a world of difference between IPCC conclusions, and stuff that Green Peace will say. The IPCC tends to be, well, scientific. There's some bias in the IPCC - they tend to be believers, and tend to eliminating errors that work against them but not the errors in their favor. On the other hand, the whole organization is incredibly conservative - they don't buy the whole "precautionary principle" thing.
There's nothing wrong with competition.
The problem is, the CEO of Office, Inc. shouldn't be allowed to tell the founders of Courier to disband their startup just because it would be too hard to port Office's product to their new machine.
Sun burned out on January 27, 2010...
Nah, it was sucked into a black hole.
Should that be off topic, funny, or insightful? I kind of lost my train of thought.
No, that's not it at all. It's the fundamentalist Christians (and at times, Catholics) that are out of hand. Fundamentalist atheists are just a reaction against them.
Tell a Hindu that the Earth doesn't sit on a turtle. They'll either laugh, or get offended that you stereotype them as a superstitious savage. Tell a Christian that the world is over a billion years old, and they will tell you that scientists only say that to get funding.
The scientific method *did* benefit from the immense skepticism against new discoveries. Arguing with Jesuits did have some benefit. But only once science started to get the upper hand. Before that point, we had the Dark Ages.
And *anything* can be habit forming, but it's a bit dodgy to call a habit an addiction. Dopamine can be involved, but unless you are talking about stuff that really exploits it (slashdot, farming games, poker machines, MMORPGS), then silly to call a habit an addiction. We have different words for "habits" and "addictions" for a reason - they are different phenomena. OK, there's some overlap, in extreme cases, but if you have a bad habit of taking a hit of heroin ever week, or are addicted to tasty cheese to the point where you would sell your grandmother for another hit of Roquefort then the term might apply.
But trying to confound terms just for the point of argument is both vacuos and disingenuous. I shake my head when people say marijuana is addictive simply because it is habit forming. And I can't stand people saying anti-drug campaigners are hypocrites if they drink coffee (as both are "drugs"). It's vacuos and disingenuous.
Pot has its problems. So does alcohol and cigarettes. But so does criminalizing drugs, as it channels money into gangs.
It's not the same dynamic.
If the ethical version would already be produced to meet demand (as is the case for bike parts, diamonds, and tritium), then segregating the market probably won't do anything (unless almost everyone jumps on board, which can happen but not too often). It won't be much different price wise, as you aren't really changing anything. You just pay for the sticker, and the warm feeling.
If the ethical version would *not* be produced (as is the case for RHEL, fair trade coffee, free range eggs) then buying it will make a difference, even if one person does so. It will both increase demand for the ethical version, and decrease demand for the unethical version. But it will be more expensive than the alternative. That's the cost of actually making a difference.
It sounds like an earnest effort. But I really doubt that even China would employ 1 million people to do try to do this.
There's about 2 million soldiers in China. There's about 2 million police. There's no way in *hell* that busting counterfeit handbags is going to be 1/2 as important as defence, or law and order.
Perhaps there's 1 million chengguan - city administrators. These are basically police deputies who maintain public order, by clearing away illegal or unregistered businesses. That's a charitable definition. I expect that stopping the sale of counterfeit products has simply been added to the chengguan's duties / excuses to shake down businesses. But China is trying to make it sound much more of a crackdown.
And there's farming. Agriculture uses a lot of energy, and with raising oil prices they might find a way to substitute energy for oil. Not immediately, but oil is only going to get exponentially more expensive as it all runs out and demand still grows.
Ah yes, If the pig will eat it, I will give it to him.
The problem is, stuff that appeals in the short term can drive away loyalty. People realise that it's a waste of time, and start quitting. But then, slashdot has spend about 10 years feeding the trolls, so it's not like they are risking much.
Why do you need a 2960XM Extreme 2.7GHz? If you really are a power user, you should have RAM and SSD (or HDD) requirements as well. OK, you can buy parts and swap, but it's really annoying. That said, the System 76 gives you a lot of choices on memory too and is *way* better value than the Macs.
*MY* biggest concerns are the screen, speakers, and touchpad. Macs are pretty damn good at all 3. I notice that System 76 gives multi-touch pads, with 2 finger scrolling, sweet.
The con - it's useless.
However, you are right that there needs to be more randomized, long term experiments. At the moment, there's short-term optimizations (what grade 6 methodology will get Johnny to do his grade 6 exam better?), and unrandomized longitudinal stuff.
OK, I'll do the engineering then.
10L of air (the inside of a SCUBA tank) weights 12g. A SCUBA tank can hold 400 atm, and weighs about 15kg (note, this is generous). Everything involving pressure tanks scales linearly, so you could have a 10L tank holding 1 atm and weighing 37 grams, displacing 12 grams of air, for a net of -25 grams of lift.
So you need materials about 3 times the strength/weight of good SCUBA gear, preferably 6 times (so you can actually get a noticeable amount of lift). That's assuming there's no challenges in manufacturing much thinner but much lighter tanks. Oh, and that buckling won't be an issue (since we've moved from tension to compression) - that can be solved my making really small tanks, but then you are trying to make the walls very very thin.
You're right - it wouldn't be easy.