It will be fun when the browsing habits of of top UK politicians are released. Or do they somehow think that there will be no possible way to trace them from anonymized data.....in which case they will learn something very important.
As long as there are things that are legal but very embarrassing, tracking people is extremely dangerous.
Air launch has a lot of advantages - the lower air density allows smaller rockets to be efficient (less air drag, square / cube law), lower exhaust pressure (higher ISP, or lower chamber pressure), etc. Also allows a wide choice of launch sites and orbit inclinations. and avoids most of the weather. So I see the advantage.
I'm surprised though that they didn't use a conventional bomber that is designed to release large objects at high altitude. I'd think it would be possible to get a surplus de-militarized B52, or Bear or something. Rocket technology is already pretty restricted due to potential missile applications, so getting permission to use an old bomber doesn't seem like it would be that difficult. A B52 can drop >50,000 pounds at high altitude, which should be enough for >1 ton to orbit.
Engineering a new plane is enormously expensive. Its great that they did it, but it seems a surprising use of their resources.
That has not been my experience. Just installing linux takes some expertise. Then the out of the box experience may be OK if you are only using the apps that come with the distribution, but try to do anything else and it can get tricky.
The world is also mostly windows, like it or not, that is the reality. Interoperability of linux and windows is not great. I just spent a day getting my linux disk shared to my windows machines. (on widows its extremely easy). Lots of reading on the web, trying to find exactly how to configure smb.conf etc. For a while I was able to delete files, but not rename them..... OK, maybe I took the wrong approach, but I didn't *intentionally* take the wrong approach, I was trying to do what seemed most reasonable to me.
I use linux at work for instrument control - but someone else sys-admins it. I have a linux server at home because I want my backups in a different OS than my originals for security reasons. I've tried using linux desktop but while most things work, too many don't.
Does photoshop run on linux? If not, then I need a windows machine. So what can I do on a linux desktop that I can't do on windows?
What does it actually mean to commit in this situation? Is it any more than saying that they think its a good idea? (I think its a good idea, but don't know how a bill now enforces things in the future)
People like top put a face to projects, even though this is the combined work of a large number of very talented people. That does not detract from Bouman having made a major contribution.
The gender question is a little unfortunate because astrophysics actualy has a lot of women in the field, more so that most sciences. I met some of the SPT folks when I was at the pole a few months ago, and that group had lots of awesome people, a fair number of them women. Same for the BICEP/KECK project I was on where for about 1/2 my time there or south pole lead scientist was a woman.
I'm a little concerned that people will get the idea that Bouman was somehow singled out *because* she was female, when there are many women making major contributions to these projects.
Before we go anywhere toward blurring the lines between human and non-human I want to see some agreements on rules. We may seen be able to grow Neanderthals and create various human / animal chimeras, but they could end up in a very fuzzy and controversial legal space. How much and what types of human DNA gives something rights.
We are approaching this from another direction (but possibly very slowly) through AI.
A lot of people spend a lot of time on airliners (I do), where there is often very limited, or buggy connectivity.
I recently spent a month at the south pole where there is only internet access about 10 hours / day when satellites are above the horizon, and that was during (locally defined) night when I was there.
Some people work in locations where connectivity is not allowed for security reasons.
Some off-site locations have internet, but its not trustable.
I'm OK with a cloud copy of my data (if I get to encrypt it if needed), but I need to be able to work when there is no connectivity .
Cost - which of course matters. There are always safety / cost tradeoffs. Overall commercial aviation is very safe, and very inexpensive per passenger-mile, so in general there seems to be a pretty good tradeoff. In this case they may have not gotten it right.
This will do a good job of solving one problem. I suspect though that it will lead to a much more serious ones - which we will no longer be able to discuss on public forums.
I wish more people would remember that homosexuality, non-Christianity, pacifists, and women's rights at one time were considered deeply offensive by a majority of the population. I don't know what standard to use to allow one type of offensive speech to be banned, but not another. (Remember that pro-gay speech was once considered dangerous because of the harm to our children).
I expect most of the big farms are used most of the time. The farms I know of do. A lot of these systems are used for simulations that take days or longer to run, so the jobs are just loaded up.
At some point older computers become uneconomical to run because of the power budget.
I haven't seen any technology that can meet reasonable noise and air blast requirements. A flying taxi is likely to need as much landing space as a small helocopter - because that is basically what it is.
Quad-copter like designs look neat, and might solve some issues, but they work exactly the same way as helicopters, by forcing air downwards.
self-flying mode sounds nice, but even a small helicopter costs several times as much as its pilot per hour.
Are police cars required to pull over before they respond to radio calls? Why is that different?
That aside, this seems unworkable.
How do they prove whether or not they are downloading data - or uploading spyware. (will they carry a large insurance bond to cover any damage their software does?)
If there are multiple in the card, how do they know who was on the phone.
If a phone rings and in hitting the silence you accidentally hit the pick-up button, is that illegal?
A good GM is one that makes the game fun for that particular group of players. What "fun" consists of varies with the group. Some like story telling. Some like tactics on a well defined rules base. Some like exploring interesting social and ethical dilemmas. Some like a chance to be completely free of all social constraints.
Its a game - so people should enjoy whatever sort of play that they like
I agree that the constitution only protects against government prosecution, but I think that there is a argument for laws that *do* provide other protections. I dno't want to see a world where a small number of organizations can effectively prevent unpopular ideas from being communicated to the public. Similarly I don't want a situation where corporations become afraid of protests, and so refuse to transmit unpopular ideas. It sounds tempting when the ideas being blocked are in opposition to one's own ideology, but many ideas that are currently popular were at one point extremely unpopular.
these are all forms of batteries with various efficiency and convenience. One of the issues with hydrogen is that its not a very efficient battery, and its expensive to transport and store.
Its *possible* that carbon is better, but I doubt it.
We do have a lot more people in prison than China does. Otherwise, yes, they are more willing than us to break eggs to make omelets. They built 10,000KM of high speed rail in the time it took us to talk about building it. They now have better roads, more solar and wind, etc.
We have democracy - but somehow a government lead by people who seem widely disliked. We have social programs, but many homeless on the streets. We have human rights but around a million ethnic minorities in prison who have never had a jury trial.
The US has great ideals - and that is important, but the reality tends to fall far short.
Its not clear how to fix regulatory capture here (eg when an industry is so large that the government regulators are likely to be involved in the industry in some way during their careers, and will naturally be biased toward it).
At the same time, there is really information here, its not just opinions. I think trusting the CDC is the best option, and its not a bad option at the moment. In the great majority of cases I think vaccinations are a good idea.
Its not the *kids* fault and they are the ones who suffer.
Its probably more about education than about IQ. Some children of uneducated parents are very intelligent and to very well later in life.
The medical industry is not trustworthy - like all industries it is a shark. One should expect it to act like a shark and take appropriate precautions, put in appropriate restraints. Like a shark it isn't "evil", it is just doing what it is designed to do, which is make money.
My comment on the 1 in 10 was to head off possible responses that people need to be better informed, smarter, whatever. (typical on slashdot).
I'm sorry to hear about you friends daughter - that is terrible.
Its tricky. Vaccines are in general clearly a huge win. I think people have forgotten the horrors of diseases like measles, polio and the like. Vaccines have almost entirely fixed that. They are not perfect, there is some risk, but I believe that risk is small compared to the disease risk. The problem is that the medical industry has not shown itself to be trustworthy.
This is really a deeper problem - in the current US there is no "root source of trust". No organization that is sufficiently trusted that the public will believe it on important issues that they cannot themselves understand. The government is not trusted, and there was never any particular reason to believe one could trust industry. Universities are somewhat trusted, but they are also influenced by money. News media is also not trustworthy. What source of information should the public believe, and why should they believe it.
I trust the CDC which recommends vaccines, but I understand if other people don't trust them.
Slashdot Mirror
It will be fun when the browsing habits of of top UK politicians are released. Or do they somehow think that there will be no possible way to trace them from anonymized data.....in which case they will learn something very important.
As long as there are things that are legal but very embarrassing, tracking people is extremely dangerous.
Air launch has a lot of advantages - the lower air density allows smaller rockets to be efficient (less air drag, square / cube law), lower exhaust pressure (higher ISP, or lower chamber pressure), etc. Also allows a wide choice of launch sites and orbit inclinations. and avoids most of the weather. So I see the advantage.
I'm surprised though that they didn't use a conventional bomber that is designed to release large objects at high altitude. I'd think it would be possible to get a surplus de-militarized B52, or Bear or something. Rocket technology is already pretty restricted due to potential missile applications, so getting permission to use an old bomber doesn't seem like it would be that difficult. A B52 can drop >50,000 pounds at high altitude, which should be enough for >1 ton to orbit.
Engineering a new plane is enormously expensive. Its great that they did it, but it seems a surprising use of their resources.
That has not been my experience. Just installing linux takes some expertise. Then the out of the box experience may be OK if you are only using the apps that come with the distribution, but try to do anything else and it can get tricky.
The world is also mostly windows, like it or not, that is the reality. Interoperability of linux and windows is not great. I just spent a day getting my linux disk shared to my windows machines. (on widows its extremely easy). Lots of reading on the web, trying to find exactly how to configure smb.conf etc. For a while I was able to delete files, but not rename them..... OK, maybe I took the wrong approach, but I didn't *intentionally* take the wrong approach, I was trying to do what seemed most reasonable to me.
I use linux at work for instrument control - but someone else sys-admins it. I have a linux server at home because I want my backups in a different OS than my originals for security reasons. I've tried using linux desktop but while most things work, too many don't.
Does photoshop run on linux? If not, then I need a windows machine. So what can I do on a linux desktop that I can't do on windows?
What does it actually mean to commit in this situation? Is it any more than saying that they think its a good idea? (I think its a good idea, but don't know how a bill now enforces things in the future)
They care about international perception. Also at least we can think about what we our doing ourselves.
People like top put a face to projects, even though this is the combined work of a large number of very talented people. That does not detract from Bouman having made a major contribution.
The gender question is a little unfortunate because astrophysics actualy has a lot of women in the field, more so that most sciences. I met some of the SPT folks when I was at the pole a few months ago, and that group had lots of awesome people, a fair number of them women. Same for the BICEP/KECK project I was on where for about 1/2 my time there or south pole lead scientist was a woman.
I'm a little concerned that people will get the idea that Bouman was somehow singled out *because* she was female, when there are many women making major contributions to these projects.
There are a myriad of ways this can go badly. Everything from misinterpreting conversations leading to arrests to blackmail of politicians.
Before we go anywhere toward blurring the lines between human and non-human I want to see some agreements on rules. We may seen be able to grow Neanderthals and create various human / animal chimeras, but they could end up in a very fuzzy and controversial legal space. How much and what types of human DNA gives something rights.
We are approaching this from another direction (but possibly very slowly) through AI.
A lot of people spend a lot of time on airliners (I do), where there is often very limited, or buggy connectivity.
I recently spent a month at the south pole where there is only internet access about 10 hours / day when satellites are above the horizon, and that was during (locally defined) night when I was there.
Some people work in locations where connectivity is not allowed for security reasons.
Some off-site locations have internet, but its not trustable.
I'm OK with a cloud copy of my data (if I get to encrypt it if needed), but I need to be able to work when there is no connectivity .
Same as I assume for all new technology. Motion, video, voice etc. If it has a sensor, I assume its probably being recorded.
Cost - which of course matters. There are always safety / cost tradeoffs. Overall commercial aviation is very safe, and very inexpensive per passenger-mile, so in general there seems to be a pretty good tradeoff. In this case they may have not gotten it right.
This will do a good job of solving one problem. I suspect though that it will lead to a much more serious ones - which we will no longer be able to discuss on public forums.
I wish more people would remember that homosexuality, non-Christianity, pacifists, and women's rights at one time were considered deeply offensive by a majority of the population. I don't know what standard to use to allow one type of offensive speech to be banned, but not another. (Remember that pro-gay speech was once considered dangerous because of the harm to our children).
I doubt sterilization would work since some wealthy people can lose their wealth. The most sure fire way is to kill ALL people. No people no poverty.
When you ask the AI to end poverty, you may not get the answer you were hoping for.
I expect most of the big farms are used most of the time. The farms I know of do. A lot of these systems are used for simulations that take days or longer to run, so the jobs are just loaded up.
At some point older computers become uneconomical to run because of the power budget.
I haven't seen any technology that can meet reasonable noise and air blast requirements. A flying taxi is likely to need as much landing space as a small helocopter - because that is basically what it is.
Quad-copter like designs look neat, and might solve some issues, but they work exactly the same way as helicopters, by forcing air downwards.
self-flying mode sounds nice, but even a small helicopter costs several times as much as its pilot per hour.
Are police cars required to pull over before they respond to radio calls? Why is that different?
That aside, this seems unworkable.
How do they prove whether or not they are downloading data - or uploading spyware. (will they carry a large insurance bond to cover any damage their software does?)
If there are multiple in the card, how do they know who was on the phone.
If a phone rings and in hitting the silence you accidentally hit the pick-up button, is that illegal?
A good GM is one that makes the game fun for that particular group of players. What "fun" consists of varies with the group. Some like story telling. Some like tactics on a well defined rules base. Some like exploring interesting social and ethical dilemmas. Some like a chance to be completely free of all social constraints.
Its a game - so people should enjoy whatever sort of play that they like
I agree that the constitution only protects against government prosecution, but I think that there is a argument for laws that *do* provide other protections. I dno't want to see a world where a small number of organizations can effectively prevent unpopular ideas from being communicated to the public. Similarly I don't want a situation where corporations become afraid of protests, and so refuse to transmit unpopular ideas. It sounds tempting when the ideas being blocked are in opposition to one's own ideology, but many ideas that are currently popular were at one point extremely unpopular.
these are all forms of batteries with various efficiency and convenience. One of the issues with hydrogen is that its not a very efficient battery, and its expensive to transport and store.
Its *possible* that carbon is better, but I doubt it.
We do have a lot more people in prison than China does.
Otherwise, yes, they are more willing than us to break eggs to make omelets. They built 10,000KM of high speed rail in the time it took us to talk about building it. They now have better roads, more solar and wind, etc.
We have democracy - but somehow a government lead by people who seem widely disliked. We have social programs, but many homeless on the streets. We have human rights but around a million ethnic minorities in prison who have never had a jury trial.
The US has great ideals - and that is important, but the reality tends to fall far short.
What is missing is convincing people who they should belive when they are told *facts*.
Its not clear how to fix regulatory capture here (eg when an industry is so large that the government regulators are likely to be involved in the industry in some way during their careers, and will naturally be biased toward it).
At the same time, there is really information here, its not just opinions. I think trusting the CDC is the best option, and its not a bad option at the moment. In the great majority of cases I think vaccinations are a good idea.
Its not the *kids* fault and they are the ones who suffer.
Its probably more about education than about IQ. Some children of uneducated parents are very intelligent and to very well later in life.
The medical industry is not trustworthy - like all industries it is a shark. One should expect it to act like a shark and take appropriate precautions, put in appropriate restraints. Like a shark it isn't "evil", it is just doing what it is designed to do, which is make money.
My comment on the 1 in 10 was to head off possible responses that people need to be better informed, smarter, whatever. (typical on slashdot).
I'm sorry to hear about you friends daughter - that is terrible.
Its tricky. Vaccines are in general clearly a huge win. I think people have forgotten the horrors of diseases like measles, polio and the like. Vaccines have almost entirely fixed that. They are not perfect, there is some risk, but I believe that risk is small compared to the disease risk. The problem is that the medical industry has not shown itself to be trustworthy.
This is really a deeper problem - in the current US there is no "root source of trust". No organization that is sufficiently trusted that the public will believe it on important issues that they cannot themselves understand. The government is not trusted, and there was never any particular reason to believe one could trust industry. Universities are somewhat trusted, but they are also influenced by money. News media is also not trustworthy. What source of information should the public believe, and why should they believe it.
I trust the CDC which recommends vaccines, but I understand if other people don't trust them.