On what alternate reality does ANY Republican get close to Jimmy Carter? Or was he before your time?
Dubya finally managed to jump the Carter bar (or Limbo under it, if you prefer). Carter might have been ineffective and less than inspirational, but an ineffective presidency is still vastly preferable to a rogue one that goes around inventing reasons to start unnecessary wars.
The statements of too many movers in the NN debate that regardless of what YOU might think the plan is, they see it as a key component in their plans to regulate political content on the Internet.
data is not like tangible commodities, so usage does not make sense
It makes sense when the ISP's equipment costs are proportional to the amount of data it must transport (which they are). The video tries to sidestep that fact by suggesting that ISP's should have enough bandwidth available for all customers to be sending and receiving their maximum bandwidth at all times... which would be nice, but provisioning enough equipment to support that scenario would be extremely expensive, and pointless since most user's connections are idle most of the time. If ISPs were required to guarantee full bandwidth to all customers at once, everyone's monthly Internet bill would be hundreds of dollars.
Also, usage based billing is just about preventing us from cutting our cable and using netflix instead.
That may be part of it, but UBB by itself shouldn't cause that -- if ISP A is overcharging your for bandwidth, you should (in theory) be able to switch over to competing ISP B which offers a more reasonable price. Eventually, competition would drive bandwidth prices down to slightly more than what the bandwidth costs the ISPs.
Of course, that assumes that there is competition between ISPs. The video says that the big ISPs are using the CRTC's decision to drive smaller ISPs out of business, and maybe that is true. But in that case, the problem is with the CRTC's regulation discouraging competition -- and not inherent in the idea of UBB itself.
At least robot killing machines don't smell like hippies, which makes them infinitely superior. And robot killing machines gunning down hippies, well I would pay good money to watch that.
Hahaha, it's so funny when people call for hippies to be murdered. But why stop there? Replace 'hippies' with 'Jews', or 'Gays', or 'Blacks', or any other minority group you don't like. Hilarious!
I live in an area that's prone to flooding and it's harder than you think to keep even a small generator out of harm's way when the water level starts rising.
Two words: inflatable raft.
Now, where do I go to collect my consultant's fee?;)
Solar costs 400% more than coal and nuclear. How is that economically viable? You think the average home can afford a $400/month electric bill?
You're misinformed. New commercial solar projects now deliver electricity at 14 cents per kilowatt-hour (page 6), whereas new nuclear plants are projected to cost 16 cents per kilowatt-hour (assuming they get constructed on time and under budget, ha ha) (page 8).
Of course, nuclear power from existing nuclear plants is cheaper, because much of the costs of building that infrastructure have largely already been paid for over the past few decades. So if you live near an existing nuclear reactor, bully for you, you can enjoy the fruits of that investment for as long as the reactor stays operational. On the other hand, many of those reactors are nearing the end of their service life, so it's iffy how long that option will stick around.
Power from coal seems cheaper, but only if you don't factor in the externalized costs (air pollution, climate change, mountaintop removal damage, etc). Whether that matters you personally depends on where you live, but someone will have to pay those costs sooner or later, so they can't just be ignored. Trying to evaluate the external costs is non-trivial, but a 2011 study suggests that the true cost of coal is somewhere between 9 and 27 cents per kilowatt-hour, with a median cost of 18 cents per kilowatt-hour. So in the big picture, coal isn't cheaper either.
For solar power to work and be economically viable, it needs to be in orbit. Period. No solar cell, no matter how efficient is going to be viable under an atmosphere.
You have it exactly backwards. Ground based solar power is economically viable now in many places, and will become more so as solar panel prices decrease, and the cost of non-renewable competition increases.
Space-based solar power, OTOH, is a non-starter because the cost of launching solar panels into orbit is so much that you'd get a much better return on your investment leaving the solar panels on the ground. It doesn't matter how efficient the solar panels can be in orbit if it's impractical to get them there.
A space elevator would change all of that, of course, and it would be all kinds of awesome.... but I wouldn't hold my breath on one being put up any time soon.
First, this is an application of machine learning, which is not the same thing as AI.
That's the beauty and mystery of AI -- once a technique is actually made to work on computers in the real world, it loses its status as an "AI technique". The AI goalposts automatically move ahead to some other, harder problem that isn't solved yet. Eventually we will have HAL-9000 style computers everywhere, and people will continually piss them off by telling them the reasons they don't count as "real AI".
My question is, how much electricity will be spoiled to "create" the 21 million bitcoins?
Let me answer your question with a question:
How much electricity will be spoiled to create the next 21 million actual/physical coins?
Mining, milling, and transporting actual silver (or zinc or whatever the government mints are making coins out of these days) isn't exactly an environmentally friendly operation, either. At least once the 21-million bit-coin market is established, the virtual coins will last indefinitely, which is more than one can say for their real-life counterparts.
Well, I wouldn't say so. For example, nobody wants a nuclear holocaust, but lots of people will buy a newspaper if they think it contains info that will help them survive one.
If people cared about the truth, they would pay i.e. spend in the direction of organizations that told them the truth.
The problem is that people have no reliable way of telling what is the truth, and what isn't.
Employing robotics/telerobotics? That way the human operators can use Earth's atmosphere as a radiation shield. Seems to work quite well, and solves/avoids a number of other issues besides.
And now, in my price range, I'm looking from jumping from a 500GB from 2006 to a "whopping" 2tb. Maybe 3tb. A lot less increase than I was expecting.
Of course, for many people, it doesn't matter anymore. For example, when I upgraded from a 250GB drive to a 500GB drive, I found the only difference was that I no longer ever get "hard drive space low -- please delete something" messages. Since my storage needs are finite (somewhere in the 350GB range), anything much greater than 350GB is effectively infinite as far as I am concerned.
As capacities increase, this will apply to more and more people. Eventually, the exact size of hard drives will barely be relevant anymore; they will all simply be "sufficiently large".
His other mistake is using "unobtainium" to make his "theories" work by saying "Oh, all you have to do is fit a nuclear power plant into a D-Cell alkaline battery!"
And that is still more realistic than the alternative, which is to design a light saber that doesn't require a power source.
Face it, if your producer comes up to you and tells you to come up with a theory for how a light saber might work in real life, you're unlikely to be able to come up with something very plausible. If there was a plausible solution, Internet geeks would be killing themselves with their home-made light sabers already.
All eggs in one handbasket; destination sulfurous.
Counter-counter-troll: That would have been the case anyway, because there simply are no other handbaskets available. In the long run, Humans need an ecosystem to survive.
The simple fact is unless you want to base a large portion of your society on "make work" or deal with riots because an honest man can't even feed himself simply because the machines do it better, well then something has to change
I think you are only looking at half of the analysis. The other thing that automation does, by way of improving productivity, is to make products cheaper. So perhaps the average honest man can't get high-paying work anymore; but on the other hand, he can still support himself on lower wages because the products and services he needs are available more cheaply. I won't predict that it will all balance out in the end, but there are some upsides.
What do you do with the millions with no job? That is the question.
In the ideal case, you've invented nuclear fusion and matter assemblers, and everything a person needs for an adequate lifestyle is available for close to free. In that case, the millions can do whatever they like; they're effectively retired, so they can take up a hobby or do charity work or etc.
In a more likely scenario, you might have to raise a tax on robots, that would be used to pay welfare checks to the unemployed humans. (Or, if you prefer dystopias, you invent a model of human-eating robot that feeds on the unemployed... that's a little too right-wing for my tastes though)
I'll believe we're broke after I see Congress vote to rescind Bush's tax cuts for the rich, and/or cut the defense budget by double digits. Until then, I can only interpret the constant refrain of "we're broke" as meaning "we're going to use the deficit as an excuse to stick it to poor people; but not we're not SO worried as to consider doing anything that might anger our valued campaign contributors".
Much as I love space exploration, I don't know that giving nationalists and space-geeks a shot of vicarious self-esteem is a valid reason (on its own) to spend taxpayer dollars on manned space flight.
There are good reasons to do space exploration, but if all we wanted was a warm fuzzy from "seeing men do something up there", we could accomplish that much more cheaply and safely on a sound stage. And if it turns out that unmanned space exploration is the way to go, so be it; we'll just have to get our entertainment elsewhere.
I suppose you could point out that "the government" and "the nation" are two different things -- even if NASA never launches another manned mission to anywhere, there is no reason why private companies can't do it better and cheaper. Or at least, that's what the conservatives keep telling me... we'll see if they are right.
All too often, the libertarian's working definition of "waste" is "any program that doesn't benefit me personally". The magic of this line of thinking is that everybody can agree that there's enormous waste in government spending.... and as long as you don't ask them to point out exactly what that waste is, they'll never notice that they're all talking about each others' sacred cows.
Slashdot Mirror
... and 7 years later, a new breed of octopus will be discovered, one that lives exclusively on meals ordered from Amazon.
and once again destroyed the ability for users to do their own interface design and to program their own workflow.
There's a reason for that: 99% of users don't want to do their own interface design, or program their own workflow.
User interface design, and workflow design, are difficult. Users expect the software developers to have already done that work for them.
On what alternate reality does ANY Republican get close to Jimmy Carter? Or was he before your time?
Dubya finally managed to jump the Carter bar (or Limbo under it, if you prefer). Carter might have been ineffective and less than inspirational, but an ineffective presidency is still vastly preferable to a rogue one that goes around inventing reasons to start unnecessary wars.
The statements of too many movers in the NN debate that regardless of what YOU might think the plan is, they see it as a key component in their plans to regulate political content on the Internet.
Citation please?
data is not like tangible commodities, so usage does not make sense
It makes sense when the ISP's equipment costs are proportional to the amount of data it must transport (which they are). The video tries to sidestep that fact by suggesting that ISP's should have enough bandwidth available for all customers to be sending and receiving their maximum bandwidth at all times... which would be nice, but provisioning enough equipment to support that scenario would be extremely expensive, and pointless since most user's connections are idle most of the time. If ISPs were required to guarantee full bandwidth to all customers at once, everyone's monthly Internet bill would be hundreds of dollars.
Also, usage based billing is just about preventing us from cutting our cable and using netflix instead.
That may be part of it, but UBB by itself shouldn't cause that -- if ISP A is overcharging your for bandwidth, you should (in theory) be able to switch over to competing ISP B which offers a more reasonable price. Eventually, competition would drive bandwidth prices down to slightly more than what the bandwidth costs the ISPs.
Of course, that assumes that there is competition between ISPs. The video says that the big ISPs are using the CRTC's decision to drive smaller ISPs out of business, and maybe that is true. But in that case, the problem is with the CRTC's regulation discouraging competition -- and not inherent in the idea of UBB itself.
At least robot killing machines don't smell like hippies, which makes them infinitely superior. And robot killing machines gunning down hippies, well I would pay good money to watch that.
Hahaha, it's so funny when people call for hippies to be murdered. But why stop there? Replace 'hippies' with 'Jews', or 'Gays', or 'Blacks', or any other minority group you don't like. Hilarious!
I live in an area that's prone to flooding and it's harder than you think to keep even a small generator out of harm's way when the water level starts rising.
Two words: inflatable raft.
Now, where do I go to collect my consultant's fee? ;)
Solar costs 400% more than coal and nuclear. How is that economically viable? You think the average home can afford a $400/month electric bill?
You're misinformed. New commercial solar projects now deliver electricity at 14 cents per kilowatt-hour (page 6), whereas new nuclear plants are projected to cost 16 cents per kilowatt-hour (assuming they get constructed on time and under budget, ha ha) (page 8).
Of course, nuclear power from existing nuclear plants is cheaper, because much of the costs of building that infrastructure have largely already been paid for over the past few decades. So if you live near an existing nuclear reactor, bully for you, you can enjoy the fruits of that investment for as long as the reactor stays operational. On the other hand, many of those reactors are nearing the end of their service life, so it's iffy how long that option will stick around.
Power from coal seems cheaper, but only if you don't factor in the externalized costs (air pollution, climate change, mountaintop removal damage, etc). Whether that matters you personally depends on where you live, but someone will have to pay those costs sooner or later, so they can't just be ignored. Trying to evaluate the external costs is non-trivial, but a 2011 study suggests that the true cost of coal is somewhere between 9 and 27 cents per kilowatt-hour, with a median cost of 18 cents per kilowatt-hour. So in the big picture, coal isn't cheaper either.
For solar power to work and be economically viable, it needs to be in orbit. Period. No solar cell, no matter how efficient is going to be viable under an atmosphere.
You have it exactly backwards. Ground based solar power is economically viable now in many places, and will become more so as solar panel prices decrease, and the cost of non-renewable competition increases.
Space-based solar power, OTOH, is a non-starter because the cost of launching solar panels into orbit is so much that you'd get a much better return on your investment leaving the solar panels on the ground. It doesn't matter how efficient the solar panels can be in orbit if it's impractical to get them there.
A space elevator would change all of that, of course, and it would be all kinds of awesome.... but I wouldn't hold my breath on one being put up any time soon.
And no doubt backed up by a dozen patents.
Of course. That's the purpose of patents, to encourage inventors to publish their inventions openly.
First, this is an application of machine learning, which is not the same thing as AI.
That's the beauty and mystery of AI -- once a technique is actually made to work on computers in the real world, it loses its status as an "AI technique". The AI goalposts automatically move ahead to some other, harder problem that isn't solved yet. Eventually we will have HAL-9000 style computers everywhere, and people will continually piss them off by telling them the reasons they don't count as "real AI".
My question is, how much electricity will be spoiled to "create" the 21 million bitcoins?
Let me answer your question with a question:
How much electricity will be spoiled to create the next 21 million actual/physical coins?
Mining, milling, and transporting actual silver (or zinc or whatever the government mints are making coins out of these days) isn't exactly an environmentally friendly operation, either. At least once the 21-million bit-coin market is established, the virtual coins will last indefinitely, which is more than one can say for their real-life counterparts.
It's the same thing, really.
Well, I wouldn't say so. For example, nobody wants a nuclear holocaust, but lots of people will buy a newspaper if they think it contains info that will help them survive one.
If people cared about the truth, they would pay i.e. spend in the direction of organizations that told them the truth.
The problem is that people have no reliable way of telling what is the truth, and what isn't.
Employing robotics/telerobotics? That way the human operators can use Earth's atmosphere as a radiation shield. Seems to work quite well, and solves/avoids a number of other issues besides.
(ducks)
But news media just give the media what people want.
You're confusing "what people want" with "what makes people pay attention (and therefore provide eyeballs for the advertisers)"
And now, in my price range, I'm looking from jumping from a 500GB from 2006 to a "whopping" 2tb. Maybe 3tb. A lot less increase than I was expecting.
Of course, for many people, it doesn't matter anymore. For example, when I upgraded from a 250GB drive to a 500GB drive, I found the only difference was that I no longer ever get "hard drive space low -- please delete something" messages. Since my storage needs are finite (somewhere in the 350GB range), anything much greater than 350GB is effectively infinite as far as I am concerned.
As capacities increase, this will apply to more and more people. Eventually, the exact size of hard drives will barely be relevant anymore; they will all simply be "sufficiently large".
His other mistake is using "unobtainium" to make his "theories" work by saying "Oh, all you have to do is fit a nuclear power plant into a D-Cell alkaline battery!"
And that is still more realistic than the alternative, which is to design a light saber that doesn't require a power source.
Face it, if your producer comes up to you and tells you to come up with a theory for how a light saber might work in real life, you're unlikely to be able to come up with something very plausible. If there was a plausible solution, Internet geeks would be killing themselves with their home-made light sabers already.
When are we going to get the hint and switch to unobtanium?
That's the beauty of fossil fuels -- we don't have to switch at all. We just wait long enough, and they become unobtanium.
All eggs in one handbasket; destination sulfurous.
Counter-counter-troll: That would have been the case anyway, because there simply are no other handbaskets available. In the long run, Humans need an ecosystem to survive.
The simple fact is unless you want to base a large portion of your society on "make work" or deal with riots because an honest man can't even feed himself simply because the machines do it better, well then something has to change
I think you are only looking at half of the analysis. The other thing that automation does, by way of improving productivity, is to make products cheaper. So perhaps the average honest man can't get high-paying work anymore; but on the other hand, he can still support himself on lower wages because the products and services he needs are available more cheaply. I won't predict that it will all balance out in the end, but there are some upsides.
What do you do with the millions with no job? That is the question.
In the ideal case, you've invented nuclear fusion and matter assemblers, and everything a person needs for an adequate lifestyle is available for close to free. In that case, the millions can do whatever they like; they're effectively retired, so they can take up a hobby or do charity work or etc.
In a more likely scenario, you might have to raise a tax on robots, that would be used to pay welfare checks to the unemployed humans. (Or, if you prefer dystopias, you invent a model of human-eating robot that feeds on the unemployed... that's a little too right-wing for my tastes though)
Because like it or not folks we're broke
I'll believe we're broke after I see Congress vote to rescind Bush's tax cuts for the rich, and/or cut the defense budget by double digits. Until then, I can only interpret the constant refrain of "we're broke" as meaning "we're going to use the deficit as an excuse to stick it to poor people; but not we're not SO worried as to consider doing anything that might anger our valued campaign contributors".
Much as I love space exploration, I don't know that giving nationalists and space-geeks a shot of vicarious self-esteem is a valid reason (on its own) to spend taxpayer dollars on manned space flight.
There are good reasons to do space exploration, but if all we wanted was a warm fuzzy from "seeing men do something up there", we could accomplish that much more cheaply and safely on a sound stage. And if it turns out that unmanned space exploration is the way to go, so be it; we'll just have to get our entertainment elsewhere.
There is absolutely NO reason to ever bring large cargo back from orbit (unless maybe you've recovered an alien artifact!).
AHA! So, the retirement of the shuttle fleet means that they must have recovered all of them by now!
I suppose you could point out that "the government" and "the nation" are two different things -- even if NASA never launches another manned mission to anywhere, there is no reason why private companies can't do it better and cheaper. Or at least, that's what the conservatives keep telling me... we'll see if they are right.
Waste
All too often, the libertarian's working definition of "waste" is "any program that doesn't benefit me personally". The magic of this line of thinking is that everybody can agree that there's enormous waste in government spending.... and as long as you don't ask them to point out exactly what that waste is, they'll never notice that they're all talking about each others' sacred cows.