Perhaps, but in this case it was one guy who did just to see if it could be done (and then brag about it), and then a magazine that analyzed the approach to see if it was worthwhile and decided it probably wasn't.
So what we are looking at here is a silly one-off stunt, not the End of Free SuperCharging As We Know it. If this ever did become a problem for Tesla (which it won't, because buying a $100K automobile just to get free electricity for your GPU rig makes no economic sense), then Tesla would take steps to discourage it; just as any sensible system would take steps to discourage egregious freeloading.
Or they could put both ports on the same side of the truck, for convenience; and having done that they could bind the two cables together so they both plug in at once; and having done that they could just make look like a single, larger cable, with a single, larger port, and here we are.
If it turns out that the moon is a flat disk attached to a black ceiling several thousand feet overhead, then he's got a pretty good chance of getting there. The tricky part will be the moon landing -- turning the rocket upside down (while simultaneously grappling it to the moon's surface so as not to fall back to Earth) won't be easy.
Yeah, what were those bastards thinking! They should have been able to foresee and use 60 years of future reactor technology development to ensure plants still operating 20 years after their designed lifespan don't have problems!
The above pretty much sums up the fatal flaw of nuclear power -- a nuclear plant must function reliably for decades and sequester its nuclear byproducts for centuries. Human designers simply aren't up to the task of planning that far into the future, hence even the best-designed reactors sometimes fail due to unforeseen circumstances. That's true of every other technology as well, of course, but in most other technologies the costs of an occasional failure are acceptable.
Perhaps automation means this 16% of the population will be able to find work due to much of the thinking being removed from what they need to do.
Seems to me it would be just the opposite -- this 16% will be permanently unemployable, because any task they are capable of learning how to do, a robot is also capable of doing better, faster, and cheaper.
And as automation/AI improves, the "minimum intelligence to be employable" threshold steadily rises; so that e.g. at some point (hopefully after I retire), only people with IQs of 140 or higher will be employable, and then shortly after that, no people will be employable at all:/
The combination of "gaming", an activity that requires something that is fun, exciting, interesting, and engaging, and "corporation", which is the exact opposite thereof.
That's kind of silly logic, isn't it? There are literally millions of corporations who successfully provide people with fun, by offering products ranging from bicycles to board games to ocean cruises to pogo sticks to software.
If EA can't manage to offer fun, it's because EA is screwed up, not because corporations and fun are inherently incompatible.
Wasn't it Oracle that finally killed the Java applet? At least, my web browsers happily ran Java applets for a number of years, until Oracle took over Java and suddenly every web browser started refusing to run applets, even when you begged it to.
Sure, all you have to do is time the market. But if you're able to reliably time the market, you're probably already a billionaire anyway.
(OTOH if you're just somebody who thinks he can reliably time the market, then you're a what's known as a "fool" and you should prepare to be parted from your money shortly;))
Every time I read it, I ask my self, so what? So a bit can be both 1 and 0 at the same time. That didn't explain anything at all.
Right, they forget to mention the hoped-for consequence, which only becomes apparent when you consider a system containing more than one qubit at once.
i.e.
1 qubit = 2 simultaneous states (== 2x potential speedup vs classicalp) 2 qubits = 4 simultaneous states (== 4x potential speedup vs classical) 3 qubits = 8 simultaneous states (== 8x potential speedup vs classical) [...] 64 qubits = 18446744073709551616 simultaneous states (== 18446744073709551616x potential speedup vs classical)
It's the old rice-on-the-chess-board exponential behavior, except applied to parallel-processing speed rather than to material.
The self-driving car's version of "checking out" is coming to a stop as quickly as possible. While that's not always the optimal solution (as seen in this case), I don't see how it will lead to running people over.
The strategy is literally "it becomes more-scarce as more is made, so it's worth more dollars because more people want it yet there's less of it!"
And oddly, this works. It's kind of like the "Limited Edition" collectors cars the Lamborghini (and similar) sometimes put out; they promise to only make 50 of them per year, and the people put down $2M for a car they'll (probably) never drive, because they're pretty confident they'll be able to sell it for significantly more than what they paid for it, soon enough. As long as demand continues to outstrip supply, the price will rise.
Of course, this only works if (a) the manufacturer doesn't dilute the value of the product by increasing the supply too much, and (b) the perceived value of the product is sufficient that at least some people are willing to pay a higher price for it. Bitcoin guarantees (a) through an algorithm, which is nice; it's (b) that I would worry about if I was considering investing in Bitcoins (which I'm not).
Ehh, maybe it is. I don't exactly go to eastern Europe to often, so I don't exactly know. But it seems like someone really isn't thinking this headline thorough and instead were just looking for headline.
Doubtful, but if you make enough money mining bitcoins to pay your for power bill, then your home heating is paying system for itself and therefore effectively free (outside of the initial capital cost, of course). I think that is what they were getting at.
Bitcoin == San Francisco real estate prices. If you bought in 1970 you are rich as low prices WILL NEVER return. Yes fluctuations will happen. But all the 6 things stated above will make it a reality unlike gold. I just wish I got in earlier.
That's a pretty good analogy, perhaps even better than you realized.
Bitcoin is like San Francisco real estate prices, in a scenario where many investors have not yet realized that there are other viable cities out there to invest in besides San Francisco.
Currently a lot of people are pouring money into Bitcoin because it's the one virtual-currency "brand name" they are most familiar with, but what happens once it becomes widespread knowledge that other virtual currencies (Ethereum, Monero, etc etc etc) are also perfectly valid and useful investments, and in many cases perform better than Bitcoin (which you would expect since they all had the benefit of watching Bitcoin evolve, and don't have the backwards-compatibility constraints the Bitcoin does)?
My prediction (and I'm usually wrong, so you take this with a grain of salt) is that sooner or later people will realize that Bitcoin is just one of many blockchain technologies, and not necessarily the best one, either. At that point they will start to diversify their investments more, and the value of Bitcoins will necessarily drop as the investor pool gets diluted.
On the other hand, I don't know it's not near the top, either.
And since at this point the Bitcoin's valuation seems to be driven entirely by investors' bandwagon psychology, which I don't claim to understand, that makes Bitcoins way to risky for me to invest in, even if I could potentially make a lot of money by timing the market -- I could equally well lose a lot of money, and I have no way to predict which outcome I would get.
With that attitude NASA doesn't need to do jack shit while the private industry develops the products and services NASA needs, except fund it.
You say that like it's a bad thing. To me, that sounds like we've finally attained a long-standing goal.
NASA is supposed to do the experimental science, making rovers and probes and testing new propulsion technologies, power sources, zero-g experiments, spaceships, landers, habitats etc. that eventually may become a commercial product.
Perhaps chemical rockets are now a sufficiently mature technology that they no longer need to be a primarily-government-developed technology? I'd like to see NASA concentrate more on the exploration of space (i.e. scientific space probes and alternative propulsion technologies), and (assuming SpaceX and its competitors are now up to the task) let private industry take over the routine delivery tasks.
Government has the resources to operate on long timelines that most private companies cannot, but outside of that it can be awfully slow, inefficient, and un-creative. So as soon as private companies can take over provisioning for a technology sector, they should be encouraged to do so.
But even if so it seems like exceptions typically get carved out for big shots who either can't or don't want to deal with extra layers of bother.
No doubt -- the only real solution is to make it so that the appropriate security mechanisms can be put in place without incurring any extra layers of bother, so that people won't try to circumvent them. Of course that's much easier said than done.
A world full of social media narcissists who post every detail about their lives online via dozens of apps that abuse 100 back-channels of telemetry and data aggregation is worried about Nation States stealing shit via hidden anti-virus code.
I was thinking more of the NSA, DOD, and other government agencies that have made the (questionable) decision to run their critical infrastructure on Windows, and now find themselves in the position of depending on Kaspersky/McAfee/etc to protect their computers against malware, and therefore having to trust said companies not to be installing malware themselves.
Whether government agencies are full of social media narcissists or not, I don't know... I try not to spend a lot of time at government agencies:)
Really it doesn't make much difference either way.
Unless you are as familiar with the codebase as its authors are (and you definitely won't be) and unless you are doing all of the compilation from source yourself (which you probably won't be), you're still more or less at the mercy of the software vendor.
Even if you read all of the source code they provide you with to "prove" the program doesn't do anything nefarious, there is no guarantee that the binary you install on your computers was based on the source code you read, and not some other version of that source code with a back-door installed.
So it comes down to the same thing -- you either trust your Anti-virus company not to spy on you, or you don't.
Biologically speaking homosexuality is bad for the replication of any species in it's most basic form
Well, no.
Being homosexual might be bad for the replication of the individual (since it reduces the individual's chances of having offspring), but it doesn't necessarily follow that it's therefore also bad for the species.
Consider that childless homosexuals, not being burdened by the task of having to care for children of their own, will likely therefore have extra time and resources available to help protect and care for the children of child-bearing couples in their family or community, thus improving the children's (and therefore the species') chances of surviving. Given the huge time investment that human children require, increasing a child's odds of survival to adulthood is a huge win.
And if you think that sort of dynamic is uncommon in nature, consider that fact that 99% of bees are sterile and play no role in the reproduction of their hive, except to gather food and protect the queen and the drones who do handle the reproduction.
Specialization and division of labor is one of the things human civilization is based on; there's no reason it can't be applied to reproduction as well.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why we can't have nice things.
Perhaps, but in this case it was one guy who did just to see if it could be done (and then brag about it), and then a magazine that analyzed the approach to see if it was worthwhile and decided it probably wasn't.
So what we are looking at here is a silly one-off stunt, not the End of Free SuperCharging As We Know it. If this ever did become a problem for Tesla (which it won't, because buying a $100K automobile just to get free electricity for your GPU rig makes no economic sense), then Tesla would take steps to discourage it; just as any sensible system would take steps to discourage egregious freeloading.
Or they could put both ports on the same side of the truck, for convenience; and having done that they could bind the two cables together so they both plug in at once; and having done that they could just make look like a single, larger cable, with a single, larger port, and here we are.
If it turns out that the moon is a flat disk attached to a black ceiling several thousand feet overhead, then he's got a pretty good chance of getting there. The tricky part will be the moon landing -- turning the rocket upside down (while simultaneously grappling it to the moon's surface so as not to fall back to Earth) won't be easy.
Yeah, what were those bastards thinking! They should have been able to foresee and use 60 years of future reactor technology development to ensure plants still operating 20 years after their designed lifespan don't have problems!
The above pretty much sums up the fatal flaw of nuclear power -- a nuclear plant must function reliably for decades and sequester its nuclear byproducts for centuries. Human designers simply aren't up to the task of planning that far into the future, hence even the best-designed reactors sometimes fail due to unforeseen circumstances. That's true of every other technology as well, of course, but in most other technologies the costs of an occasional failure are acceptable.
Perhaps automation means this 16% of the population will be able to find work due to much of the thinking being removed from what they need to do.
Seems to me it would be just the opposite -- this 16% will be permanently unemployable, because any task they are capable of learning how to do, a robot is also capable of doing better, faster, and cheaper.
And as automation/AI improves, the "minimum intelligence to be employable" threshold steadily rises; so that e.g. at some point (hopefully after I retire), only people with IQs of 140 or higher will be employable, and then shortly after that, no people will be employable at all :/
The theoretical Basilisk is the most ball-slappingly insane AI ever imagined [...]
That does it -- you're going to be the first one strapped to the rack.
Do supercomputers ever come with a graphics card (that is intended to drive a display)?
I'd imagine that if you want a console for your supercomputer, you set up a PC next to it and run X Window remotely or something.
The combination of "gaming", an activity that requires something that is fun, exciting, interesting, and engaging, and "corporation", which is the exact opposite thereof.
That's kind of silly logic, isn't it? There are literally millions of corporations who successfully provide people with fun, by offering products ranging from bicycles to board games to ocean cruises to pogo sticks to software.
If EA can't manage to offer fun, it's because EA is screwed up, not because corporations and fun are inherently incompatible.
Wasn't it Oracle that finally killed the Java applet? At least, my web browsers happily ran Java applets for a number of years, until Oracle took over Java and suddenly every web browser started refusing to run applets, even when you begged it to.
I'm still waiting for a laptop with an ergonomically shaped keyboard (and a corresponding concave screen to match, so that you can close the lid ;) )
Sure, all you have to do is time the market. But if you're able to reliably time the market, you're probably already a billionaire anyway.
(OTOH if you're just somebody who thinks he can reliably time the market, then you're a what's known as a "fool" and you should prepare to be parted from your money shortly ;))
Every time I read it, I ask my self, so what? So a bit can be both 1 and 0 at the same time. That didn't explain anything at all.
Right, they forget to mention the hoped-for consequence, which only becomes apparent when you consider a system containing more than one qubit at once.
i.e.
1 qubit = 2 simultaneous states (== 2x potential speedup vs classicalp)
2 qubits = 4 simultaneous states (== 4x potential speedup vs classical)
3 qubits = 8 simultaneous states (== 8x potential speedup vs classical)
[...]
64 qubits = 18446744073709551616 simultaneous states (== 18446744073709551616x potential speedup vs classical)
It's the old rice-on-the-chess-board exponential behavior, except applied to parallel-processing speed rather than to material.
The self-driving car's version of "checking out" is coming to a stop as quickly as possible. While that's not always the optimal solution (as seen in this case), I don't see how it will lead to running people over.
Wow, Hollywood has actually been accurately portraying the state of security in Linux for years, and nobody realized!
If it turns out that the secretaries of the world have been running Linux all these years, I will be rather surprised :)
The strategy is literally "it becomes more-scarce as more is made, so it's worth more dollars because more people want it yet there's less of it!"
And oddly, this works. It's kind of like the "Limited Edition" collectors cars the Lamborghini (and similar) sometimes put out; they promise to only make 50 of them per year, and the people put down $2M for a car they'll (probably) never drive, because they're pretty confident they'll be able to sell it for significantly more than what they paid for it, soon enough. As long as demand continues to outstrip supply, the price will rise.
Of course, this only works if (a) the manufacturer doesn't dilute the value of the product by increasing the supply too much, and (b) the perceived value of the product is sufficient that at least some people are willing to pay a higher price for it. Bitcoin guarantees (a) through an algorithm, which is nice; it's (b) that I would worry about if I was considering investing in Bitcoins (which I'm not).
Ehh, maybe it is. I don't exactly go to eastern Europe to often, so I don't exactly know. But it seems like someone really isn't thinking this headline thorough and instead were just looking for headline.
Doubtful, but if you make enough money mining bitcoins to pay your for power bill, then your home heating is paying system for itself and therefore effectively free (outside of the initial capital cost, of course). I think that is what they were getting at.
Bitcoin == San Francisco real estate prices. If you bought in 1970 you are rich as low prices WILL NEVER return. Yes fluctuations will happen. But all the 6 things stated above will make it a reality unlike gold. I just wish I got in earlier.
That's a pretty good analogy, perhaps even better than you realized.
Bitcoin is like San Francisco real estate prices, in a scenario where many investors have not yet realized that there are other viable cities out there to invest in besides San Francisco.
Currently a lot of people are pouring money into Bitcoin because it's the one virtual-currency "brand name" they are most familiar with, but what happens once it becomes widespread knowledge that other virtual currencies (Ethereum, Monero, etc etc etc) are also perfectly valid and useful investments, and in many cases perform better than Bitcoin (which you would expect since they all had the benefit of watching Bitcoin evolve, and don't have the backwards-compatibility constraints the Bitcoin does)?
My prediction (and I'm usually wrong, so you take this with a grain of salt) is that sooner or later people will realize that Bitcoin is just one of many blockchain technologies, and not necessarily the best one, either. At that point they will start to diversify their investments more, and the value of Bitcoins will necessarily drop as the investor pool gets diluted.
How do you know $7000 is anywhere near the top?
I absolutely don't.
On the other hand, I don't know it's not near the top, either.
And since at this point the Bitcoin's valuation seems to be driven entirely by investors' bandwagon psychology, which I don't claim to understand, that makes Bitcoins way to risky for me to invest in, even if I could potentially make a lot of money by timing the market -- I could equally well lose a lot of money, and I have no way to predict which outcome I would get.
One minor difference: we know how to build a Hyperloop. There aren't any new scientific principles at play there, it's only a matter of engineering.
Stargate technology, OTOH, is a bit more nebulous at this point :)
How many cell phones would you need to commandeer, and for how long, in order to successfully mine a Bitcoin using JavaScript?
It seems like trying to boil the ocean by stealing cigarette lighters...
With that attitude NASA doesn't need to do jack shit while the private industry develops the products and services NASA needs, except fund it.
You say that like it's a bad thing. To me, that sounds like we've finally attained a long-standing goal.
NASA is supposed to do the experimental science, making rovers and probes and testing new propulsion technologies, power sources, zero-g experiments, spaceships, landers, habitats etc. that eventually may become a commercial product.
Perhaps chemical rockets are now a sufficiently mature technology that they no longer need to be a primarily-government-developed technology? I'd like to see NASA concentrate more on the exploration of space (i.e. scientific space probes and alternative propulsion technologies), and (assuming SpaceX and its competitors are now up to the task) let private industry take over the routine delivery tasks.
Government has the resources to operate on long timelines that most private companies cannot, but outside of that it can be awfully slow, inefficient, and un-creative. So as soon as private companies can take over provisioning for a technology sector, they should be encouraged to do so.
But even if so it seems like exceptions typically get carved out for big shots who either can't or don't want to deal with extra layers of bother.
No doubt -- the only real solution is to make it so that the appropriate security mechanisms can be put in place without incurring any extra layers of bother, so that people won't try to circumvent them. Of course that's much easier said than done.
A world full of social media narcissists who post every detail about their lives online via dozens of apps that abuse 100 back-channels of telemetry and data aggregation is worried about Nation States stealing shit via hidden anti-virus code.
I was thinking more of the NSA, DOD, and other government agencies that have made the (questionable) decision to run their critical infrastructure on Windows, and now find themselves in the position of depending on Kaspersky/McAfee/etc to protect their computers against malware, and therefore having to trust said companies not to be installing malware themselves.
Whether government agencies are full of social media narcissists or not, I don't know... I try not to spend a lot of time at government agencies :)
Really it doesn't make much difference either way.
Unless you are as familiar with the codebase as its authors are (and you definitely won't be) and unless you are doing all of the compilation from source yourself (which you probably won't be), you're still more or less at the mercy of the software vendor.
Even if you read all of the source code they provide you with to "prove" the program doesn't do anything nefarious, there is no guarantee that the binary you install on your computers was based on the source code you read, and not some other version of that source code with a back-door installed.
So it comes down to the same thing -- you either trust your Anti-virus company not to spy on you, or you don't.
Biologically speaking homosexuality is bad for the replication of any species in it's most basic form
Well, no.
Being homosexual might be bad for the replication of the individual (since it reduces the individual's chances of having offspring), but it doesn't necessarily follow that it's therefore also bad for the species.
Consider that childless homosexuals, not being burdened by the task of having to care for children of their own, will likely therefore have extra time and resources available to help protect and care for the children of child-bearing couples in their family or community, thus improving the children's (and therefore the species') chances of surviving. Given the huge time investment that human children require, increasing a child's odds of survival to adulthood is a huge win.
And if you think that sort of dynamic is uncommon in nature, consider that fact that 99% of bees are sterile and play no role in the reproduction of their hive, except to gather food and protect the queen and the drones who do handle the reproduction.
Specialization and division of labor is one of the things human civilization is based on; there's no reason it can't be applied to reproduction as well.