That would be useless against the kind of criminal that is most problematic right now, the kind that do not care if they get caught because they are on a suicidal mission.
That is the kind of criminal that gets the most news coverage, but suicidal mass shooters are not the most problematic type of criminal right now, nor have they ever been.
Around 33,000 people are shot to death each year in the USA.
Out of those 33,000, less than 50 per year are killed as part of a Columbine/Aurora/SanBernardino style shooting spree.
So you're imagining requirements that would apply to about one tenth of one percent of the actual gun homicides that occur. The media (or somebody) has distorted your view of reality.
Frankly, I don't understand why Apple shareholders stand for it.
Do Apple shareholders even know what an API is? (Serious question -- I don't know any Apple shareholders to speak of, so I don't know what their level of technical understanding might be. My suspicion is that most of them just look at Apple's products from a consumer perspective; i.e. either they work well and are shiny, or they don't/aren't)
Solar and wind work in low % of overall generation. It doesn't work at high % of total generation. Same with net metering at home installs.
People will keep saying this until it does work in high % of total generation, and then they'll find something else to complain about.
Not that the problems with solar aren't real, but the people working to solve those problems are real also, and sooner or later (and more likely sooner, given the amount of effort being invested), they will solve them.
Don't we have better things to be doing then this?
What, like invade third-world countries that pissed us off? Or sponsor another iteration of the Olympics? Or look at amusingly captioned photos of catst?
In a lot of cases, the potential benefits of doing something are impossible to know in advance, but maybe you just do it anyway because it looks like it would be a cool thing to do. This is one of those cases. If you don't think it's a promising avenue, go do something else instead; nobody will stop you.
I suspect that solar power advocates don't like to talk about the cost of the solar watt-hour because if they did that then the charts would not look so great.
Utility-scale solar power is now selling for less than three cents per kWh. So that would be less than $.00003 per watt-hour.
This compares favorably to coal and other forms of traditional power generation.
My suspicion is that when you think about solar power, you are thinking only about residential rooftop solar power, which is indeed more expensive to due lack of economies of scale. That would be an error, since utility-scale solar power is where the advances in cost-effectiveness are occurring.
After being subsidized heavily in the USA for decades this is all we have to show for it. Perhaps we need to stop and think if this is in fact a good use of our tax money.
The price per watt of solar power drops every year and shows no sign of leveling out any time soon. If you don't like the price this year, wait until next year. If you don't like solar power period, at any price, that's fine too -- the world will continue to adopt solar power at an ever-increasing pace, with or without your support.
We don't get our oil delivered through the energy lanes of Europe. In fact, the US share of Middle Eastern oil has shrunken dramatically. North America now produces a dramatic amount of it's own oil and gas.
True, but oil is a global market -- so unless we decided to ban all exports exports of domestic oil (which is unlikely, even under Trump), disruptions in Europe and the Middle East would increase the price of oil here in the USA about the same as it would anywhere else. Being able to produce oil cheaply in Montana doesn't help Americans much if the oil producers prefer to sell it for more abroad than they can get at home.
To avoid that, we're left policing the world's seas, and picking up most of the tab.
As per the article, a "cellphone" is where the radio communicates with a local cell, which then transfers the call to the regular phone network. [...] Don't confuse that with a radio which communicates directly with another radio.
Out of curiosity, what would it take to allow a cell phone to communicate with other nearby cell phones directly, as a fallback for when no towers are nearby? Is that something that could be done in software alone, or would the hardware need modifications as well?
Color me surprised, I'm guessing two faced assholes are gonna be one of the easiest personality traits to mimic.
Really? Lying convincingly is hard. Most people can't do it well enough to get away with it for very long; especially since everyone else has necessarily evolved a fairly good instinct for picking up on less-than-perfect falsehoods and manipulations. A good liar has to remember not only what the actual facts are, but also keep a complete history of all of his previous lies in mind, so that he won't accidentally contradict an old lie with a new lie (or a newly spoken truth).
Which isn't to say a computer can't be taught to lie convincingly, or that it won't be a terrifying and disturbing development when it happens. If you think social-engineering and spear-phishing hacks are a problem now, just wait until the hackers have a self-improving algorithm that can do it for them in a massively parallel fashion, without ever making a mistake.
That is because the current cesspool that is media reporting cannot comprehend the difference between Artificial Intelligence (AI), which this is not, and Machine Learning (ML), which this is.
The really infuriating thing about language is, if enough people misuse a term, eventually their misuse of the term becomes the de facto correct meaning. The purists can complain but there's little they can do to stop it.
I do wonder, however, how many ML bots are already being used by companies to bid up their ebay auctions until the algorithm decides the other bidder has peaked.. If it is not happening yet, it will not be far away. Clearly fraud, of course, but hey.. thats hardly anything new.
From an economic standpoint, I don't see a problem with that. You're either willing to pay the auction price for an item, or you're not (in which case, don't bid a price you aren't willing to pay).
If the seller wants to bid on his own item, fine -- he might end up having to purchase the item from himself, which makes the auction a waste of everyone's time, but so be it. He'd probably get a better return by simply setting the reserve price to whatever his minimum price is.
I had a mouse with this same functionality back in 1992, and it cost much less. It even came with a wire to keep it attached to the computer, so it wouldn't get lost.
Nope, C++ is not a superset of C at all. There's lots of subtle little things that are different in very important ways.
All true, but irrelevant, since C++ is "close enough" to compatible with C that in most cases you can simply rename a.c file to.cpp and it will compile and run correctly (possibly with a few minor tweaks).
Perhaps more importantly, you can link your C++ code directly to code that was compiled with a C compiler and have it call into the C code without any major hassles.
So the major benefit -- being able to keep using all those existing C codebases from your C++ program -- was preserved.
Other projects have managed breaking transitions far more quickly and without wasting nearly a decade
Can you name some? In order to make the comparison fair, you should limit your examples to other popular programming languages that made a successful breaking change, since invalidating large, established codebases of user code is precisely what makes such a change so expensive.
Call me an optimist, but in a world where self-driving cars are becoming a reality, I don't think a self-guarding solar array is beyond our reach. Video cameras and security alarms are pretty cheap already.
if we can all produce electricity for 10c/kwh then why have power companies at all.
I imagine you're still going to want access to power at night, and on cloudy/rainy days... so until a week's worth of battery-backup is affordable, you're still going to want a grid-tie in most cases.
In the past, Siri was pretty much equivalent to a speech-recognition interface to the Google search box. That, plus "hey Siri, set a timer for 35 minutes" on laundry day was about all I could get Siri to usefully do.
Still, yesterday she managed to handle this conversation in a useful manner:
Me: Hey Siri, what time does the nearest post office open tomorrow morning? Siri: Do you mean this post office? (Show map with the nearest post office to my location indicated) Me: Yes, that one. Siri: The post office at (that address) is open from 9 am to 5 pm tomorrow Me: Can you show me that address again on the map? (since the map was no longer being displayed, and I wanted to review it) Sir: Here it is (shows map again)
Maybe Alexa and Cortana are light-years beyond this by now (I don't know, I've never used them), but I thought the above showed some progress on Siri's part -- in particular, Siri is starting to keep the context of the conversation in mind when interpreting follow-on requests, rather than treating each request as an independent/stand-alone query.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't click on any dick pic links that appear on Slashdot. Most of those goes back to virus-infected websites.
Hell, I remember when the dick pics on Slashdot were 100% ASCII-based. And the dicks had wings, for some reason.
That would be useless against the kind of criminal that is most problematic right now, the kind that do not care if they get caught because they are on a suicidal mission.
That is the kind of criminal that gets the most news coverage, but suicidal mass shooters are not the most problematic type of criminal right now, nor have they ever been.
Around 33,000 people are shot to death each year in the USA.
Out of those 33,000, less than 50 per year are killed as part of a Columbine/Aurora/SanBernardino style shooting spree.
So you're imagining requirements that would apply to about one tenth of one percent of the actual gun homicides that occur. The media (or somebody) has distorted your view of reality.
Frankly, I don't understand why Apple shareholders stand for it.
Do Apple shareholders even know what an API is? (Serious question -- I don't know any Apple shareholders to speak of, so I don't know what their level of technical understanding might be. My suspicion is that most of them just look at Apple's products from a consumer perspective; i.e. either they work well and are shiny, or they don't/aren't)
Solar and wind work in low % of overall generation. It doesn't work at high % of total generation. Same with net metering at home installs.
People will keep saying this until it does work in high % of total generation, and then they'll find something else to complain about.
Not that the problems with solar aren't real, but the people working to solve those problems are real also, and sooner or later (and more likely sooner, given the amount of effort being invested), they will solve them.
Well, assuming the evil maid doesn't know your login password, of course.
I'm sure Musk could easily find thousands to initially travel to mars, even with a 50% survivability rate...
Sure, staffing the first ship is easy.
Staffing the second ship, after everyone has seen what happened to all the people on the first one, however... that will be more challenging.
Why is it so critical for our race to not go extinct? Species go extinct all the time.
Why is it so critical for you to eat food? People die of starvation all the time.
Ah, I see -- you don't enjoy starvation and would prefer to avoid it. Similarly, humanity doesn't enjoy extinction, and would prefer to avoid it.
Don't we have better things to be doing then this?
What, like invade third-world countries that pissed us off? Or sponsor another iteration of the Olympics? Or look at amusingly captioned photos of catst?
In a lot of cases, the potential benefits of doing something are impossible to know in advance, but maybe you just do it anyway because it looks like it would be a cool thing to do. This is one of those cases. If you don't think it's a promising avenue, go do something else instead; nobody will stop you.
I suspect that solar power advocates don't like to talk about the cost of the solar watt-hour because if they did that then the charts would not look so great.
Utility-scale solar power is now selling for less than three cents per kWh. So that would be less than $.00003 per watt-hour.
This compares favorably to coal and other forms of traditional power generation.
My suspicion is that when you think about solar power, you are thinking only about residential rooftop solar power, which is indeed more expensive to due lack of economies of scale. That would be an error, since utility-scale solar power is where the advances in cost-effectiveness are occurring.
How often do people ask why solar is so unpopular?
Almost never since about 2005, because solar has actually become extremely popular.
After being subsidized heavily in the USA for decades this is all we have to show for it. Perhaps we need to stop and think if this is in fact a good use of our tax money.
The price per watt of solar power drops every year and shows no sign of leveling out any time soon. If you don't like the price this year, wait until next year. If you don't like solar power period, at any price, that's fine too -- the world will continue to adopt solar power at an ever-increasing pace, with or without your support.
We don't get our oil delivered through the energy lanes of Europe. In fact, the US share of Middle Eastern oil has shrunken dramatically. North America now produces a dramatic amount of it's own oil and gas.
True, but oil is a global market -- so unless we decided to ban all exports exports of domestic oil (which is unlikely, even under Trump), disruptions in Europe and the Middle East would increase the price of oil here in the USA about the same as it would anywhere else. Being able to produce oil cheaply in Montana doesn't help Americans much if the oil producers prefer to sell it for more abroad than they can get at home.
To avoid that, we're left policing the world's seas, and picking up most of the tab.
As per the article, a "cellphone" is where the radio communicates with a local cell, which then transfers the call to the regular phone network. [...] Don't confuse that with a radio which communicates directly with another radio.
Out of curiosity, what would it take to allow a cell phone to communicate with other nearby cell phones directly, as a fallback for when no towers are nearby? Is that something that could be done in software alone, or would the hardware need modifications as well?
Color me surprised, I'm guessing two faced assholes are gonna be one of the easiest personality traits to mimic.
Really? Lying convincingly is hard. Most people can't do it well enough to get away with it for very long; especially since everyone else has necessarily evolved a fairly good instinct for picking up on less-than-perfect falsehoods and manipulations. A good liar has to remember not only what the actual facts are, but also keep a complete history of all of his previous lies in mind, so that he won't accidentally contradict an old lie with a new lie (or a newly spoken truth).
Which isn't to say a computer can't be taught to lie convincingly, or that it won't be a terrifying and disturbing development when it happens. If you think social-engineering and spear-phishing hacks are a problem now, just wait until the hackers have a self-improving algorithm that can do it for them in a massively parallel fashion, without ever making a mistake.
That is because the current cesspool that is media reporting cannot comprehend the difference between Artificial Intelligence (AI), which this is not, and Machine Learning (ML), which this is.
The really infuriating thing about language is, if enough people misuse a term, eventually their misuse of the term becomes the de facto correct meaning. The purists can complain but there's little they can do to stop it.
I do wonder, however, how many ML bots are already being used by companies to bid up their ebay auctions until the algorithm decides the other bidder has peaked.. If it is not happening yet, it will not be far away. Clearly fraud, of course, but hey.. thats hardly anything new.
From an economic standpoint, I don't see a problem with that. You're either willing to pay the auction price for an item, or you're not (in which case, don't bid a price you aren't willing to pay).
If the seller wants to bid on his own item, fine -- he might end up having to purchase the item from himself, which makes the auction a waste of everyone's time, but so be it. He'd probably get a better return by simply setting the reserve price to whatever his minimum price is.
Second-System Effect. What you're really buying is a programming framework in the end.
Are you sure you didn't mean the Inner-Platform Effect? (Although if you're really lucky you could end up with both simultaneously :) )
I had a mouse with this same functionality back in 1992, and it cost much less. It even came with a wire to keep it attached to the computer, so it wouldn't get lost.
Disclaimer: I am a millenial in age only.
Age is the only criterion for being (or not being) a millennial.
I actually own a house, and married, and even have an actual full time job.
Well, aren't you special.
Nope, C++ is not a superset of C at all. There's lots of subtle little things that are different in very important ways.
All true, but irrelevant, since C++ is "close enough" to compatible with C that in most cases you can simply rename a .c file to .cpp and it will compile and run correctly (possibly with a few minor tweaks).
Perhaps more importantly, you can link your C++ code directly to code that was compiled with a C compiler and have it call into the C code without any major hassles.
So the major benefit -- being able to keep using all those existing C codebases from your C++ program -- was preserved.
Other projects have managed breaking transitions far more quickly and without wasting nearly a decade
Can you name some? In order to make the comparison fair, you should limit your examples to other popular programming languages that made a successful breaking change, since invalidating large, established codebases of user code is precisely what makes such a change so expensive.
Call me an optimist, but in a world where self-driving cars are becoming a reality, I don't think a self-guarding solar array is beyond our reach. Video cameras and security alarms are pretty cheap already.
if we can all produce electricity for 10c/kwh then why have power companies at all.
I imagine you're still going to want access to power at night, and on cloudy/rainy days... so until a week's worth of battery-backup is affordable, you're still going to want a grid-tie in most cases.
In fact, the whole reason Musk started SpaceX is so he can launch a mission to capture and retrieve the sun for his own solar energy purposes.
Oh dear. If Musk brings the sun back to Earth, won't that increase global warming?
citation found!
You call that a citation? This is a citation.
In the past, Siri was pretty much equivalent to a speech-recognition interface to the Google search box. That, plus "hey Siri, set a timer for 35 minutes" on laundry day was about all I could get Siri to usefully do.
Still, yesterday she managed to handle this conversation in a useful manner:
Me: Hey Siri, what time does the nearest post office open tomorrow morning?
Siri: Do you mean this post office? (Show map with the nearest post office to my location indicated)
Me: Yes, that one.
Siri: The post office at (that address) is open from 9 am to 5 pm tomorrow
Me: Can you show me that address again on the map? (since the map was no longer being displayed, and I wanted to review it)
Sir: Here it is (shows map again)
Maybe Alexa and Cortana are light-years beyond this by now (I don't know, I've never used them), but I thought the above showed some progress on Siri's part -- in particular, Siri is starting to keep the context of the conversation in mind when interpreting follow-on requests, rather than treating each request as an independent/stand-alone query.
Why do Electric Car makers not make EVs that look Identical or indistinguishable to a Gasoline powered model.
They do. You just never notice them because, well, they look indistinguishable from the gasoline-powered model.
Here are some examples of electric cars you probably wouldn't be able pick out of a crowd:
2017 FIAT 500e
2017 Ford Fusion Energi
2017 Mercedes Benz E-Class
2017 Ford Focus Electric
2017 Kia Soul EV
2017 Volkswagen e-Golf