Many people think Trump is an idiot. He is not. He knows exactly what to say in order to make enough people vote for him.
A non-idiot would also know when it is time to stop campaigning for votes and start governing. (or, if his plan was to retain support by remaining permanently in campaign mode, it isn't working)
It was going to cost a ton of time and money to get all the material ADA compliant, and they would have continued to be in violation the entire time they were working toward that. So they did the only thing they could, and removed everything.
I don't know about the legal issues, but from a common-sense perspective it would make more sense for the captioning to be performed on-demand on a per-video basis; i.e. if a disabled student needs access to a particular video, he/she can request that it be captioned. The captioning is then added to that video and made available to everyone.
That way the ADA students get the captioning they need, and everyone else gets the benefit of the videos as well; plus the captioners don't spend a lot of their limited time captioning video that nobody will actually use the captions of; rather they spend their time captioning videos that actually need captioning sooner rather than later.
In other words, you could push the most intrusive, malevolent, destructive code to a user's device at will with no oversight.
Isn't this also true for Javascript-embedded-in-a-web-page?
In both cases, the only thing standing between the user and catastrophic fiery death is the security of the execution environment -- either the sandbox keeps the malware from causing damage, or it doesn't. At least in the Apple Store case, the downloaded code is authenticated as coming from a known/registered developer, so there is some (slim) chance of them being held accountable for anything negligent/malicious they might do to your phone.
The issue with Wind and Solar is that they require large areas to be installed on (and power distribution, but I'll focus on the former).
That is an issue. Fortunately there are large areas available to install them on, both on land and at sea.
Progressives have been brainwashed by the Renewable cartel, just like Conservatives were by the Fossil Fuel Cartel.
Or, they realize that we'll continue to want to use energy long after fossil fuels are no longer practical to use, and are making sure we'll have the ability to do so.
Would nuclear plants help solve that problem? They absolutely would, but only if they get built -- and post-Fukushima/Chernobyl, not many people want them built; fewer still want to pay the huge amounts of money it takes to secure them forever against all conceivable failure modes. Is that "brainwashing"? I guess you could call it that; another way to look at it is that people have seen what nuclear power is capable of, and decided they don't want it.
I'd say that nuclear-fission power is in a similar position to fuel cells -- advanced technology with lots of promise, but trailing so badly behind the competition at this point that (barring some miraculous technological leap forward) it probably won't ever catch up and be competitive against other approaches.
Only for the first few years, when you are paying the introductory "teaser" rate. Then the rates are "adjusted" upward, even if overall interest rates don't rise.
That's what I would expect as well -- however, when my ARM adjusted (in 2011), my interest rate went down significantly. I think it was an aberration due to the zero/near-zero interest rate policies put in place by the Fed after the housing crash, but that's what happened.
Technological advancements can't result in long-term widescale job loss. Because if it does, the masses wouldn't be able to buy as much stuff, and it would reduce the country's net productivity, meaning a smaller pie for the rich to take their disproportionate slice from.
That seems like an argument for why it would be bad for technological advancements to result in job loss -- which is a very different thing than an argument for why they can't result in job loss.
If you think the individually-rational decisions of various companies will always guarantee a universally-positive outcome for the market as a whole, then you've never experienced a market crash or a tragedy-of-the-commons. The "invisible hand" is not an infallible guide.
because only a government can deprive people of freedom to make their own economic decisions
Another canard -- there's nothing particularly unique about governments in that respect. Any sufficiently powerful entity can deprive people of freedom to make their own economic choices, and private corporations also do it all the time. Read about the "company store" for miners, or the conditions in which migrant agricultural workers were (and are) held. It's no good to say "well, they're technically free to walk away whenever they want" if, as a practical matter, they do not have the economic resources to do so.
That freedom is what allows people to increase their standard of living - by individually choosing more productive activities over less.
And what do you do when there is no activity that you are capable of that is economically productive, because anything you could do, a machine can do better and more cheaply? Hope that other people will buy your (inferior and more expensive) products/services out of sympathy for your plight?
Surely if they are able to transplant arms and legs to soldiers, they would be able to transplants arms and legs to resurrected dead guys also? (Assuming they didn't revive him just to watch his horrified reaction at finding himself limbless)
Yeah, Sofia Vergara showing up in my bedroom would be nice, but the likelihood of anything more happening than her channeling the Talking Heads and saying "This is not my beautiful house!" and walking out is less than the above.
Once you've engaged the Improbability Drive, you might as well crank it up to maximum power.
Seems to me that no serious estimate is possible until you know with some degree of certainty what material you're going to be using.
In the best case, you'd use some magic material with an infinite strength-to-weight ratio, and send the whole thing up inside a a 20-pound cubesat for practically no cost.
In the worst case, it wouldn't matter how much you spend, because the material would never be able to support its own weight no matter how big the ribbon was.
The actual case is somewhere between those two extremes, but without knowing where, you can pick any cost estimate you want, and it won't be any more meaningful than any other cost estimate you might choose.
With rockets it is still $100K - $1M per pound to get to the moon. We need a space elevator.
Nah, what we really need is a transporter. Compared to a space elevator, it's cheaper, faster, safer, and at this point, just as technically feasible to build.
It's all fun and games until the dirigible's envelope gets a hole punched in it. I suggest deploying only unmanned dirigibles at first, until the necessary redundancies and materials have been thoroughly proven under real Venutian conditions!
Your ECC RAM won't matter much if the cosmic ray hits the CPU registers. Or a cell in a block of your flash storage.
Also, your ECC RAM won't matter much if you get run over by a truck. So what? ECC RAM will help if there is a bitflip in your ECC RAM, that's what it's for and that's what the benefit is. It's not going to solve world hunger either, and nobody ever suggested that it would.
The next step would be to deny entry for people with wiped phones.
Perhaps -- and then the countermeasure would be to modify the procedure so that instead of placing a recognizably "vanilla" OS on your phone, it would replace your OS with an image that contains only some of your favorite innocuous data and apps that you don't mind Customs poking around in.
It seems they succeeded in their goal and were hoist by their own petard. Of course, had they recovered the funds then ZeroCoin would have failed at its purpose. I wonder who took the loss.
My intuition was that it would have the same effect as any other currency counterfeiting operation has on the "genuine" currency: i.e. all holders of ZeroCoins took the loss, in the form of a certain amount of extra inflation caused by the increase in "supply", which reduced the values of their ZeroCoin holdings. Possibly also they might take a further loss if people start to lose faith in ZeroCoins and start selling them (or stop buying them), causing their value to decrease some more.
Seems like one way to deal with the problem would be to wipe your phone before crossing the border, so all Customs ever sees is a (more or less) vanilla OS install. You could then restore your data again once you're on the other side.
Currently doing that is a hit of a hassle, but I think an app could be written to automate the process nicely.
Most normal humans don't want to sit around and do nothing, they want to be productive and make personal goals, balance risk versus security, have control of their destiny, and be able to provide better for their families than they did for themselves.
The above is all very true, but it doesn't follow that humans therefore want to spend their working hours doing tedious manual labor that could be done better by a robot. (I'm not sure you were saying that it did follow, btw)
Ask just about anyone what their dream job would be, and they'll tell you. Ask them why they aren't currently doing their dream job, and they'll tell you that as well -- often it's because there's little or no money to be made as an actor or dance instructor or professional hang glider pilot or artisanal woodworker or etc. Many of these activities can only be hobbies instead of jobs, because people need to feed their children and pay the rent, and so they are forced into doing whatever drudgery the market is willing to pay for, instead of the activities they are really good at and enjoy doing.
But does it have to be that way forever? Without robots and AI, the answer is probably, yes -- there are un-fun tasks that nevertheless need to be done, so those are largely the tasks that society is willing to pay for. The garbage bins aren't going to empty themselves, and all that.
But in a future society where robots can perform most of these everyday tasks effectively "for free"; there is no reason to force a human being to do those tasks. Instead, with the menial labor done by robots, the wage-slaves could then be freed up to pursue whatever "dream job" they want to have, regardless of whether they can find someone willing to pay them much (or anything) to do that job, or not.
How could they afford it? Either because the robot labor has made goods and services so cheap that even a minimal salary is still plenty to meet one's financial needs, or because a system has been set up to tax the robots and use that money to subsidize paying salaries for jobs that would otherwise not be economically possible. Probably a combination of those two things.
Is that happy scenario inevitable? Not on the short term -- the default scenario would be that the owners of the robots keep all their robot-generated wealth to themselves, and become incredibly rich while everyone else becomes unemployed. But what happens then -- when 99% of the population is on welfare? The only difference between that and the "happy scenario" is that the out-of-work majority has no incentive to do anything constructive, and is still viewing their unemployment as a personal failure rather than an inevitable consequence of superhuman AI -- and that stigma will fade rapidly once it becomes apparent that it applies to everyone, not just to the traditional "losers". At that point, people will stop calling it "welfare" and start calling it a "basic living stipend", and if democracy still exists, they will adjust the funding levels provided by it such that the robots' productivity is enjoyed by all and not just by the super-rich.
But that leaves the problem of hopeless couch-potato-ism; so an enhancement to just cash handouts would be encouraging people to pursue their dream activities, and paying them to do so. Then we'd have people living rewarding lives that they chose for themselves, rather than sitting around feeling bad about being on the dole, or slowly dying inside doing tedious make-work.
I think what you're missing is that those programs are still around despite the efforts of the Republican Party's Libertarian wing, and not for lack of trying, either.
Their main problem (in addition to the occasional opposition from the Democrats) is that many Republicans are retirement-age, or have children or grandchildren, and so when they realize that the "waste" that the Republicans are promising to cut is actually their own benefits, they rebel and put a quick stop to the proposed cuts. The libertarians are still working on a way to convince their Republican constituency that their draconian budget cuts will only hurt "other people", but they're running out of dog-whistles for that.
No. A "grieving father" doesn't get a free pass to blame others for his daughter's (and his own) responsibilities in the accident.
Certainly not on Slashdot, anyway, because we're all heartless dicks with no empathy for anyone and a 100% commitment to pursue our mindless blinkered pedantry in each and every situation, no matter how crass or inappropriate it may be. I know, let's all send him hate mail now! That'll teach him not to be illogical when he's grieving!
Programming languages do not matter. Any program can be written in any language. Programming languages are as interchangeable as hammers.
Yes, that's why I write all of my software in Brainfuck, except for the performance-critical parts which I implement directly as a Turing Machine specification. My "hello world" app might not ship for another 18 months, but when it's finally done it's gonna be awesome.
So we have no one doing any work? Robots perform all jobs from the menial to the complex? Everything is free? [...] This sounds like a good thing to you?
Does it matter whether it sounds like a good thing to me, or not? That appears to be the direction we are headed in, unless we are going to outlaw the development of robotics and AI. The only question is, what how are we going to adapt? If we do nothing and just retain the current system, then we still end up with robots doing all the jobs, but also with all of the humans starving (or perhaps living on welfare, if it's available).
Slashdot Mirror
Many people think Trump is an idiot. He is not. He knows exactly what to say in order to make enough people vote for him.
A non-idiot would also know when it is time to stop campaigning for votes and start governing. (or, if his plan was to retain support by remaining permanently in campaign mode, it isn't working)
What if all the switches get stuck on destroy?
It was going to cost a ton of time and money to get all the material ADA compliant, and they would have continued to be in violation the entire time they were working toward that. So they did the only thing they could, and removed everything.
I don't know about the legal issues, but from a common-sense perspective it would make more sense for the captioning to be performed on-demand on a per-video basis; i.e. if a disabled student needs access to a particular video, he/she can request that it be captioned. The captioning is then added to that video and made available to everyone.
That way the ADA students get the captioning they need, and everyone else gets the benefit of the videos as well; plus the captioners don't spend a lot of their limited time captioning video that nobody will actually use the captions of; rather they spend their time captioning videos that actually need captioning sooner rather than later.
I'm guessing that lag and lousy visual quality won't pair well with VR goggles, no?
So at least the VR games won't suffer from these things (or if they do, rampant nausea will kill the market very quickly).
I agree that simplicity is best. I prefer vim but props to the Notepad++ team for fixing this.
Vim is the most secure editor, because so far nobody at the CIA has been able to figure out how it works.
In other words, you could push the most intrusive, malevolent, destructive code to a user's device at will with no oversight.
Isn't this also true for Javascript-embedded-in-a-web-page?
In both cases, the only thing standing between the user and catastrophic fiery death is the security of the execution environment -- either the sandbox keeps the malware from causing damage, or it doesn't. At least in the Apple Store case, the downloaded code is authenticated as coming from a known/registered developer, so there is some (slim) chance of them being held accountable for anything negligent/malicious they might do to your phone.
The issue with Wind and Solar is that they require large areas to be installed on (and power distribution, but I'll focus on the former).
That is an issue. Fortunately there are large areas available to install them on, both on land and at sea.
Progressives have been brainwashed by the Renewable cartel, just like Conservatives were by the Fossil Fuel Cartel.
Or, they realize that we'll continue to want to use energy long after fossil fuels are no longer practical to use, and are making sure we'll have the ability to do so.
Would nuclear plants help solve that problem? They absolutely would, but only if they get built -- and post-Fukushima/Chernobyl, not many people want them built; fewer still want to pay the huge amounts of money it takes to secure them forever against all conceivable failure modes. Is that "brainwashing"? I guess you could call it that; another way to look at it is that people have seen what nuclear power is capable of, and decided they don't want it.
I'd say that nuclear-fission power is in a similar position to fuel cells -- advanced technology with lots of promise, but trailing so badly behind the competition at this point that (barring some miraculous technological leap forward) it probably won't ever catch up and be competitive against other approaches.
Only for the first few years, when you are paying the introductory "teaser" rate. Then the rates are "adjusted" upward, even if overall interest rates don't rise.
That's what I would expect as well -- however, when my ARM adjusted (in 2011), my interest rate went down significantly. I think it was an aberration due to the zero/near-zero interest rate policies put in place by the Fed after the housing crash, but that's what happened.
Technological advancements can't result in long-term widescale job loss. Because if it does, the masses wouldn't be able to buy as much stuff, and it would reduce the country's net productivity, meaning a smaller pie for the rich to take their disproportionate slice from.
That seems like an argument for why it would be bad for technological advancements to result in job loss -- which is a very different thing than an argument for why they can't result in job loss.
If you think the individually-rational decisions of various companies will always guarantee a universally-positive outcome for the market as a whole, then you've never experienced a market crash or a tragedy-of-the-commons. The "invisible hand" is not an infallible guide.
because only a government can deprive people of freedom to make their own economic decisions
Another canard -- there's nothing particularly unique about governments in that respect. Any sufficiently powerful entity can deprive people of freedom to make their own economic choices, and private corporations also do it all the time. Read about the "company store" for miners, or the conditions in which migrant agricultural workers were (and are) held. It's no good to say "well, they're technically free to walk away whenever they want" if, as a practical matter, they do not have the economic resources to do so.
That freedom is what allows people to increase their standard of living - by individually choosing more productive activities over less.
And what do you do when there is no activity that you are capable of that is economically productive, because anything you could do, a machine can do better and more cheaply? Hope that other people will buy your (inferior and more expensive) products/services out of sympathy for your plight?
"Show me an example of a program that you wrote and are proud of"
(and then go over the program with them to make sure they understand how it works and why they wrote it the way they did)
The proof is in the pudding.
Surely if they are able to transplant arms and legs to soldiers, they would be able to transplants arms and legs to resurrected dead guys also? (Assuming they didn't revive him just to watch his horrified reaction at finding himself limbless)
Yeah, Sofia Vergara showing up in my bedroom would be nice, but the likelihood of anything more happening than her channeling the Talking Heads and saying "This is not my beautiful house!" and walking out is less than the above.
Once you've engaged the Improbability Drive, you might as well crank it up to maximum power.
Seems to me that no serious estimate is possible until you know with some degree of certainty what material you're going to be using.
In the best case, you'd use some magic material with an infinite strength-to-weight ratio, and send the whole thing up inside a a 20-pound cubesat for practically no cost.
In the worst case, it wouldn't matter how much you spend, because the material would never be able to support its own weight no matter how big the ribbon was.
The actual case is somewhere between those two extremes, but without knowing where, you can pick any cost estimate you want, and it won't be any more meaningful than any other cost estimate you might choose.
With rockets it is still $100K - $1M per pound to get to the moon. We need a space elevator.
Nah, what we really need is a transporter. Compared to a space elevator, it's cheaper, faster, safer, and at this point, just as technically feasible to build.
It's all fun and games until the dirigible's envelope gets a hole punched in it. I suggest deploying only unmanned dirigibles at first, until the necessary redundancies and materials have been thoroughly proven under real Venutian conditions!
Does it also search through a database of software patents to make sure that it doesn't infringe?
Right now it's using this database, presumably they have a licensing contract with Randall Monroe that gives them permission to use the code.
Your ECC RAM won't matter much if the cosmic ray hits the CPU registers. Or a cell in a block of your flash storage.
Also, your ECC RAM won't matter much if you get run over by a truck. So what? ECC RAM will help if there is a bitflip in your ECC RAM, that's what it's for and that's what the benefit is. It's not going to solve world hunger either, and nobody ever suggested that it would.
The next step would be to deny entry for people with wiped phones.
Perhaps -- and then the countermeasure would be to modify the procedure so that instead of placing a recognizably "vanilla" OS on your phone, it would replace your OS with an image that contains only some of your favorite innocuous data and apps that you don't mind Customs poking around in.
And the cat-and-mouse game continues...
It seems they succeeded in their goal and were hoist by their own petard. Of course, had they recovered the funds then ZeroCoin would have failed at its purpose. I wonder who took the loss.
My intuition was that it would have the same effect as any other currency counterfeiting operation has on the "genuine" currency: i.e. all holders of ZeroCoins took the loss, in the form of a certain amount of extra inflation caused by the increase in "supply", which reduced the values of their ZeroCoin holdings. Possibly also they might take a further loss if people start to lose faith in ZeroCoins and start selling them (or stop buying them), causing their value to decrease some more.
Seems like one way to deal with the problem would be to wipe your phone before crossing the border, so all Customs ever sees is a (more or less) vanilla OS install. You could then restore your data again once you're on the other side.
Currently doing that is a hit of a hassle, but I think an app could be written to automate the process nicely.
Most normal humans don't want to sit around and do nothing, they want to be productive and make personal goals, balance risk versus security, have control of their destiny, and be able to provide better for their families than they did for themselves.
The above is all very true, but it doesn't follow that humans therefore want to spend their working hours doing tedious manual labor that could be done better by a robot. (I'm not sure you were saying that it did follow, btw)
Ask just about anyone what their dream job would be, and they'll tell you. Ask them why they aren't currently doing their dream job, and they'll tell you that as well -- often it's because there's little or no money to be made as an actor or dance instructor or professional hang glider pilot or artisanal woodworker or etc. Many of these activities can only be hobbies instead of jobs, because people need to feed their children and pay the rent, and so they are forced into doing whatever drudgery the market is willing to pay for, instead of the activities they are really good at and enjoy doing.
But does it have to be that way forever? Without robots and AI, the answer is probably, yes -- there are un-fun tasks that nevertheless need to be done, so those are largely the tasks that society is willing to pay for. The garbage bins aren't going to empty themselves, and all that.
But in a future society where robots can perform most of these everyday tasks effectively "for free"; there is no reason to force a human being to do those tasks. Instead, with the menial labor done by robots, the wage-slaves could then be freed up to pursue whatever "dream job" they want to have, regardless of whether they can find someone willing to pay them much (or anything) to do that job, or not.
How could they afford it? Either because the robot labor has made goods and services so cheap that even a minimal salary is still plenty to meet one's financial needs, or because a system has been set up to tax the robots and use that money to subsidize paying salaries for jobs that would otherwise not be economically possible. Probably a combination of those two things.
Is that happy scenario inevitable? Not on the short term -- the default scenario would be that the owners of the robots keep all their robot-generated wealth to themselves, and become incredibly rich while everyone else becomes unemployed. But what happens then -- when 99% of the population is on welfare? The only difference between that and the "happy scenario" is that the out-of-work majority has no incentive to do anything constructive, and is still viewing their unemployment as a personal failure rather than an inevitable consequence of superhuman AI -- and that stigma will fade rapidly once it becomes apparent that it applies to everyone, not just to the traditional "losers". At that point, people will stop calling it "welfare" and start calling it a "basic living stipend", and if democracy still exists, they will adjust the funding levels provided by it such that the robots' productivity is enjoyed by all and not just by the super-rich.
But that leaves the problem of hopeless couch-potato-ism; so an enhancement to just cash handouts would be encouraging people to pursue their dream activities, and paying them to do so. Then we'd have people living rewarding lives that they chose for themselves, rather than sitting around feeling bad about being on the dole, or slowly dying inside doing tedious make-work.
I think what you're missing is that those programs are still around despite the efforts of the Republican Party's Libertarian wing, and not for lack of trying, either.
Their main problem (in addition to the occasional opposition from the Democrats) is that many Republicans are retirement-age, or have children or grandchildren, and so when they realize that the "waste" that the Republicans are promising to cut is actually their own benefits, they rebel and put a quick stop to the proposed cuts. The libertarians are still working on a way to convince their Republican constituency that their draconian budget cuts will only hurt "other people", but they're running out of dog-whistles for that.
No. A "grieving father" doesn't get a free pass to blame others for his daughter's (and his own) responsibilities in the accident.
Certainly not on Slashdot, anyway, because we're all heartless dicks with no empathy for anyone and a 100% commitment to pursue our mindless blinkered pedantry in each and every situation, no matter how crass or inappropriate it may be. I know, let's all send him hate mail now! That'll teach him not to be illogical when he's grieving!
Programming languages do not matter. Any program can be written in any language. Programming languages are as interchangeable as hammers.
Yes, that's why I write all of my software in Brainfuck, except for the performance-critical parts which I implement directly as a Turing Machine specification. My "hello world" app might not ship for another 18 months, but when it's finally done it's gonna be awesome.
So we have no one doing any work? Robots perform all jobs from the menial to the complex? Everything is free? [...] This sounds like a good thing to you?
Does it matter whether it sounds like a good thing to me, or not? That appears to be the direction we are headed in, unless we are going to outlaw the development of robotics and AI. The only question is, what how are we going to adapt? If we do nothing and just retain the current system, then we still end up with robots doing all the jobs, but also with all of the humans starving (or perhaps living on welfare, if it's available).