For a small fraction of what is spent on personal vehicle ownership, we could have pretty amazing public transportation that would satisfy the needs of nearly every city & suburb dweller. And that would naturally lead to fewer serious accidents.
Also for a small fraction of what is spent on fast food, people could buy and cook healthy vegetarian meals for themselves, that would satisfy the nutritional needs of nearly every citizen. And that would naturally lead to fewer cases of heart disease and obesity.
Unfortunately, what people want is not always the same as what would theoretically work the best. In this case, most people want private cars, and they have made that preference clear through both their spending and their voting patterns. Barring the advent of some kind of benign dictatorship, a transition to all-public-transit won't happen anytime soon.
These researchers may be trying to apply the wrong methods to a device that is almost certainly the product of a higher power.
That may well be the case, but if so, it's also quite clear that the higher power used evolution and natural selection as his development tool.
If human brains had just been magic'd into existence by divine fiat, there would be no reason for them to look like a specialized version of the brains of earlier hominids (which in turn look like specialized versions of the brains of earlier mammals, and so on for as far back as you care to look).
unless, of course, you manage to get a majority of the people to record it incorrectly... but gee, that's impossible, right?
Nothing's impossible. However, the relevant question would be, is it harder to subvert a blockchain-based system (where you need subvert "a majority of the people") than the current system (where you need to subvert only one person, as long as it is the right person)?
It seems like a co-ordinated swarm of drones would be a good way to neutralize someone who has decided to go on a shooting spree. They could either attack the shooter or simply swarm around him so that he can't see where he is going, and shooting at them wouldn't be particularly effective since they are small, fast, and there are so many of them.
One use case, imagine I'm a US company and I ship worldwide. A customer wants to buy $5000 of product. I ship the product. They contact their credit card company and say it was a fraudulent charge and they issue a chargeback. My company is out of $5000 and there is not much recourse
If I'm not mistaken, the flip side of this is if you take the customer's Bitcoins and decide not to ship their product. What recourse would your customer have then?
I was at Best Buy last week; all of the TVs there looked awesome. I'm sure some of them looked slightly better than others, but really, who cares? At this point the quality of your viewing experience will be determined almost exclusively by the creative content of the programming you chose to watch, not by any limitations of the display technology. Adam Sandler movies will continue to suck no matter how large the contrast ratio gets.
For products where your relationship with the producer ends at the point of purchase (and you don't much care whether or not you will continue to be able to buy that product in the future), that makes sense.
For a lot of the more complex products (in particular cars, software, computers), however, the value of your purchase will depend strongly on its manufacturer's continued ability to exist and support that product.
i.e. if you bought a Pebble watch last month, you're probably not too happy that Pebble called it quits this month, since that means you won't be getting much in the way of support or updates in the future, and your watch might stop working entirely.
Man replied: "Not really, since in any scenario where that source didn't exist, neither would we. So it was pretty much guaranteed via the anthropic principle"
....at which point God smote mankind for being such intolerable smartasses.
Another good option is to re-use the existing wires in the wall to carry data. Ethernet-over-power-lines is cheap and works well (as long as your two endpoints are on the same circuit, and your appliances aren't too electrically noisy). Ethernet-over-phone-lines rather pricey but also works well (I'm able to get broadband data traffic up to the third story of my building from the garage using 1970's-era phone wiring with this device).
It's like having a bunch of little routers in your home all working together to make sure you can stream The OA regardless of which room you're in.
This is a good reason not to upgrade. The OA is neither as entertaining nor as plausible as the "buffering, please wait" progress bar it would supersede.
Dude, that's just stupid. I love how people make such arguments. "This is the cheapest option available but because there is a businessman in charge, he'll pick more expensive options."
You're right, the businessman will indeed choose the cheapest option -- for him. Which in this case means the option that lets him pay off the political debts to his oil-company backers, stick it to the liberals, and ignore climate change completely, because who cares?
Of course that will be the most expensive option for the rest of humanity, but that hardly matters for Mr. Trump, by the time the shit hits the fan, he'll have already earned his money.
I don't know where this idea came from that businessmen always consider "the big picture" and do the optimal thing. A glance at any given newspaper should suffice to show that businessmen mostly consider only the next quarter's earnings, and sometimes not even that.
Batteries have been a decade away from a major breakthrough for the past 40 years.
The major breakthrough came in the 90s with the advent of the cell phone. Suddenly there was a huge market incentive for investing into battery research to maximize power density. That is why we have 200+ mile range on electric cars now, rather than the 30-70 mile range they could reach back then.
About $250/oz of the value of gold is based purely on the industrial value as a construction material! There is real long-term intrinsic value that serves as a guaranteed floor and allows gold to trade at a much higher level in a similar way to a fiat currency.
What's "intrinsic" about that? Is there some particular reason to think that people will always and forever value gold at $250/oz or higher, no matter what?
Keep in mind that aluminum was once valued more highly than gold, now it's cheap enough that many people don't even both to recycle it but rather just throw it in the landfill.
Seems to me that gold is valued as an industrial material only as long as no cheaper/more-useful substitute can be found, at which point its value would drop accordingly. Outside of that, its main attraction is that it is shiny and people like the way it looks, at which point we're definitely back to 'eye of the beholder' territory.
That's an oversimplification to binary -- of course neither Bitcoin nor anything else is a magical solution to the fact that your government (or any other sufficiently powerful entity) could point a gun at your head (either literally or metaphorically) and force you to comply with whatever demands/rules they've come up with.
The question is, how practical is it for a government to do that on a regular/systemic basis? With a formal banking system, it's quite possible, since there are only a small number of banks and they are easy for a government to regulate. With Bitcoin, it's still possible, but (for now, anyway) considerably more difficult/expensive to carry out, which is why you only see it done in special cases where the government(s) involved can justify the significant cost of doing so.
Perhaps a government will in the future come up with a practical way to systematically regulate all p2p bitcoin-like traffic that can't be easily circumvented, but they haven't done it yet and it might turn out that it's infeasible to do it, ever.
Turns out it's rather simple, really --- just ban computers. He's going to start by replacing computers with human couriers for the secure-messaging market, and move outward from there. By 2020 we should have most of the Internet replaced by the (now greatly expanded) Post Office.
I expect your right, and in six months it will be obvious; however in the meantime I wandered around Best Buy last week to see what USB-C peripherals they had on sale, and the only ones I could find were MacBook Pros and Apple-branded USB-C-to-X dongles for same...:)
Well, there's always the Uber approach -- tunnel at whatever depth you want, and if you hit something man-made, just keep drilling right through it and see if anyone ever notices or complains.
I submit that one of Elon's prime assets is his social capital -- i.e. Elon says that X could be a thing, and as a result of his saying so, enough talented/knowledgeable people get excited about it that it (sometimes) actually becomes a thing, because they then go ahead and implement it (regardless of whether Elon himself ever had the ability to implement it on his own).
Frankly, our society could use more of that. There are too many naysayers, and not enough people willing to take a risk and try something new.
... and the problem there is, nobody can really tell whether a given library is secure or insecure (exception: after an exploit is found, we can say with certainty that it was/is insecure;) ).
So the question becomes, how do we know which third party libraries we can afford to trust the security of our application to?
Slashdot Mirror
For a small fraction of what is spent on personal vehicle ownership, we could have pretty amazing public transportation that would satisfy the needs of nearly every city & suburb dweller. And that would naturally lead to fewer serious accidents.
Also for a small fraction of what is spent on fast food, people could buy and cook healthy vegetarian meals for themselves, that would satisfy the nutritional needs of nearly every citizen. And that would naturally lead to fewer cases of heart disease and obesity.
Unfortunately, what people want is not always the same as what would theoretically work the best. In this case, most people want private cars, and they have made that preference clear through both their spending and their voting patterns. Barring the advent of some kind of benign dictatorship, a transition to all-public-transit won't happen anytime soon.
These researchers may be trying to apply the wrong methods to a device that is almost certainly the product of a higher power.
That may well be the case, but if so, it's also quite clear that the higher power used evolution and natural selection as his development tool.
If human brains had just been magic'd into existence by divine fiat, there would be no reason for them to look like a specialized version of the brains of earlier hominids (which in turn look like specialized versions of the brains of earlier mammals, and so on for as far back as you care to look).
unless, of course, you manage to get a majority of the people to record it incorrectly... but gee, that's impossible, right?
Nothing's impossible. However, the relevant question would be, is it harder to subvert a blockchain-based system (where you need subvert "a majority of the people") than the current system (where you need to subvert only one person, as long as it is the right person)?
It seems like a co-ordinated swarm of drones would be a good way to neutralize someone who has decided to go on a shooting spree. They could either attack the shooter or simply swarm around him so that he can't see where he is going, and shooting at them wouldn't be particularly effective since they are small, fast, and there are so many of them.
Well, someday, maybe.
It's not like they had a high bar to clear. At least there's no exclamation point at the end of this one.
One use case, imagine I'm a US company and I ship worldwide. A customer wants to buy $5000 of product. I ship the product. They contact their credit card company and say it was a fraudulent charge and they issue a chargeback. My company is out of $5000 and there is not much recourse
If I'm not mistaken, the flip side of this is if you take the customer's Bitcoins and decide not to ship their product. What recourse would your customer have then?
Agreed; streaming is more appropriate for content that you're only going to want to watch a single time. (i.e. 99% of what's out there)
What happens then?
Cthulhu awakens.
I was at Best Buy last week; all of the TVs there looked awesome. I'm sure some of them looked slightly better than others, but really, who cares? At this point the quality of your viewing experience will be determined almost exclusively by the creative content of the programming you chose to watch, not by any limitations of the display technology. Adam Sandler movies will continue to suck no matter how large the contrast ratio gets.
For products where your relationship with the producer ends at the point of purchase (and you don't much care whether or not you will continue to be able to buy that product in the future), that makes sense.
For a lot of the more complex products (in particular cars, software, computers), however, the value of your purchase will depend strongly on its manufacturer's continued ability to exist and support that product.
i.e. if you bought a Pebble watch last month, you're probably not too happy that Pebble called it quits this month, since that means you won't be getting much in the way of support or updates in the future, and your watch might stop working entirely.
Man replied: "Not really, since in any scenario where that source didn't exist, neither would we. So it was pretty much guaranteed via the anthropic principle"
Another good option is to re-use the existing wires in the wall to carry data. Ethernet-over-power-lines is cheap and works well (as long as your two endpoints are on the same circuit, and your appliances aren't too electrically noisy). Ethernet-over-phone-lines rather pricey but also works well (I'm able to get broadband data traffic up to the third story of my building from the garage using 1970's-era phone wiring with this device).
It's like having a bunch of little routers in your home all working together to make sure you can stream The OA regardless of which room you're in.
This is a good reason not to upgrade. The OA is neither as entertaining nor as plausible as the "buffering, please wait" progress bar it would supersede.
Dude, that's just stupid. I love how people make such arguments. "This is the cheapest option available but because there is a businessman in charge, he'll pick more expensive options."
You're right, the businessman will indeed choose the cheapest option -- for him. Which in this case means the option that lets him pay off the political debts to his oil-company backers, stick it to the liberals, and ignore climate change completely, because who cares?
Of course that will be the most expensive option for the rest of humanity, but that hardly matters for Mr. Trump, by the time the shit hits the fan, he'll have already earned his money.
I don't know where this idea came from that businessmen always consider "the big picture" and do the optimal thing. A glance at any given newspaper should suffice to show that businessmen mostly consider only the next quarter's earnings, and sometimes not even that.
Batteries have been a decade away from a major breakthrough for the past 40 years.
The major breakthrough came in the 90s with the advent of the cell phone. Suddenly there was a huge market incentive for investing into battery research to maximize power density. That is why we have 200+ mile range on electric cars now, rather than the 30-70 mile range they could reach back then.
About $250/oz of the value of gold is based purely on the industrial value as a construction material! There is real long-term intrinsic value that serves as a guaranteed floor and allows gold to trade at a much higher level in a similar way to a fiat currency.
What's "intrinsic" about that? Is there some particular reason to think that people will always and forever value gold at $250/oz or higher, no matter what?
Keep in mind that aluminum was once valued more highly than gold, now it's cheap enough that many people don't even both to recycle it but rather just throw it in the landfill.
Seems to me that gold is valued as an industrial material only as long as no cheaper/more-useful substitute can be found, at which point its value would drop accordingly. Outside of that, its main attraction is that it is shiny and people like the way it looks, at which point we're definitely back to 'eye of the beholder' territory.
That's an oversimplification to binary -- of course neither Bitcoin nor anything else is a magical solution to the fact that your government (or any other sufficiently powerful entity) could point a gun at your head (either literally or metaphorically) and force you to comply with whatever demands/rules they've come up with.
The question is, how practical is it for a government to do that on a regular/systemic basis? With a formal banking system, it's quite possible, since there are only a small number of banks and they are easy for a government to regulate. With Bitcoin, it's still possible, but (for now, anyway) considerably more difficult/expensive to carry out, which is why you only see it done in special cases where the government(s) involved can justify the significant cost of doing so.
Perhaps a government will in the future come up with a practical way to systematically regulate all p2p bitcoin-like traffic that can't be easily circumvented, but they haven't done it yet and it might turn out that it's infeasible to do it, ever.
Turns out it's rather simple, really --- just ban computers. He's going to start by replacing computers with human couriers for the secure-messaging market, and move outward from there. By 2020 we should have most of the Internet replaced by the (now greatly expanded) Post Office.
I expect your right, and in six months it will be obvious; however in the meantime I wandered around Best Buy last week to see what USB-C peripherals they had on sale, and the only ones I could find were MacBook Pros and Apple-branded USB-C-to-X dongles for same... :)
I we would halt all off shore wind farms and put them where the wind in strong and constant.
The wind offshore is strong and constant. That's one of the main reasons you'd want to put a wind farm there.
Well, there's always the Uber approach -- tunnel at whatever depth you want, and if you hit something man-made, just keep drilling right through it and see if anyone ever notices or complains.
I submit that one of Elon's prime assets is his social capital -- i.e. Elon says that X could be a thing, and as a result of his saying so, enough talented/knowledgeable people get excited about it that it (sometimes) actually becomes a thing, because they then go ahead and implement it (regardless of whether Elon himself ever had the ability to implement it on his own).
Frankly, our society could use more of that. There are too many naysayers, and not enough people willing to take a risk and try something new.
... and the problem there is, nobody can really tell whether a given library is secure or insecure (exception: after an exploit is found, we can say with certainty that it was/is insecure ;) ).
So the question becomes, how do we know which third party libraries we can afford to trust the security of our application to?
15-20 minutes falls well within the ISO standard definition of "a while".
How's the alternative working out for you? They don't make you pay any fees at gas stations, do they?