If 95% of the entire world population was converted into zombies magically overnight, it would take the other 5% 20 days at 1 zombie a day to eradicate the horde.
How long would it take the 95% to eliminate (or convert, if you prefer) most of the 5%?
Are you trying to imply that they way people communicate is forever fixed in stone and cannot be changed or improved upon? Don't you think that's a little shortsighted?
Sorry, could you rephrase your questions? I didn't understand what you were asking, as I was unable to see your facial expression as you were typing them.
Maybe in another 20 years they'll re-discover perspective.
That's the thing, isn't it? It seems OS look-and-feel trends are just going around in circles.
Perhaps they should just make a slider that lets you choose which year you want your desktop to look like, and be done with it. (or would adding that feature remove peoples' sole remaining incentive to upgrade every other year?)
I bet we could outsource that work to a 3rd world country and only pay a 1/10 of minimum wage. It is not like the pilots would have to be physically here in the US to run them remotely.
Good idea! We can hire drone pilots for cheap in, say, Pakistan. I can't think of anything that could possibly go wrong with this plan.;^)
Sounds more like all ideologies are harmful, religious or otherwise.
It's not that ideologies are always harmful, so much as that acting without thinking can be harmful, and ideology discourages people from thinking things through for themselves.
If people are carefully and honestly thinking through the consequences of their actions, they are less likely to harm themselves or others.
If, OTOH, people are blindly following dogma rather than engaging in rational thought.... well, often that isn't an immediate problem (either because the dogma is reasonably applicable to the situation at hand, or because the consequences of the decisions being made on auto-pilot are not too severe). But it does open the door for serious harm to occur, because people who aren't thinking are not able to quickly or easily detect or amend their mistakes.
So why hasn't it happened? Is the panopticon that good? Are they just burying all the stories of thwarted attempts?
I'd go with another theory -- there are very, very few people inside the USA who want to be terrorists (and even fewer with the required combination of skills and ruthlessness to actually pull off a successful act of terrorism).
The reason why: If you're living in a hopelessly dysfunctional third-world hellhole, you don't have a lot to lose, so you may well just say "screw it" and throw in your lot with the local terrorist militia, in the hopes that shaking things up enough might somehow improve things. If you're inside the USA, on the other hand, your quality of life is (or at least, can be) much higher, so you'll be less tempted to throw all that away for the glory of jihad.
The TSA will be at all entrances doing bag checks.
Getting into the mall will become such a hassle that almost nobody will go there; instead people will do most of their shopping on line and the rest at non-mall locations.
A lot of positions require learning algorithms. Once you have those, what's stopping them from learning whole new jobs without programmer's intervention?
A major part of programming is talking to your users, learning about what the problem is that they need to have solved, and then designing a program that will (hopefully) solve that problem for them in a reasonably acceptable manner. If/when a computer program is intelligent enough to do that, then we've pretty much reached human-level AI, and at that point the world will be so different from today's that underemployment of human programmers will likely be the least of our concerns.
The problem with a vaccum tube, though, is that it is closed at both ends. As much as it sucks coming to an early stop below the surface, slamming into the airlock is going to hurt, at a speed which would otherwise get you up for another 4km;)
The fix is to make the "short" end of the tube taller, so that it sticks up above the Earth's surface as much as necessary. Oh yeah, and put a handrail next to the airlock.
It's kind of beside the point whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. No doubt it will have some combination of good and bad effects, but regardless of what the effects are, the cat is out of the bag -- the algorithm is invented and it's not going to go away. And if these guys hadn't invented it, somebody else would have. The only question that remains is how society ought to react to its existence.
...that he will be strongly in favor of whatever the audience is in favor of in whatever venue he's speaking (because he won't really talk to Republicans anyway, so in that sense self-selecting).
Should I infer from this that you believe that Republicans are against strong encryption?
I'd think the Libertarian wing of the Republican party, at least, would want to promote strong encryption everywhere. I'm not sure where the "Defend America Against Evil" wing stands on the issue. (The "We Are Against Whatever Obama Is For" wing, of course, doesn't itself know where it stands on any given issue, until after Obama has stated his position;))
Alright sir, I see you are here to defend patent XJ82934952H28354. Why isn't the inventor here? > I'm right here, your Honor! Someone said you used a computer program to write this patent. Is that true? > It sure is, your Honor! But then again, most everybody uses a computer program to write patents these days. Microsoft Word, for example. Ah, I see. Carry on!
I wonder how many TV companies would shovel over billions for the rights to broadcast "The Real World"/"Survivor"/"Big Brother" Mars for long term funding.
Let's assume the best-case scenario -- that the entertainment industry is dying to get broadcast rights for the Mars Reality TV show and will pay top dollar to do so.
What constitutes "top dollar" for that industry? i.e. how much could they afford to pay if they really wanted to?
I'm not sure how to answer that, but the biggest TV event I'm aware of is the World Cup, which brought in $4 billion to FIFA last year.
Would $4 billion be enough for a Mars colonization program? According to this article, they'd still be $2 billion short.
A very speculative statement, not to mention the fact that Tesla has been losing money.
I don't think I can convince you with further argument, so I'll just leave you with this paragraph from the "History of Electric Vehicles" page on Wikipedia (see the page itself for citations):
Senior leaders at several large automakers, including Nissan and General Motors, have stated that the [Tesla] Roadster was a catalyst which demonstrated that there is pent-up consumer demand for more efficient vehicles. GM vice-chairman Bob Lutz said in 2007 that the Tesla Roadster inspired him to push GM to develop the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid sedan prototype that aims to reverse years of dwindling market share and massive financial losses for America's largest automaker.[79] In an August 2009 edition of The New Yorker, Lutz was quoted as saying, "All the geniuses here at General Motors kept saying lithium-ion technology is 10 years away, and Toyota agreed with us -- and boom, along comes Tesla. So I said, 'How come some tiny little California startup, run by guys who know nothing about the car business, can do this, and we can't?' That was the crowbar that helped break up the log jam."
No, but they were the first to sell an EV that made non-geeks' pulses quicken. The vehicles sold before that were more of the "eat your vegetables" variety, and thus doomed to be money-losing niche vehicles, useful only as arguments against the viability of the electric vehicle market.
They did move first into the high end market, but what will matter is the lower end mass market where existing EVs are trying to sell.
Sure, but you can't get to the mass market without starting somewhere viable. Previous attempts to start at the low end failed (see: EV-1, RAV4 EV), and failures don't help the EV market grow.
The EV market would evolve, with or without subsidies, and with or without Tesla.
That's an assertion only -- I don't see any evidence to back it up. Before Tesla's successes, no other companies were marketing a desirable electric car, and there was little evidence that any of them had much interest in doing so in the future.
Sure, the EV market would have caught on anyway, decades from now, after gas prices rose high enough that almost nobody could to afford to drive a traditional car anymore; but that's a rather grim scenario that I think we are well-served to avoid.
That some wealthy folks that don't need the money are getting it isn't really helping anybody expect them and Tesla.
Them, and Tesla, and everyone else who will buy an electric car that wouldn't have existed without Tesla's demonstration of how to profitably sell EVs, and all the other car companies that can now take advantage of the technology Tesla developed.
Giving a few wealthy folks money to buy high cost EV's that often aren't even their primary vehicle isn't going to do much to help the global warming situation.
I think it already has -- the model S showed the auto industry that there is a market for electric cars, if those cars provide a good customer experience. Before Tesla, the general thought in the car industry was that electric cars would have to be cheaper than gasoline cars in order to sell, but that idea never worked -- because it was impossible to price an electric car that cheap without stripping it down into an unsellable golf-cart. Tesla demonstrated that the way to sell electric cars wasn't to make them cheaper than gasoline cars, but rather to make them better. Now we have other manufacturers (BMW, Nissan, GM) competing to get into that market, and the development-and-competition ball is rolling. The next step is for competition and volume production to bring prices down, just like they did for gasoline cars in the early 20th century.
Our upside might be much greater if that money were used for development and improvement of solutions.
Perhaps, if you knew which companies to throw the development money at. But that's a hard thing to predict reliably (witness the long succession of "visionary" electric car companies whose products went nowhere, despite significant investment). This way, the customers decide which electric car designs are worth supporting and which are not.
This year. Unlike certain whiners, the government is thinking long-term.
Why is the government giving subsidies to people for buying these cars?
Because the government has a long-term goal of reducing carbon emissions and reducing America's reliance on oil. Subsidies for electric cars help develop battery technology and other infrastructure necessary for making that transition, sooner and less disruptively than the market would manage on its own.
That means middle class people like me have to pay more in taxes so we continue to not be able to afford an expensive car like a Tesla and so that the rich can afford to buy a Tesla for less than the true cost.
The upside for you is that when the shit finally hits the fan regarding oil consumption (either due to geopolitical problems, peak oil, or the effects of global warming becoming intolerable), you will be much more likely at that point to have the option of buying an affordably priced electric car to serve your transportation needs. That will be less painful for you than paying $20/gallon for gas, or going without a car -- your other two options in a scenario where the electric cars market was not well developed in advance of our need for it.
There will be a surge and resulting peak in demand for their expensive cars and then demand will fall off a cliff and the company will eventually disappear.
That's assuming that (a) Tesla continues to make only high-end/expensive cars, and (b) that the (now saturated) market for high-end/expensive Teslas is insufficient to support the company. The former is possible, but only if Tesla doesn't follow through on their stated goals with the Model 3 (and presumably, other cheaper models thereafter). The latter is also possible, although that problem doesn't seem to stop other high-end auto companies from staying in business.
Maybe then we'll finally stop seeing the endless supply of pump and dump stock articles that appear on/., esp positive-spin articles like this one that magically appear whenever there is negative news about the company.
if i find your drones from any of you around my house they will be shot out of the sky and destroyed completely.
That's why I bought three dozen of the tiny $39.95 model. I figure if I send them all to your house simultaneously, at least some of them will get through. I've programmed them all to try to land on your head; game on!
Actually the odds of you becoming a multi millionaire are significant higher forming a startup.
Maybe, if you have a good head for business and are willing and able to put in the necessary time and effort.
Most people (including me), would not enjoy forming a startup and would almost certainly not profit from it. We'd almost certainly not profit much from the lottery-ticket route either, but at least that option is quick, easy, and enjoyable.
Then, it's perfectly logical: for the same $2, a $500 million jackpot provides 12.5x the entertainment of a $40 million jackpot.
Maybe, but... I'm trying to think of the things I could buy (or do) with $500 million that I couldn't also buy (or do) with "only" $40 million. I'm not coming up with a whole lot. Moon base, maybe?
I'm not actually worried about the handful of birds so much as I just think CSP is a waste of money that could better be spent developing cheaper and more efficient photovoltaic cells.
You might be right, but CSP does have its advantages; cheaper materials for one (at least until PV cell prices come down a good deal more), and more importantly, the ability to continue generating power after sunset (or when clouds pass overhead) by using heat that was stored up earlier during the day. The heated salt solution acts like a huge, inexpensive battery in that respect.
Slashdot Mirror
If 95% of the entire world population was converted into zombies magically overnight, it would take the other 5% 20 days at 1 zombie a day to eradicate the horde.
How long would it take the 95% to eliminate (or convert, if you prefer) most of the 5%?
Are you trying to imply that they way people communicate is forever fixed in stone and cannot be changed or improved upon? Don't you think that's a little shortsighted?
Sorry, could you rephrase your questions? I didn't understand what you were asking, as I was unable to see your facial expression as you were typing them.
So I accept beer, scotch, and redeaded women.
Wow, you are one twisted individual :)
Maybe in another 20 years they'll re-discover perspective.
That's the thing, isn't it? It seems OS look-and-feel trends are just going around in circles.
Perhaps they should just make a slider that lets you choose which year you want your desktop to look like, and be done with it. (or would adding that feature remove peoples' sole remaining incentive to upgrade every other year?)
I bet we could outsource that work to a 3rd world country and only pay a 1/10 of minimum wage. It is not like the pilots would have to be physically here in the US to run them remotely.
Good idea! We can hire drone pilots for cheap in, say, Pakistan. I can't think of anything that could possibly go wrong with this plan. ;^)
Sounds more like all ideologies are harmful, religious or otherwise.
It's not that ideologies are always harmful, so much as that acting without thinking can be harmful, and ideology discourages people from thinking things through for themselves.
If people are carefully and honestly thinking through the consequences of their actions, they are less likely to harm themselves or others.
If, OTOH, people are blindly following dogma rather than engaging in rational thought.... well, often that isn't an immediate problem (either because the dogma is reasonably applicable to the situation at hand, or because the consequences of the decisions being made on auto-pilot are not too severe). But it does open the door for serious harm to occur, because people who aren't thinking are not able to quickly or easily detect or amend their mistakes.
So why hasn't it happened? Is the panopticon that good? Are they just burying all the stories of thwarted attempts?
I'd go with another theory -- there are very, very few people inside the USA who want to be terrorists (and even fewer with the required combination of skills and ruthlessness to actually pull off a successful act of terrorism).
The reason why: If you're living in a hopelessly dysfunctional third-world hellhole, you don't have a lot to lose, so you may well just say "screw it" and throw in your lot with the local terrorist militia, in the hopes that shaking things up enough might somehow improve things. If you're inside the USA, on the other hand, your quality of life is (or at least, can be) much higher, so you'll be less tempted to throw all that away for the glory of jihad.
The TSA will be at all entrances doing bag checks.
Getting into the mall will become such a hassle that almost nobody will go there; instead people will do most of their shopping on line and the rest at non-mall locations.
Actually, that doesn't sound too bad.
A lot of positions require learning algorithms. Once you have those, what's stopping them from learning whole new jobs without programmer's intervention?
A major part of programming is talking to your users, learning about what the problem is that they need to have solved, and then designing a program that will (hopefully) solve that problem for them in a reasonably acceptable manner. If/when a computer program is intelligent enough to do that, then we've pretty much reached human-level AI, and at that point the world will be so different from today's that underemployment of human programmers will likely be the least of our concerns.
So it's reinventing quantum physics: it's fuzzy until you look at it more carefully. P.S. don't look at cats.
He's not kidding. I looked at my cat through VR glasses and saw this.
The problem with a vaccum tube, though, is that it is closed at both ends. As much as it sucks coming to an early stop below the surface, slamming into the airlock is going to hurt, at a speed which would otherwise get you up for another 4km ;)
The fix is to make the "short" end of the tube taller, so that it sticks up above the Earth's surface as much as necessary. Oh yeah, and put a handrail next to the airlock.
It's kind of beside the point whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. No doubt it will have some combination of good and bad effects, but regardless of what the effects are, the cat is out of the bag -- the algorithm is invented and it's not going to go away. And if these guys hadn't invented it, somebody else would have. The only question that remains is how society ought to react to its existence.
...that he will be strongly in favor of whatever the audience is in favor of in whatever venue he's speaking (because he won't really talk to Republicans anyway, so in that sense self-selecting).
Should I infer from this that you believe that Republicans are against strong encryption?
I'd think the Libertarian wing of the Republican party, at least, would want to promote strong encryption everywhere. I'm not sure where the "Defend America Against Evil" wing stands on the issue. (The "We Are Against Whatever Obama Is For" wing, of course, doesn't itself know where it stands on any given issue, until after Obama has stated his position ;))
I think it will be more like:
Alright sir, I see you are here to defend patent XJ82934952H28354. Why isn't the inventor here?
> I'm right here, your Honor!
Someone said you used a computer program to write this patent. Is that true?
> It sure is, your Honor! But then again, most everybody uses a computer program to write patents these days. Microsoft Word, for example.
Ah, I see. Carry on!
I wonder how many TV companies would shovel over billions for the rights to broadcast "The Real World"/"Survivor"/"Big Brother" Mars for long term funding.
Let's assume the best-case scenario -- that the entertainment industry is dying to get broadcast rights for the Mars Reality TV show and will pay top dollar to do so.
What constitutes "top dollar" for that industry? i.e. how much could they afford to pay if they really wanted to?
I'm not sure how to answer that, but the biggest TV event I'm aware of is the World Cup, which brought in $4 billion to FIFA last year.
Would $4 billion be enough for a Mars colonization program? According to this article, they'd still be $2 billion short.
A very speculative statement, not to mention the fact that Tesla has been losing money.
I don't think I can convince you with further argument, so I'll just leave you with this paragraph from the "History of Electric Vehicles" page on Wikipedia (see the page itself for citations):
Senior leaders at several large automakers, including Nissan and General Motors, have stated that the [Tesla] Roadster was a catalyst which demonstrated that there is pent-up consumer demand for more efficient vehicles. GM vice-chairman Bob Lutz said in 2007 that the Tesla Roadster inspired him to push GM to develop the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid sedan prototype that aims to reverse years of dwindling market share and massive financial losses for America's largest automaker.[79] In an August 2009 edition of The New Yorker, Lutz was quoted as saying, "All the geniuses here at General Motors kept saying lithium-ion technology is 10 years away, and Toyota agreed with us -- and boom, along comes Tesla. So I said, 'How come some tiny little California startup, run by guys who know nothing about the car business, can do this, and we can't?' That was the crowbar that helped break up the log jam."
Tesla was not first to market with an EV.
No, but they were the first to sell an EV that made non-geeks' pulses quicken. The vehicles sold before that were more of the "eat your vegetables" variety, and thus doomed to be money-losing niche vehicles, useful only as arguments against the viability of the electric vehicle market.
They did move first into the high end market, but what will matter is the lower end mass market where existing EVs are trying to sell.
Sure, but you can't get to the mass market without starting somewhere viable. Previous attempts to start at the low end failed (see: EV-1, RAV4 EV), and failures don't help the EV market grow.
The EV market would evolve, with or without subsidies, and with or without Tesla.
That's an assertion only -- I don't see any evidence to back it up. Before Tesla's successes, no other companies were marketing a desirable electric car, and there was little evidence that any of them had much interest in doing so in the future.
Sure, the EV market would have caught on anyway, decades from now, after gas prices rose high enough that almost nobody could to afford to drive a traditional car anymore; but that's a rather grim scenario that I think we are well-served to avoid.
That some wealthy folks that don't need the money are getting it isn't really helping anybody expect them and Tesla.
Them, and Tesla, and everyone else who will buy an electric car that wouldn't have existed without Tesla's demonstration of how to profitably sell EVs, and all the other car companies that can now take advantage of the technology Tesla developed.
Giving a few wealthy folks money to buy high cost EV's that often aren't even their primary vehicle isn't going to do much to help the global warming situation.
I think it already has -- the model S showed the auto industry that there is a market for electric cars, if those cars provide a good customer experience. Before Tesla, the general thought in the car industry was that electric cars would have to be cheaper than gasoline cars in order to sell, but that idea never worked -- because it was impossible to price an electric car that cheap without stripping it down into an unsellable golf-cart. Tesla demonstrated that the way to sell electric cars wasn't to make them cheaper than gasoline cars, but rather to make them better. Now we have other manufacturers (BMW, Nissan, GM) competing to get into that market, and the development-and-competition ball is rolling. The next step is for competition and volume production to bring prices down, just like they did for gasoline cars in the early 20th century.
Our upside might be much greater if that money were used for development and improvement of solutions.
Perhaps, if you knew which companies to throw the development money at. But that's a hard thing to predict reliably (witness the long succession of "visionary" electric car companies whose products went nowhere, despite significant investment). This way, the customers decide which electric car designs are worth supporting and which are not.
Teslas are for rich people.
This year. Unlike certain whiners, the government is thinking long-term.
Why is the government giving subsidies to people for buying these cars?
Because the government has a long-term goal of reducing carbon emissions and reducing America's reliance on oil. Subsidies for electric cars help develop battery technology and other infrastructure necessary for making that transition, sooner and less disruptively than the market would manage on its own.
That means middle class people like me have to pay more in taxes so we continue to not be able to afford an expensive car like a Tesla and so that the rich can afford to buy a Tesla for less than the true cost.
The upside for you is that when the shit finally hits the fan regarding oil consumption (either due to geopolitical problems, peak oil, or the effects of global warming becoming intolerable), you will be much more likely at that point to have the option of buying an affordably priced electric car to serve your transportation needs. That will be less painful for you than paying $20/gallon for gas, or going without a car -- your other two options in a scenario where the electric cars market was not well developed in advance of our need for it.
There will be a surge and resulting peak in demand for their expensive cars and then demand will fall off a cliff and the company will eventually disappear.
That's assuming that (a) Tesla continues to make only high-end/expensive cars, and (b) that the (now saturated) market for high-end/expensive Teslas is insufficient to support the company. The former is possible, but only if Tesla doesn't follow through on their stated goals with the Model 3 (and presumably, other cheaper models thereafter). The latter is also possible, although that problem doesn't seem to stop other high-end auto companies from staying in business.
Maybe then we'll finally stop seeing the endless supply of pump and dump stock articles that appear on /., esp positive-spin articles like this one that magically appear whenever there is negative news about the company.
Now who is being the naive optimist, eh bucko? ;^)
if i find your drones from any of you around my house they will be shot out of the sky and destroyed completely.
That's why I bought three dozen of the tiny $39.95 model. I figure if I send them all to your house simultaneously, at least some of them will get through. I've programmed them all to try to land on your head; game on!
Actually the odds of you becoming a multi millionaire are significant higher forming a startup.
Maybe, if you have a good head for business and are willing and able to put in the necessary time and effort.
Most people (including me), would not enjoy forming a startup and would almost certainly not profit from it. We'd almost certainly not profit much from the lottery-ticket route either, but at least that option is quick, easy, and enjoyable.
Is it not good that we live in a country where we can spend money on lottery tickets if we choose?
Is it good that people have the freedom to make bad decisions? Yes.
Is it good that people then go ahead and actually make bad decisions? No. (at least, it's not good for them)
Then, it's perfectly logical: for the same $2, a $500 million jackpot provides 12.5x the entertainment of a $40 million jackpot.
Maybe, but... I'm trying to think of the things I could buy (or do) with $500 million that I couldn't also buy (or do) with "only" $40 million. I'm not coming up with a whole lot. Moon base, maybe?
I'm not actually worried about the handful of birds so much as I just think CSP is a waste of money that could better be spent developing cheaper and more efficient photovoltaic cells.
You might be right, but CSP does have its advantages; cheaper materials for one (at least until PV cell prices come down a good deal more), and more importantly, the ability to continue generating power after sunset (or when clouds pass overhead) by using heat that was stored up earlier during the day. The heated salt solution acts like a huge, inexpensive battery in that respect.