...really smart people creating things - "war machines" to be blunt - that will wind up killing someone on some battlefield somewhere
Possibly, but I doubt it. We already have plenty of ways to kill people on the battlefield, and very few of them would benefit by adding robotic legs to them. The cavalry upgraded from horses to tanks a long time ago.
These machines would be more useful for logistical support, e.g. moving supplies across terrain that wheeled vehicles can't make it over (although I have my doubts even about that).
You forgot option (3) -- as soon as the user chooses an OS to boot into, that OS auto-deletes the other OS to free up more user-space. I think this might be what Microsoft is going for;^)
I suggest you stop treating it as a function of the state and leave it up to the victim whether to pursue some form of retaliationâ"within the realm of a proportional response, naturallyâ"at their own expense. After all, the victim is the only one with the right to retaliation in the first place.
This would only work in cases where the victim has the resources to mount an effective response. Many victims are too poor, too busy, too scared, too injured, or too dead to do so, and so unless the state does the prosecution for them, the result would be that many crimes could be committed with de facto impunity.
It is not fixed. When these Bitcoins are lost forever, they can be mined again.
I don't see how this could be true without introducing a potential double-spending problem. The issue is that the Bitcoin system has no way of 'knowing' the the Bitcoins are really lost (as opposed to just sitting unused in someone's wallet for a long time). If a Bitcoin miner was allowed to re-mine the unused coins, and then the coins' original owner finally came back from his 30-year trip to Timbuktu and tried to spend said coins, then we'd have a situation where two people "own" the same coins, and either one of them would be refused, or coins would be double-spent. I don't think either of those options would be considered acceptable.
it mainly means that the bitcoin you hold in your account may suddenly jump in value by a factor 10 if the world decides to move the decimal point one more position. Now how's that for a return on investment?!
Yes, that is the kind of return on investment that holders of the Zimbabwean dollar often enjoyed. That's why Zimbabweans are all so rich.;^)
What are you going to give the Tea Partiers to get out of the way?
Personally I'm just going to roll my eyes at them, since I'm not directly involved in the process.
If I was the Democratic Party, OTOH, I would give them -- absolutely nothing, other than the chance to stop the ongoing self-destruction of the Republican Party, whenever they feel like they've done themselves enough damage.
ACA implementation is mandatory spending and is not tied to the annual appropriations bills (source).
Is that arbitrary? Perhaps, in the sense that the Democrats could have crafted the bill's funding mechanism differently (but were smart and/or lucky enough not to). But it's not like someone made that categorization decision of the top of his head just this week.
so what? two-thirds of the federal govenrment serves no good purpose, they're just parasites on our dime.
... according to your own personal definition of "no good purpose". The problem is there are 316 million people in the USA, and every one of them has a different idea of what parts of the government are worth funding, and which are a waste of money. What you see as worthless I may see as an essential service, and vice versa.
Fortunately, we have a mechanism for resolving these disputes, it's called representative democracy. People vote for representatives who then represent their views in the legislature, and those representatives vote on laws and policy. Through this mechanism, the people's will can be (roughly) reflected by the government's policies.
The problem we have currently is that there is a 20% minority (the Tea Party) that is laboring under the delusion that they are a majority, and therefore they think they have the right to coerce the rest of the nation into doing things their way. Procedural shenanigans notwithstanding, that's not how a democracy works, as the Republicans are quickly finding out.
TL;DR: If the Tea Partiers want a nation with a low-tax/low-service government, they need to convince a majority of American voters to elect Tea Party representatives, at which point they'll have control and they can govern as they see fit. Until then, they need to get out of the way; we've a country to run and their narcissistic bullshit is pointless and destructive.
I don't know where you saw me DEMANDING anything. I merely agreed that this is not such a big problem. At worst, you have to downgrade your iOS phone back to an older version, or refrain from upgrading it to iOS7 in the first place. Or maybe you even have to trade it in for another model.
Sure, it's inconvenient, but it's not going to cause you to starve to death, or cause your children to die of dysentery. Hence, it's what they call a first-world problem.
As far as "burning ember of rage and righteous derision", re-read your own post, I think you'll see it there.
Republicans are asking for a one year delay for the individual just as Obama himself asked for a one year delay for corporate entities.
Okay, let's say Obama took them up on that and game out what would happen. The individual mandate is delayed for a year, which removes much of the incentive for people without immediate health problems to sign up for health insurance (because why bother when you could save money by just waiting until you're sick?). The people who are sick (or likely to become sick), on the other hand, still have a big incentive to sign up for insurance, and the insurance companies are obligated to sell it to them. So with only expensive customers in their risk pool, the insurance companies are forced to greatly raise their premiums, which means that healthy people become even less willing to sign up, because now the premiums are too expensive. The ACA enters a death spiral, at the end of which it ends up as a system that offers only unaffordable insurance that nobody can buy. Everyone loses, except for the Republicans, who can now gloat about the "inevitable failure" of the ACA.
No, I can't see Obama going for that, unless he's an idiot.
Who's the villain here?
I'm pretty sure it's the 30 or so Republicans who are holding the rest of the nation hostage, against the wishes of 80% of the American public.
Even as I took the time to compose this post the dismissive parent comment went from a score of 1 to +4, Insightful. Is it because most people have never experienced debilitating motion sickness and thus cannot believe it's real?
I think the "First World Problems" comment was more about iOS7-induced motion sickness than motion sickness in general.
An obvious solution would be not to use a cell phone that causes motion sickness. So this is only a 'big problem' for people who believe that they absolutely must use iOS7 -- i.e. people with an entitled "first world" mindset.
So sure the guy in the summary may have found Ruby a bit more fun, but honestly if he's not got the interest to learn the parts of development that made C++ boring for him his programming abilities are never going to get past the point of any relevance. Either you like the subject enough to push through the hard sometimes even boring bits or you don't.
The above is a huge oversimplification. If it was just a matter of "you're either interested enough to try or you're not", we could start teaching Calculus to first-graders and find out right away which ones were "interested enough" in math to succeed and which ones weren't.
The reality is that people learn at different rates, and presenting people with material that is too far beyond their current skill set will only frustrate them. If the author wasn't able to grok C++ at one stage in his learning development, then C++ was clearly not the appropriate language for him to be learning at that time. As we see, after learning some easier languages (Ruby et al) for a while, the author then had sufficient experience to dive into C/C++. Not everyone is a programming prodigy, but that doesn't mean they can't learn. You have to learn to walk before you can run.
You guys both deserve to sit down and have a beer and a pizza -- you'd probably each find that the other is a perfectly agreeable person. It's silly to rhetorically condemn people to death over a difference in opinion about the meaning of justice.
*If* such a mechanism was coded in, the nature of open source would mean it would be found by others. This in turn would compromise the trust of the ENTIRE kernel. That trust can take years to build up - but be detroyed in a heartbeat.
If it was obviously a deliberate back door, sure. Which is why the clever hacker/government-agency would be a lot more subtle -- rather than a glaring "if (username == "backdoor") allowRootAccess();", they'd put a very subtle mistake into the code instead. If the mistake was detected, they could then simply say "oops, my bad", and it would be fixed for the next release, but other than that nobody would be any the wiser. Repeat as necessary, and the visible results might not look too different from what we actually have.
Humans are highly adaptable and flexible, not merely fast calculators who knows how to react to known conditions.
Some humans are. Many are not. Most are on their own internal auto-pilot, having driven the same route countless times, and are not really paying attention. Some are sleepy, or drunk, or distracted by their kids or a billboard or their cell phone.
If you give up in humanity so quickly, maybe you dont trust yourself or never grew up to be a responcible adult.
So your solution is to just wait for all of humanity to become better drivers? If that was going to happen, it would have happened already.
At this point, the requirements for getting a licence become much harder, much like getting a gun licence in Australia. Must show genuine need, must do yearly tests, must have a much higher skill level than our current drivers and demonstrate a need to be able to operate a vehicle manually.
I doubt this will happen much; there are too many people who enjoy driving to make this politically feasible, regardless of the safety benefits.
More likely what you'll see is cars that can be set to full-automatic-drive or manual-drive-with-emergency-override, so that people who feel like doing the driving themselves can, while people who don't want to drive at the moment don't have to.
Bonus prediction: There will be people who assume the latter mode means they can drive like maniacs, because the computer will be there to swoop in and "rescue" them whenever they make a miscalculation. Some of those people will be wrong.
at some point in the future, people will suicide for lack or purpose or become eternal irresponsible childs. Please mark my words, date time hour and place of this statement. I can stand by it.
It's a pretty easy statement to stand by, given that there's an infinite amount of future ahead of us and you'll be dead for most of it;)
Unfortunately, most of the appeal of a series hybrid is elimination of the drivetrain.
I'd imagine that for non-engineers, the appeal is not having to buy very much gasoline. If the car reliably gets you where you want to go at (effectively) 200+mpg, it hardly matters whether it uses a series hybrid, traditional hybrid, or unicorns under the hood. If it works, it works.
So how long will it be before a student who isn't thrilled with having adults e-stalk them decides to leave a "private" comment about how Principal Lovegood is just a bit too handsy?
Students have been spreading calumnies like that about their principals and teachers since before there was Internet access... I don't think anything would be different now.
OTOH the knowledge that there are adults (virtually) present might well be enough to prevent the Lord of the Flies scenario that seems to play out too often these days.
Or people who don't have a lot of time to mess around with unfamiliar concepts.
How about hooking up 4 SATA and power cables to 4 drives, and engaging RAID software. Hint: it's a trivial amount of work.
It's a trivial amount of work if you already know what RAID is and which RAID software to use and how to set it up and what the gotchas are and what not to do.
For example: if Joe Newbie wants to take one quarter of his files with him on a trip, does he need to bring all 4 SATA drives or can he just bring one of them? The answer is, of course, is "it depends", but the point is that if Joe makes a bad decision there he could end up without any usable data while on his trip, or even (in the worst case) losing his data entirely. Granted that wouldn't happen to someone who knows what they're doing, but that's just the point -- most people do not. They have work they need to get done, and they don't have time for 'learning experiences' while they do it. Hence they pay extra for the simpler known solution.
And of course all of this gets handed over to the government, if not granted a direct feed.
It's even better than that -- you get handed over to the government anytime the Feds present Google with the necessary warrant (and/or back-room strong-arming) for your arrest.
That way they don't have to send out officers to find and arrest you; they just wait for the next time you need to travel somewhere, and -- presto, you are delivered to the local police station instead:)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't start with the best case, start with the 1 in a million case. Proceed from there.
Right-o. If I fly first class, is there an outlet that I can plug my tesla coil into?
...really smart people creating things - "war machines" to be blunt - that will wind up killing someone on some battlefield somewhere
Possibly, but I doubt it. We already have plenty of ways to kill people on the battlefield, and very few of them would benefit by adding robotic legs to them. The cavalry upgraded from horses to tanks a long time ago.
These machines would be more useful for logistical support, e.g. moving supplies across terrain that wheeled vehicles can't make it over (although I have my doubts even about that).
You forgot option (3) -- as soon as the user chooses an OS to boot into, that OS auto-deletes the other OS to free up more user-space. I think this might be what Microsoft is going for ;^)
I suggest you stop treating it as a function of the state and leave it up to the victim whether to pursue some form of retaliationâ"within the realm of a proportional response, naturallyâ"at their own expense. After all, the victim is the only one with the right to retaliation in the first place.
This would only work in cases where the victim has the resources to mount an effective response. Many victims are too poor, too busy, too scared, too injured, or too dead to do so, and so unless the state does the prosecution for them, the result would be that many crimes could be committed with de facto impunity.
It is not fixed. When these Bitcoins are lost forever, they can be mined again.
I don't see how this could be true without introducing a potential double-spending problem. The issue is that the Bitcoin system has no way of 'knowing' the the Bitcoins are really lost (as opposed to just sitting unused in someone's wallet for a long time). If a Bitcoin miner was allowed to re-mine the unused coins, and then the coins' original owner finally came back from his 30-year trip to Timbuktu and tried to spend said coins, then we'd have a situation where two people "own" the same coins, and either one of them would be refused, or coins would be double-spent. I don't think either of those options would be considered acceptable.
it mainly means that the bitcoin you hold in your account may suddenly jump in value by a factor 10 if the world decides to move the decimal point one more position. Now how's that for a return on investment?!
Yes, that is the kind of return on investment that holders of the Zimbabwean dollar often enjoyed. That's why Zimbabweans are all so rich. ;^)
What are you going to give the Tea Partiers to get out of the way?
Personally I'm just going to roll my eyes at them, since I'm not directly involved in the process.
If I was the Democratic Party, OTOH, I would give them -- absolutely nothing, other than the chance to stop the ongoing self-destruction of the Republican Party, whenever they feel like they've done themselves enough damage.
I vote we hire you as the government website author. You've proven an ability to inflate simple numbers by a factor of three
I think what he meant to say is "16.7 million [3-byte session-tokens] is about 50MB.".
FWIW.
ACA implementation is mandatory spending and is not tied to the annual appropriations bills (source).
Is that arbitrary? Perhaps, in the sense that the Democrats could have crafted the bill's funding mechanism differently (but were smart and/or lucky enough not to). But it's not like someone made that categorization decision of the top of his head just this week.
so what? two-thirds of the federal govenrment serves no good purpose, they're just parasites on our dime.
... according to your own personal definition of "no good purpose". The problem is there are 316 million people in the USA, and every one of them has a different idea of what parts of the government are worth funding, and which are a waste of money. What you see as worthless I may see as an essential service, and vice versa.
Fortunately, we have a mechanism for resolving these disputes, it's called representative democracy. People vote for representatives who then represent their views in the legislature, and those representatives vote on laws and policy. Through this mechanism, the people's will can be (roughly) reflected by the government's policies.
The problem we have currently is that there is a 20% minority (the Tea Party) that is laboring under the delusion that they are a majority, and therefore they think they have the right to coerce the rest of the nation into doing things their way. Procedural shenanigans notwithstanding, that's not how a democracy works, as the Republicans are quickly finding out.
TL;DR: If the Tea Partiers want a nation with a low-tax/low-service government, they need to convince a majority of American voters to elect Tea Party representatives, at which point they'll have control and they can govern as they see fit. Until then, they need to get out of the way; we've a country to run and their narcissistic bullshit is pointless and destructive.
I don't know where you saw me DEMANDING anything. I merely agreed that this is not such a big problem. At worst, you have to downgrade your iOS phone back to an older version, or refrain from upgrading it to iOS7 in the first place. Or maybe you even have to trade it in for another model.
Sure, it's inconvenient, but it's not going to cause you to starve to death, or cause your children to die of dysentery. Hence, it's what they call a first-world problem.
As far as "burning ember of rage and righteous derision", re-read your own post, I think you'll see it there.
Republicans are asking for a one year delay for the individual just as Obama himself asked for a one year delay for corporate entities.
Okay, let's say Obama took them up on that and game out what would happen. The individual mandate is delayed for a year, which removes much of the incentive for people without immediate health problems to sign up for health insurance (because why bother when you could save money by just waiting until you're sick?). The people who are sick (or likely to become sick), on the other hand, still have a big incentive to sign up for insurance, and the insurance companies are obligated to sell it to them. So with only expensive customers in their risk pool, the insurance companies are forced to greatly raise their premiums, which means that healthy people become even less willing to sign up, because now the premiums are too expensive. The ACA enters a death spiral, at the end of which it ends up as a system that offers only unaffordable insurance that nobody can buy. Everyone loses, except for the Republicans, who can now gloat about the "inevitable failure" of the ACA.
No, I can't see Obama going for that, unless he's an idiot.
Who's the villain here?
I'm pretty sure it's the 30 or so Republicans who are holding the rest of the nation hostage, against the wishes of 80% of the American public.
Even as I took the time to compose this post the dismissive parent comment went from a score of 1 to +4, Insightful. Is it because most people have never experienced debilitating motion sickness and thus cannot believe it's real?
I think the "First World Problems" comment was more about iOS7-induced motion sickness than motion sickness in general.
An obvious solution would be not to use a cell phone that causes motion sickness. So this is only a 'big problem' for people who believe that they absolutely must use iOS7 -- i.e. people with an entitled "first world" mindset.
So sure the guy in the summary may have found Ruby a bit more fun, but honestly if he's not got the interest to learn the parts of development that made C++ boring for him his programming abilities are never going to get past the point of any relevance. Either you like the subject enough to push through the hard sometimes even boring bits or you don't.
The above is a huge oversimplification. If it was just a matter of "you're either interested enough to try or you're not", we could start teaching Calculus to first-graders and find out right away which ones were "interested enough" in math to succeed and which ones weren't.
The reality is that people learn at different rates, and presenting people with material that is too far beyond their current skill set will only frustrate them. If the author wasn't able to grok C++ at one stage in his learning development, then C++ was clearly not the appropriate language for him to be learning at that time. As we see, after learning some easier languages (Ruby et al) for a while, the author then had sufficient experience to dive into C/C++. Not everyone is a programming prodigy, but that doesn't mean they can't learn. You have to learn to walk before you can run.
You deserve to be shot.
You too deserve to be shot, for treason.
You guys both deserve to sit down and have a beer and a pizza -- you'd probably each find that the other is a perfectly agreeable person. It's silly to rhetorically condemn people to death over a difference in opinion about the meaning of justice.
*If* such a mechanism was coded in, the nature of open source would mean it would be found by others. This in turn would compromise the trust of the ENTIRE kernel. That trust can take years to build up - but be detroyed in a heartbeat.
If it was obviously a deliberate back door, sure. Which is why the clever hacker/government-agency would be a lot more subtle -- rather than a glaring "if (username == "backdoor") allowRootAccess();", they'd put a very subtle mistake into the code instead. If the mistake was detected, they could then simply say "oops, my bad", and it would be fixed for the next release, but other than that nobody would be any the wiser. Repeat as necessary, and the visible results might not look too different from what we actually have.
Sorry boss, there is 4 inch of snow on the road so I cannot go to work... pathetic!
Or awesome, depending on your office environment.
Humans are highly adaptable and flexible, not merely fast calculators who knows how to react to known conditions.
Some humans are. Many are not. Most are on their own internal auto-pilot, having driven the same route countless times, and are not really paying attention. Some are sleepy, or drunk, or distracted by their kids or a billboard or their cell phone.
If you give up in humanity so quickly, maybe you dont trust yourself or never grew up to be a responcible adult.
So your solution is to just wait for all of humanity to become better drivers? If that was going to happen, it would have happened already.
At this point, the requirements for getting a licence become much harder, much like getting a gun licence in Australia. Must show genuine need, must do yearly tests, must have a much higher skill level than our current drivers and demonstrate a need to be able to operate a vehicle manually.
I doubt this will happen much; there are too many people who enjoy driving to make this politically feasible, regardless of the safety benefits.
More likely what you'll see is cars that can be set to full-automatic-drive or manual-drive-with-emergency-override, so that people who feel like doing the driving themselves can, while people who don't want to drive at the moment don't have to.
Bonus prediction: There will be people who assume the latter mode means they can drive like maniacs, because the computer will be there to swoop in and "rescue" them whenever they make a miscalculation. Some of those people will be wrong.
at some point in the future, people will suicide for lack or purpose or become eternal irresponsible childs. Please mark my words, date time hour and place of this statement. I can stand by it.
It's a pretty easy statement to stand by, given that there's an infinite amount of future ahead of us and you'll be dead for most of it ;)
Unfortunately, most of the appeal of a series hybrid is elimination of the drivetrain.
I'd imagine that for non-engineers, the appeal is not having to buy very much gasoline. If the car reliably gets you where you want to go at (effectively) 200+mpg, it hardly matters whether it uses a series hybrid, traditional hybrid, or unicorns under the hood. If it works, it works.
*EVERY* problem in the classroom is solvable with a properly trained and experienced teacher.
Great, but this problem is happening outside the classroom.
So how long will it be before a student who isn't thrilled with having adults e-stalk them decides to leave a "private" comment about how Principal Lovegood is just a bit too handsy?
Students have been spreading calumnies like that about their principals and teachers since before there was Internet access... I don't think anything would be different now.
OTOH the knowledge that there are adults (virtually) present might well be enough to prevent the Lord of the Flies scenario that seems to play out too often these days.
So in other words, stupid people. Right
Or people who don't have a lot of time to mess around with unfamiliar concepts.
How about hooking up 4 SATA and power cables to 4 drives, and engaging RAID software. Hint: it's a trivial amount of work.
It's a trivial amount of work if you already know what RAID is and which RAID software to use and how to set it up and what the gotchas are and what not to do.
For example: if Joe Newbie wants to take one quarter of his files with him on a trip, does he need to bring all 4 SATA drives or can he just bring one of them? The answer is, of course, is "it depends", but the point is that if Joe makes a bad decision there he could end up without any usable data while on his trip, or even (in the worst case) losing his data entirely. Granted that wouldn't happen to someone who knows what they're doing, but that's just the point -- most people do not. They have work they need to get done, and they don't have time for 'learning experiences' while they do it. Hence they pay extra for the simpler known solution.
And of course all of this gets handed over to the government, if not granted a direct feed.
It's even better than that -- you get handed over to the government anytime the Feds present Google with the necessary warrant (and/or back-room strong-arming) for your arrest.
That way they don't have to send out officers to find and arrest you; they just wait for the next time you need to travel somewhere, and -- presto, you are delivered to the local police station instead :)