Then someone steps into the street unexpectedly and the first car in the line has to brake suddenly. Bang! Bang! Bang! Hear the sound of multiple rear end collisions.
Yes, that could definitely happen, if the people writing the driving software failed to take that possibility into account.
But more likely they will take unexpected panic stops into account, and space the cars accordingly. The people who design automated car software aren't completely stupid.
And given that a computer can have a reaction time measured in microseconds, the likelihood is that even with the necessary spacing to handle a panic stop, the cars will still be fairly close together. (The distance between cars will need to vary proportionally to their speed, though -- which will be an interesting problem to handle when there are a large number of cars in a line on the highway... when the cars want to speed up, where does the extra space come from?)
Do we have regular bitcoin stories everytime they sneeze. I guarantee there are Bitcoin PR people planting stories here and they are goaled on how many stories they get out.
There's no need to invoke a conspiracy. The fact is that BitCoin is catnip to several common type of nerd -- the wannabe cypherpunks who like to see computers change the world, and the libertarians who want to see the centralized government control marginalized in favor of individuals. Not to mention the programmer nerds (like myself) who are simply impressed by BitCoin as a p2p software design that has managed to avoid catastrophic implosion (so far) despite the obvious monetary incentive for people to attack it.
So yes, there are a lot of BitCoin stories on Slashdots, simply because many nerds find BitCoin interesting.
Yes, you do... as long as you aren't harming others in the process.
Where it gets sticky is in the definition of what constitutes "harming others". For example, some argue that self-abuse (e.g. chronic drug use, or suicide) counts as harming others, in that by removing yourself from society, the other people in the society lose the benefits of your productivity/friendship/support/expertise/etc.
On the plus side, that will make the courts' job easier in most cases -- instead of unreliable and/or dishonest witness testimony, you'll have multiple streams of audio and video to look at.
On the minus side, no privacy for anyone outside their shuttered home... and anything you say or do in public will be recorded forever, so no living down any regrettable mistakes, either.
I've had exactly one SSD thus far. Yeah, it was definitely fast (notice "was"). Then it bit the big one.
Anecdotal evidence isn't very useful, since there are plenty of traditional hard drives that fail as well, and plenty of SSDs that do not fail.
What would be useful information is the failure rates of the SSDs that are currently on sale, compared to the failure rates of their spinning counterparts.
(Of course a hybrid drive is probably less reliable than either, since it has two technologies in it, and a failure in either one means you're boned)
Hiding the truth does nothing to help them look good, and in the long term adds to their list of mistakes
The truth is that in many cases they don't really know what is going on. So they can either say "don't worry, everything is fine" (and rightly be accused of spinning), or they can say "this is what we think is happening" (and be unjustly -- but inevitably -- accused of lying when it turns out to be something different).
The third option, where they come out and say "we honestly don't know what's going on down there", is probably the most problematic for them, as it would result in responses like "well if you don't know what's going on, maybe you're not qualified to run a reactor", and then the political problems would make solving the technical problems even harder. (Which isn't to say that such a response is necessarily incorrect; only that the technical people are trying to concentrate on the technical problems at hand, and aren't terribly motivated to create new political problems for themselves on top of that)
And who will pay for this rocket? Just putting a person in space is extraordinarily expensive, shooting them all to Mars is mind-blowingly expensive, and even if they're crazy people with absurd dreams(are they?) you'd want to get something for doing it.
We're going to cut costs by not putting any fuel in the rocket. Then at launch time we'll anesthetize the crew, attach video screens over the ship's viewports, and move the rocket to the middle of the Australian Outback. Two years later we'll remove the video screens and see how long it takes them to figure out what planet they are on.
Mars one will not repeat this achievement. It lacks the money, the people and the technology by an enormous margin.
All you need is the right enabling technology and you can dramatically lower your mission costs. And the US government clearly has developed the necessary technology, so it's just a matter of convincing them to share it with the Mars One folks.
Something a human astronaut could have accomplished in a day.
So, for the sake of argument, let's say a human can do things 100 times faster. On the other hand, if sending a human also costs 100 times more money, why not just send 100 robots and let them work in parallel? It costs the same either way, and gets the same amount of work done, but the robots are a lot less likely to die, and it's a lot less traumatic and controversial if/when some of them do.
Once the robots have finished the construction of a nice research base, hotel, and spaceport on Mars, that would be a good time to send the first humans over.
What is more humane: to create millions of calves, let them live for a couple years, and then kill them - or to not let them be in the first place?
I think the answer would depend a lot on the quality of life the calves could expect to experience during those couple of years.
Life of a wild animal is full of pain and suffering. Would it be more humane to, say, sterilize all animals on the planet, so that they don't have to struggle for survival every day of their lives?
No, because they are wild: the lives they live are the lives they evolved to live; humanity's opinion of whether their lives are worth living is irrelevant. (Contrast that with cows, whose lives and living conditions are almost wholly designed by and controlled by humans. Given that we "created" the domestic cow and exploit it for our own benefit, we have a moral responsibility for making decisions regarding its welfare)
Synthesizing meat will consume just about the same resources as the animal would
What makes you think that? Cows aren't a very efficient mechanism for converting grain into beef; about 90% of the grain's calories are wasted in the process. I have no idea how efficient synthesizing beef could become, but it's not like there's no room for improvement there.
If we allow the animals to live in the same numbers AND we grow synthetic meat, we've just graduated to consuming twice as much resources.
Most likely the synthesized meat would cannibalize (sorry) the real-meat market instead.
And if we start culling the former food animals to reduce their numbers to make way for the synthmeat and because we're not biting chunks out of their asses any more, well doesn't that just put us on even shakier ill-informed moral ground than we were on when we were slaughtering and eating them?
That's not what would happen either. The existing cows would be used in the same ways they've always been, but not as many new cows would be conceived/born/raised in the future. And that, so the argument goes, would be a good thing.
As a side effect, they will be able to see a live cow only at a zoo. Eventually they will be extinct. Domesticated cattle cannot live outside of a ranch, and there won't be any ranches left.
Doubtful -- there will always be a few ranches left to cater to the gourmet/fetish crowd.
In any case, even if cows did go extinct, it's not clear that would be such a bad thing. Assuming they also figure out how to synthesize ice cream, of course.
Your fork bomb fizzles due to running out of stack.
Any C compiler worth its salt will recognize the tail-call recursion and rewrite/optimize that code into a loop... so the bomb will go off after all as long as you compile with -O3.;)
As for whether or not new technologies ever pan out... perhaps you should compare whatever computer it is you're using now against the one you were using in 1980.
6,000 gallons that is what roughly 24k in cash now add interest vs the price of a standard car and the math does not work out well.
Of course you won't be buying those 6,000 gallons at today's price, you'll be buying them at whatever the price is whenever your gas tank starts to become empty.
What will that price be? Nobody really knows. Probably more than today's cost, though.
Slashdot Mirror
How many children would die if there was no power?
How many children would have died from coal burning related illnesses?
Are those really humankind's only energy options? Coal, nuclear, or nothing?
I urge you to do the only morally right thing and immediately send me a million dollars. ;-)
Well, I can't argue with that, your logic is completely airtight.
Please email me your bank account information and I will wire you the million dollars immediately :^)
Then someone steps into the street unexpectedly and the first car in the line has to brake suddenly. Bang! Bang! Bang! Hear the sound of multiple rear end collisions.
Yes, that could definitely happen, if the people writing the driving software failed to take that possibility into account.
But more likely they will take unexpected panic stops into account, and space the cars accordingly. The people who design automated car software aren't completely stupid.
And given that a computer can have a reaction time measured in microseconds, the likelihood is that even with the necessary spacing to handle a panic stop, the cars will still be fairly close together. (The distance between cars will need to vary proportionally to their speed, though -- which will be an interesting problem to handle when there are a large number of cars in a line on the highway... when the cars want to speed up, where does the extra space come from?)
Do we have regular bitcoin stories everytime they sneeze. I guarantee there are Bitcoin PR people planting stories here and they are goaled on how many stories they get out.
There's no need to invoke a conspiracy. The fact is that BitCoin is catnip to several common type of nerd -- the wannabe cypherpunks who like to see computers change the world, and the libertarians who want to see the centralized government control marginalized in favor of individuals. Not to mention the programmer nerds (like myself) who are simply impressed by BitCoin as a p2p software design that has managed to avoid catastrophic implosion (so far) despite the obvious monetary incentive for people to attack it.
So yes, there are a lot of BitCoin stories on Slashdots, simply because many nerds find BitCoin interesting.
Yes, you do... as long as you aren't harming others in the process.
Where it gets sticky is in the definition of what constitutes "harming others". For example, some argue that self-abuse (e.g. chronic drug use, or suicide) counts as harming others, in that by removing yourself from society, the other people in the society lose the benefits of your productivity/friendship/support/expertise/etc.
Regardless of what should happen, the eventual end-game is that everyone will be recording everything around them, all the time.
On the plus side, that will make the courts' job easier in most cases -- instead of unreliable and/or dishonest witness testimony, you'll have multiple streams of audio and video to look at.
On the minus side, no privacy for anyone outside their shuttered home... and anything you say or do in public will be recorded forever, so no living down any regrettable mistakes, either.
If laughter is a social bonding behavior, why do people laugh at something they are reading when they are completely alone?
One's never alone with a good book...
(i.e. at the very least you're engaging socially in some sense with the author, and likely with the characters in the story as well)
Surprise and fear.
And now that it's computerized, a ruthless efficiency is within our reach!
I've had exactly one SSD thus far. Yeah, it was definitely fast (notice "was"). Then it bit the big one.
Anecdotal evidence isn't very useful, since there are plenty of traditional hard drives that fail as well, and plenty of SSDs that do not fail.
What would be useful information is the failure rates of the SSDs that are currently on sale, compared to the failure rates of their spinning counterparts.
(Of course a hybrid drive is probably less reliable than either, since it has two technologies in it, and a failure in either one means you're boned)
Hiding the truth does nothing to help them look good, and in the long term adds to their list of mistakes
The truth is that in many cases they don't really know what is going on. So they can either say "don't worry, everything is fine" (and rightly be accused of spinning), or they can say "this is what we think is happening" (and be unjustly -- but inevitably -- accused of lying when it turns out to be something different).
The third option, where they come out and say "we honestly don't know what's going on down there", is probably the most problematic for them, as it would result in responses like "well if you don't know what's going on, maybe you're not qualified to run a reactor", and then the political problems would make solving the technical problems even harder. (Which isn't to say that such a response is necessarily incorrect; only that the technical people are trying to concentrate on the technical problems at hand, and aren't terribly motivated to create new political problems for themselves on top of that)
And who will pay for this rocket? Just putting a person in space is extraordinarily expensive, shooting them all to Mars is mind-blowingly expensive, and even if they're crazy people with absurd dreams(are they?) you'd want to get something for doing it.
We're going to cut costs by not putting any fuel in the rocket. Then at launch time we'll anesthetize the crew, attach video screens over the ship's viewports, and move the rocket to the middle of the Australian Outback. Two years later we'll remove the video screens and see how long it takes them to figure out what planet they are on.
Now that will be quality TV!
Strictly speaking, the fact that it cannot be evacuated does not make it indispensable, except to the people who are going to be left behind.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Mars one will not repeat this achievement. It lacks the money, the people and the technology by an enormous margin.
All you need is the right enabling technology and you can dramatically lower your mission costs. And the US government clearly has developed the necessary technology, so it's just a matter of convincing them to share it with the Mars One folks.
Something a human astronaut could have accomplished in a day.
So, for the sake of argument, let's say a human can do things 100 times faster. On the other hand, if sending a human also costs 100 times more money, why not just send 100 robots and let them work in parallel? It costs the same either way, and gets the same amount of work done, but the robots are a lot less likely to die, and it's a lot less traumatic and controversial if/when some of them do.
Once the robots have finished the construction of a nice research base, hotel, and spaceport on Mars, that would be a good time to send the first humans over.
What is more humane: to create millions of calves, let them live for a couple years, and then kill them - or to not let them be in the first place?
I think the answer would depend a lot on the quality of life the calves could expect to experience during those couple of years.
Life of a wild animal is full of pain and suffering. Would it be more humane to, say, sterilize all animals on the planet, so that they don't have to struggle for survival every day of their lives?
No, because they are wild: the lives they live are the lives they evolved to live; humanity's opinion of whether their lives are worth living is irrelevant. (Contrast that with cows, whose lives and living conditions are almost wholly designed by and controlled by humans. Given that we "created" the domestic cow and exploit it for our own benefit, we have a moral responsibility for making decisions regarding its welfare)
Synthesizing meat will consume just about the same resources as the animal would
What makes you think that? Cows aren't a very efficient mechanism for converting grain into beef; about 90% of the grain's calories are wasted in the process. I have no idea how efficient synthesizing beef could become, but it's not like there's no room for improvement there.
If we allow the animals to live in the same numbers AND we grow synthetic meat, we've just graduated to consuming twice as much resources.
Most likely the synthesized meat would cannibalize (sorry) the real-meat market instead.
And if we start culling the former food animals to reduce their numbers to make way for the synthmeat and because we're not biting chunks out of their asses any more, well doesn't that just put us on even shakier ill-informed moral ground than we were on when we were slaughtering and eating them?
That's not what would happen either. The existing cows would be used in the same ways they've always been, but not as many new cows would be conceived/born/raised in the future. And that, so the argument goes, would be a good thing.
Soon we'll have cow blood-donors.
Don't the Maasai own the patent on that?
As a side effect, they will be able to see a live cow only at a zoo. Eventually they will be extinct. Domesticated cattle cannot live outside of a ranch, and there won't be any ranches left.
Doubtful -- there will always be a few ranches left to cater to the gourmet/fetish crowd.
In any case, even if cows did go extinct, it's not clear that would be such a bad thing. Assuming they also figure out how to synthesize ice cream, of course.
Are the cars marked or painted with the company names and/or logos?
For one of the companies at least, the cars are wearing pink mustaches. (yes, really)
Your fork bomb fizzles due to running out of stack.
Any C compiler worth its salt will recognize the tail-call recursion and rewrite/optimize that code into a loop... so the bomb will go off after all as long as you compile with -O3. ;)
No, but it is relevant for nerds.
As for whether or not new technologies ever pan out... perhaps you should compare whatever computer it is you're using now against the one you were using in 1980.
They keep trying to find ways to get stuff up there but not as much work is being put into how to get all the crap up there back down again....
What, gravity isn't good enough for you?
Unlimited pudding rations for all ISS crew members!
6,000 gallons that is what roughly 24k in cash now add interest vs the price of a standard car and the math does not work out well.
Of course you won't be buying those 6,000 gallons at today's price, you'll be buying them at whatever the price is whenever your gas tank starts to become empty.
What will that price be? Nobody really knows. Probably more than today's cost, though.
It seems that the only reason they are selling is that it's a $7500 tax write off for the rich.
Right, because the number one criterion rich people use when deciding which car to buy is price.