Number 2 is incorrect, since storing license plates does not in any way, shape or form increase the chance of catching someone.
I think you're wrong about this. Say the police discover a dead body on Tuesday, and they determine that the dead body was dumped there around 2PM on Sunday. Being able to go back and find out what cars were in the area around 2PM Sunday would certainly be a useful source of leads.
The fact that the capability seems likely to invite abuse doesn't negate the fact that it would also be genuinely be useful in some cases.
Refusal to join any political party would be a good starting point.
More likely a good ending point, unless you are a billionaire who can afford to move mountains with his checking account. Most people don't have that kind of clout, and therefore only have any chance of significantly affecting politics by banding together with other like-minded people to pool their resources -- also known as forming (or joining) a political party.
So for most people, refusing to join any political party is the same as politically neutering themselves.
And considering people "roll back" bitcoin transactions every time there's a hack that "devalues" the value of it versus current fiat currency (like how NYSE rolled back stock trades). All those hacks that steal bitcoins cause the price of it to crash, those transactions get rolled back because if you own a lot, suddenly they're worth less, etc.
To my knowledge, nobody has ever "rolled back" a bitcoin transaction, because it is not possible to roll back a BitCoin transaction. Not unless you've gained control over more than half of the computers on the BitCoin p2p network, anyway.
What you're probably thinking of is various BitCoin-related trading sites getting hacked, and rolling back the state of their databases -- which is indeed troubling, for users of those sites, but it's a problem specific to those sites and not to the BitCoin protocol itself.
1) This technology will lead to a loss of privacy and abuses by police, therefore it should be stopped
or
2) This technology will enable police to find and catch criminals more quickly and effectively, therefore it should be allowed.
The truth is, both reactions are correct -- but the issue is typically presented as a tradeoff: we can have our privacy OR better law enforcement, but not both.
But what fun is that? I want both. And since we are all clever Bagginses here on Slashdot, perhaps someone can think of an LPR system that would allow police to track down criminals quickly, and yet still by highly resistant to privacy loss or abuse. I recognize that such a design is non-trivial, but in a world where people come up with clever systems such as BitCoin, I don't think it's necessarily impossible either. It just takes some serious thought, and getting past the "ooh, new technology is scary" stage.
Flying at 500ft (the minimum altitude on most airspace) gives you very little options if you need to make an emergency aircraft.
I think the previous poster meant "choose a 500 foot range" -- not necessarily the range between 0ft and 500ft, but the range between x ft and (x+500) ft, for some appropriate value of x.
As for your other objections, I think they are valid, but perhaps there could be some fail-safe mechanism (parachute? ejection seat? rocket booster? dunno what exactly) that could get the craft safely to the ground in the event of an engine failure.
We obviously have the technology. No major breakthrough required. What am I missing here?
They aren't very fast, and they aren't particularly easy to control if there is any wind. Also, they have to be very large in order to lift much weight, which limits the places where they can land without bumping into things.
And finally, helium is a non-renewable resource, and once it's gone, it's gone. I'm not sure we want to encourage people to use it up more quickly than we already do. (Of course they could use hydrogen instead, but it has its own problems, as any number of Slashdotters are sure to point out whenever its name is uttered;^) )
Most of these vehicles will only be able to fly from airport to airport - which are often located in areas with large amounts of traffic.
Legally, I believe that is the case.
In actual practice, however, I wonder how many of these vehicles' owners are going to be tempted to take off and land on straight, unpopulated stretches of road? (The trip between LA and Vegas comes to mind)
But if everyone went around in automated cars, the point is there would be no "idiot" in your rear view because he also would have been in an automated car; one which would have stopped in time.
Nonsense. Nature will by then have bred a far superior idiot, who will have downloaded some buggy "mods" into his car's autodriving software, causing it to crash (in one or more senses of the word).
Blindsight, besides being the best thing I've ever read, has a rather stark outlook on the nature of consciousness and what that means for us as human beings.
I have to second this -- the ending of Blindsight might have been depressing, except that the book's sheer awesomeness outweighs any unhappiness the ending might otherwise generate.
Here's the problem with cheap cynicism: eventually it becomes self-fulfilling. People who don't demand good government won't expect to get it, and when they don't get it they won't punish those who failed to deliver it.
Lazy politicians will take advantage of this because it's always easier to lower people's expectations than to actually deliver results. Left unchecked, that leads to a downward spiral (poor results -> apathy -> corruption -> poorer results), examples of which can be seen in any number of countries. It's not inevitable, however -- it's a choice the country's people make, regarding what levels of performance they will or will not put up with. America didn't go to the moon, or win WW2 or the cold war on the strength of cynicism -- and if those days are behind us now, it's because we chose that path.
The problem is that when you give money to the government like that, the effectiveness plummets.
No. Giving money to an ineffective government causes effectiveness to plummet. The correct lesson to draw from that is not "never give money to the government", however, but rather, "make sure your government is effective". I think that is the nuance that Republicans miss when they decide to drown everything in the bathtub.
There are some things (like selling autos and consumer electronics) that private industry is better at, and other things (like basic research, the military, and health care) that government is better at. We should use the best tool for the job in each case.
I have to agree with them. Very smart move, and one that will followed by everyone
I don't think it will work, though -- a country-sized Intranet is an indefensibly large target. All it takes is one connection to the outside world, and the spooks can come right back in through that connection. In a country the size of Iran, what are the odds that some desperate/clever Iranian won't set up a satellite dish or something to get access to the outside world? And even if they don't, it wouldn't be too difficult for a spook to come in and set up one up.
I think at best this will only harm Iranians, and give the Iranian government a false sense of security.
I refuse to believe they can deliver a mars orbiter for 80 million USD.
I'm skeptical as well. I'd love to see them succeed, but I think it's more likely this will turn out like the $45 Aakash tablet computer did. Often when the price tag on something seems to good to be true, it is.
My only question is why set it to 1 second intervals, and not say 1 hour or day or month intervals. What difference does it make?
I don't know that the exact value of the interval is what's important, so much as the fact that there is an interval, and therefore an upper bound on how fast transactions can be executed.
Right now you have a situation where the company with the shortest fiber-optic cable to the stock exchange can use its faster access time to game the market, and make money at everyone else's expense. By imposing a standard delay for all parties, this unfair advantage would (presumably) be neutralized.
Are there any markets (real or simulated) that actually operate in the once-per-time-period fashion described in this thread? Speculating about how such markets might work (or fail to work) is fun, but it's no substitute for actually trying it out and seeing what happens...
I see no reason for internal servers to be using IPv6.
You're probably right, but I have to say that fe80::foo link-local addresses are really handy for auto-configuring devices on a LAN, since they are guaranteed unique and also guaranteed never to change. The IPv4 equivalent (169.254.*.* self-assigned addresses) is a can of worms by comparison.
If they could get the system cost down to something on the order of 15 cents a generated kilowatt hour including overnight storage they might have something.
Why is 15 cents per kilowatt hour the magic price target that solar power must meet?
Is it because that's what conventional electricity currently costs you?
If so, that's reasonable for today, but there's no guarantee that conventional electricity won't cost more tomorrow -- especially if you factor in the externalized costs (subsidies, military and strategic costs of having to keep control of foreign energy fields, global warming, war due to competition for diminishing resources, environmental damage due to mining and oil spills, etc)
The payback period is roughly 10-12 years, [...] What happens if I get a new job that requires me to move next year?
That's a legitimate concern, but there are solutions. For example, San Francisco's PACE program finances the cost of a home solar array via a low-interest bond, that is repaid via a property tax that stays with the house. That way when you move out, you aren't out $30,000.
What difference? The US already vastly overproduces food. So the US has a little less overproduction of food. I don't see the concern.
And if the US suddenly has not just "a little less overproduction" but rather "a serious underproduction" of food, what happens then?
Obviously, at the very least food prices will rise. How much they rise, and whether or not food becomes rare enough to cause civil unrest, war, and/or further ecological damage (as more wildland is hurriedly pressed into service), would depend on how successful Canada (and other newly farmable locales) are at quickly ramping up their own production to compensate. Maybe they would be good at it, but the concern is that maybe they wouldn't be, or perhaps they'd prefer to sell their food to someone else instead. If Americans are going hungry but Canada can get more money selling their food to China, will Americans blame them for doing so? (Answer: yes, of course they will)
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Number 2 is incorrect, since storing license plates does not in any way, shape or form increase the chance of catching someone.
I think you're wrong about this. Say the police discover a dead body on Tuesday, and they determine that the dead body was dumped there around 2PM on Sunday. Being able to go back and find out what cars were in the area around 2PM Sunday would certainly be a useful source of leads.
The fact that the capability seems likely to invite abuse doesn't negate the fact that it would also be genuinely be useful in some cases.
Refusal to join any political party would be a good starting point.
More likely a good ending point, unless you are a billionaire who can afford to move mountains with his checking account. Most people don't have that kind of clout, and therefore only have any chance of significantly affecting politics by banding together with other like-minded people to pool their resources -- also known as forming (or joining) a political party.
So for most people, refusing to join any political party is the same as politically neutering themselves.
And considering people "roll back" bitcoin transactions every time there's a hack that "devalues" the value of it versus current fiat currency (like how NYSE rolled back stock trades). All those hacks that steal bitcoins cause the price of it to crash, those transactions get rolled back because if you own a lot, suddenly they're worth less, etc.
To my knowledge, nobody has ever "rolled back" a bitcoin transaction, because it is not possible to roll back a BitCoin transaction. Not unless you've gained control over more than half of the computers on the BitCoin p2p network, anyway.
What you're probably thinking of is various BitCoin-related trading sites getting hacked, and rolling back the state of their databases -- which is indeed troubling, for users of those sites, but it's a problem specific to those sites and not to the BitCoin protocol itself.
I see two common responses to this:
1) This technology will lead to a loss of privacy and abuses by police, therefore it should be stopped
or
2) This technology will enable police to find and catch criminals more quickly and effectively, therefore it should be allowed.
The truth is, both reactions are correct -- but the issue is typically presented as a tradeoff: we can have our privacy OR better law enforcement, but not both.
But what fun is that? I want both. And since we are all clever Bagginses here on Slashdot, perhaps someone can think of an LPR system that would allow police to track down criminals quickly, and yet still by highly resistant to privacy loss or abuse. I recognize that such a design is non-trivial, but in a world where people come up with clever systems such as BitCoin, I don't think it's necessarily impossible either. It just takes some serious thought, and getting past the "ooh, new technology is scary" stage.
Yeah, jetpacks have serious issues. What this world needs is a good $500 Balloonachute.
Flying at 500ft (the minimum altitude on most airspace) gives you very little options if you need to make an emergency aircraft.
I think the previous poster meant "choose a 500 foot range" -- not necessarily the range between 0ft and 500ft, but the range between x ft and (x+500) ft, for some appropriate value of x.
As for your other objections, I think they are valid, but perhaps there could be some fail-safe mechanism (parachute? ejection seat? rocket booster? dunno what exactly) that could get the craft safely to the ground in the event of an engine failure.
We obviously have the technology. No major breakthrough required. What am I missing here?
They aren't very fast, and they aren't particularly easy to control if there is any wind. Also, they have to be very large in order to lift much weight, which limits the places where they can land without bumping into things.
And finally, helium is a non-renewable resource, and once it's gone, it's gone. I'm not sure we want to encourage people to use it up more quickly than we already do. (Of course they could use hydrogen instead, but it has its own problems, as any number of Slashdotters are sure to point out whenever its name is uttered ;^) )
Most of these vehicles will only be able to fly from airport to airport - which are often located in areas with large amounts of traffic.
Legally, I believe that is the case.
In actual practice, however, I wonder how many of these vehicles' owners are going to be tempted to take off and land on straight, unpopulated stretches of road? (The trip between LA and Vegas comes to mind)
We spent 804 billion dollars in Iraq and didn't even get a "thank you card"
True, but we did receive some nice complimentary footwear.
But if everyone went around in automated cars, the point is there would be no "idiot" in your rear view because he also would have been in an automated car; one which would have stopped in time.
Nonsense. Nature will by then have bred a far superior idiot, who will have downloaded some buggy "mods" into his car's autodriving software, causing it to crash (in one or more senses of the word).
Blindsight, besides being the best thing I've ever read, has a rather stark outlook on the nature of consciousness and what that means for us as human beings.
I have to second this -- the ending of Blindsight might have been depressing, except that the book's sheer awesomeness outweighs any unhappiness the ending might otherwise generate.
... although "The Handmaid's Tale" in particular makes you just want to go and slit your wrists afterwards.
Here's the problem with cheap cynicism: eventually it becomes self-fulfilling. People who don't demand good government won't expect to get it, and when they don't get it they won't punish those who failed to deliver it.
Lazy politicians will take advantage of this because it's always easier to lower people's expectations than to actually deliver results. Left unchecked, that leads to a downward spiral (poor results -> apathy -> corruption -> poorer results), examples of which can be seen in any number of countries. It's not inevitable, however -- it's a choice the country's people make, regarding what levels of performance they will or will not put up with. America didn't go to the moon, or win WW2 or the cold war on the strength of cynicism -- and if those days are behind us now, it's because we chose that path.
what I'm asking, where the fuck is this summers heatwaves? there hasn't been a single good heatwave in Finland all summer now.
I think your heatwave may have got lost and ended up in Greenland.
The problem is that when you give money to the government like that, the effectiveness plummets.
No. Giving money to an ineffective government causes effectiveness to plummet. The correct lesson to draw from that is not "never give money to the government", however, but rather, "make sure your government is effective". I think that is the nuance that Republicans miss when they decide to drown everything in the bathtub.
There are some things (like selling autos and consumer electronics) that private industry is better at, and other things (like basic research, the military, and health care) that government is better at. We should use the best tool for the job in each case.
I have to agree with them. Very smart move, and one that will followed by everyone
I don't think it will work, though -- a country-sized Intranet is an indefensibly large target. All it takes is one connection to the outside world, and the spooks can come right back in through that connection. In a country the size of Iran, what are the odds that some desperate/clever Iranian won't set up a satellite dish or something to get access to the outside world? And even if they don't, it wouldn't be too difficult for a spook to come in and set up one up.
I think at best this will only harm Iranians, and give the Iranian government a false sense of security.
I refuse to believe they can deliver a mars orbiter for 80 million USD.
I'm skeptical as well. I'd love to see them succeed, but I think it's more likely this will turn out like the $45 Aakash tablet computer did. Often when the price tag on something seems to good to be true, it is.
Finally we're on the road to being huddled around the very last solar panel in a freezing cave
I think I see the problem, you've placed your solar panel inside a cave.
What do you suggest? Clear cutting huge swaths of forest to install solar panels and wind turbines?
Huge swaths of rooftop, maybe. And if that's not enough, there remains a plenty of room to place either solar panels or wind turbines offshore.
My only question is why set it to 1 second intervals, and not say 1 hour or day or month intervals. What difference does it make?
I don't know that the exact value of the interval is what's important, so much as the fact that there is an interval, and therefore an upper bound on how fast transactions can be executed.
Right now you have a situation where the company with the shortest fiber-optic cable to the stock exchange can use its faster access time to game the market, and make money at everyone else's expense. By imposing a standard delay for all parties, this unfair advantage would (presumably) be neutralized.
Are there any markets (real or simulated) that actually operate in the once-per-time-period fashion described in this thread? Speculating about how such markets might work (or fail to work) is fun, but it's no substitute for actually trying it out and seeing what happens...
I see no reason for internal servers to be using IPv6.
You're probably right, but I have to say that fe80::foo link-local addresses are really handy for auto-configuring devices on a LAN, since they are guaranteed unique and also guaranteed never to change. The IPv4 equivalent (169.254.*.* self-assigned addresses) is a can of worms by comparison.
If they could get the system cost down to something on the order of 15 cents a generated kilowatt hour including overnight storage they might have something.
Why is 15 cents per kilowatt hour the magic price target that solar power must meet?
Is it because that's what conventional electricity currently costs you?
If so, that's reasonable for today, but there's no guarantee that conventional electricity won't cost more tomorrow -- especially if you factor in the externalized costs (subsidies, military and strategic costs of having to keep control of foreign energy fields, global warming, war due to competition for diminishing resources, environmental damage due to mining and oil spills, etc)
The payback period is roughly 10-12 years, [...] What happens if I get a new job that requires me to move next year?
That's a legitimate concern, but there are solutions. For example, San Francisco's PACE program finances the cost of a home solar array via a low-interest bond, that is repaid via a property tax that stays with the house. That way when you move out, you aren't out $30,000.
What difference? The US already vastly overproduces food. So the US has a little less overproduction of food. I don't see the concern.
And if the US suddenly has not just "a little less overproduction" but rather "a serious underproduction" of food, what happens then?
Obviously, at the very least food prices will rise. How much they rise, and whether or not food becomes rare enough to cause civil unrest, war, and/or further ecological damage (as more wildland is hurriedly pressed into service), would depend on how successful Canada (and other newly farmable locales) are at quickly ramping up their own production to compensate. Maybe they would be good at it, but the concern is that maybe they wouldn't be, or perhaps they'd prefer to sell their food to someone else instead. If Americans are going hungry but Canada can get more money selling their food to China, will Americans blame them for doing so? (Answer: yes, of course they will)