> And when they include the weight of the car in the statement, they are implying that the weight of the vehicle is somehow relevant.
It is relevant. Walk up to a car that's in neutral and sitting still and press lightly on the back end. It won't start rolling. It's not that it rolls very slowly. It doesn't roll at all. You could sit there for an hour and nothing would happen. You have to push pretty hard to get it started (as anyone who's helped move a stalled car can tell you), and while the details are very complicated, that force is roughly proportional to its weight.
No, the article was just written by a completely clueless person who had no idea what they were talking about. I looked up the original paper, and the answer is right there in the abstract:
For many years, however, it has been implicitly assumed that this scheme is of inherently nonlocal nature, and therefore exclusive to quantum systems[...] We present an optical implementation of the teleportation protocol solely based on classical entanglement between spatial and modal degrees of freedom, entirely independent of nonlocality.
This effect is, in their words, "entirely independent of nonlocality." The information is being transmitted through space in the ordinary way, traveling no faster than light. The person who wrote the summary just made up the part about "instantly" and "without loss of time."
> if you're in a car and the fucking wheel falls off making you crash into someone you're still at fault currently from an insurance perspective
You are not at fault from any perspective (insurance or otherwise), unless it was your fault the wheel fell off. Now, if you knew the wheel was badly damaged, and chose to drive around anyway, that's another matter. If it then falls off and causes a crash and kills someone, you can be charged with manslaughter. But if it fell off because of a manufacturing defect, it's the manufacturer who's responsible (and can be charged). And if it fell off because you just had work done on the car and the mechanic forgot to tighten the bolts holding it on, that's who is responsible.
Depending where you live, your insurance might pay regardless. That's called "no-fault insurance". The goal is to avoid expensive disputes about who is responsible. But that's another matter.
Except when they don't. For example, many carbon tax proposals call for simply dividing up the revenue and paying it back out to the public again. The poor tend to use less energy than the rich, so most of them would end up receiving more money back than they paid.
Incentives for energy efficiency are not about increasing government revenue. They're about encouraging certain behaviors while keeping revenue unchanged.
Maybe that was the theory at the start, but it's certainly not the practice, and has almost nothing to do with how the courts have interpreted it. That's because the powers granted to the government are so broad and vague, they can cover almost anything. For example, Article I section 8 gives the government the power to "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." It also says it can "make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers." So the government can pass any law which is "necessary and proper" for promoting the "general welfare" of the country. I'm having trouble thinking of anything that couldn't be justified under that.
By the way, that "necessary and proper" bit is often referred to as the "elastic clause", specifically because it's so vague and can so easily be stretched to permit almost anything.
Actually, tons of schools get grants for all sorts of things all the time. The only reason you're hearing about this one is that it just happened to involve the school Obama's daughters go to. You don't hear anything about the hundreds of other grants given to other schools they don't go to, because talking about them wouldn't fit the political narrative.
People have the right to speak, and other people have the right not to listen. If someone wants to browse a version of the internet where everything "inappropriate" has been removed, they have that right. This company is trying to provide that for them. When they block certain content, that isn't censorship. It's giving their customers what they want, and performing exactly the function those customers came to their site for in the first place.
You can argue this will never be very effective. Possibly that's true. You can disagree with their choices about what's inappropriate. Well, don't use their site if you don't like the policies they've chosen. If a lot of people feel the same way, they probably won't get much business. I sure wouldn't invest in this company. And you might feel parents shouldn't be so protective of their children, that it's important to be exposed to these things. Maybe or maybe not, but parents have the right to decide how they'll raise their children.
But the one thing this site absolutely is not doing is censoring the internet. They're not doing anything to block you from reaching content you want to get. Instead, they're providing a service to block content you want to have blocked. A service that you go to specifically because you don't want that content appearing on your computer. That's no more censorship than the spam filter on my email.
If you give more money to some people, that certainly has to come from somewhere. The question is where. One option is to set it super low, below what people on social security or disability currently get, and fund it entirely by taking money away from those people. Another option is to set it a bit higher, comparable to current social security levels, and make up the difference through increased taxes on the rich. Either one of those could happen. Which one actually happens is a political choice.
I've actually tried to calculate this. If you just take all the current benefits that would be replaced by UBI (social security, standard deduction, welfare, etc.) and spread that money evenly over the whole population, I estimate it would come out to about $6000 per person per year. That's not enough to live on, though it is a significant part. For comparison, the poverty limit is currently about $12,000. So if we really wanted this to be enough to survive on, we would need some additional money that would have to come from the rich, not the poor.
The question is whether it actually would reduce productivity. The summary mentions "a world facing structural unemployment due to jobs taken by automated AI, robotics and machines." If you believe (as I do, and as the people behind this study clearly do) that we're heading toward a world where productivity isn't driven by human labor, we'd better start figuring out how to support all those people who won't be needed to maintain productivity.
Besides, there are many kinds of "productivity", and economists are much better at measuring some than others. A parent who stays home to raise their children may be contributing far more to society than if they were running a cash register at the grocery. But conventional economic measures only include the latter while ignoring the former.
What's new this time around is that we're approaching a point where machines can do almost anything better than humans. Service sector jobs are being eliminated just as quickly as any others. In the past, machines replaced physical labor, so people moved to jobs that involved mental labor. But now the machines are replacing mental labor as well. And the machines keep getting more capable every year, while the humans don't. So the set of jobs where humans are better than machines keeps shrinking, and that's likely to continue until it completely vanishes.
I really don't understand the perspective of people who insist we need to work to find life meaningful. Like this quote from the article:
“I do not find this a promising future, as I do not find the prospect of leisure-only life appealing,” he said. “I believe that work is essential to human wellbeing.”
You know what? For hundreds of years, the definition of a "gentleman" was someone who didn't need to work. And you know what else? Most of those people were just fine with that. Sure, there were some gentry who wanted to work anyway, and there were specific approved professions they could go into: the military, the clergy, politics. But tons of people were quite satisfied with not having to work.
So I welcome a time when no one has to work unless they want to. If you're a workaholic, if you can't be happy without a job, then go for it. There will always be ways people can strive for achievement. But for most people, work is a necessity and an obligation, and I look forward to that changing.
Exactly. I have NoScript installed. That isn't an ad blocker as such, but it does end up blocking a lot of ads. But that's the advertisers' fault, not mine. There's no reason ads should need scripting or plugins. If you can't make your ads work within reasonable security constraints, that's your problem.
Ok then, what do you suggest doing instead? Let's start by accepting the goals of protecting minors and encouraging compassion and empathy. (Maybe you don't agree with those goals, but that's irrelevant. Twitter has set them as goals, and it's their platform. Besides, most people outside the Slashdot bubble would agree with them.) So what do you recommend they should do to promote them?
The latest IPCC report included predictions about future climate change for six different scenarios, ranging from "no further increase in atmospheric CO2" to "ongoing rapid global development, mainly powered by fossil fuels." The different scenarios led to radically different predictions, with the expected temperatures in 2100 differing by more than 3 degrees between the best case and worst case scenarios.
So please, don't go around spouting nonsense about, "relative to natural processes human contributions to greenhouse gases are a drop in the bucket." It's simply not true. If you don't know what you're talking about, either look up the facts (it would have taken you all of about three minutes), or else remain silent. But don't make things up and then spread disinformation online.
That's like saying, "It's settled science that diseases kill people, so we don't need any more scientists working to study diseases." The argument sounds totally ludicrous to anyone who hasn't already decided that climate science is worthless. It's not even that it's a bad argument, it simply doesn't make any sense at all. It simply provides a glaring illustration of the biases of the person trying to make it. If climate change is a serious problem, and human activity is responsible for it, then of course we need the clearest understanding we can get of what's happening and how our actions affect it. And no, economists and agronomists are not even vaguely qualified to answer those questions.
That's not what this article is talking about. These are fixed charging stations at Google's headquarters. Here's one of the companies they're working with. As they describe on their website, it's something where you drive up to the charger, stop your car, use your phone to monitor the progress of charging, etc.
I wonder if you could use lasers to beam energy up to it from the ground? You'd need good tracking, but that shouldn't be hard, and you'd need to be careful not to fry birds that got in the way, but that also seems manageable. The biggest problem might be dealing with clouds or rain.
Actually, hydrogen's energy/weight is much higher than gasoline's. In fact, no other chemical fuel even comes close. Unfortunately, it's energy/volume is pretty bad, which is why storage is so difficult.
It's such a little thing to fix, and it drives me crazy. I'll be looking at the front page, reading a story, when... bang! The browser window goes blank, then reloads, jumps around a few times in the process, and after 5-10 seconds finally settles down somewhere that's different from where I was, so I have to scroll back to find the story I was reading. If I want to reload the page, I'll hit the reload button!
Do a web search for "prevent slashdot automatic reloading", and you'll find lots of pages with people complaining about this problem and suggesting not very satisfactory solutions to it. For example, https://webapps.stackexchange....
It takes five minutes to run the numbers on that and find that it takes way more energy than could ever be considered reasonable.
Actually it doesn't. See, for example, this article from a few days ago: http://www.theatlantic.com/tec.... Heating the road can sometimes be much less expensive than traditional approaches with snowplows and chemicals.
I just can't comprehend how this is even a proposal in the first place.
That was my first thought too. My second thought was, "Some people who know a lot more about this than I do clearly think it's a good idea, so perhaps they know things I don't." After thinking about it more, I came up with some potential advantages: installation is very easy (just huge sheets of panels lying flat on the ground), it allows huge solar installations (the cost of hooking up to the grid isn't proportional to the number of panels, so the bigger your installation, the cheaper it is), it requires no new land, they're going somewhere that's owned by the government (you might choose to put solar panels on your roof, but that's completely your choice, not something the government can force on you), and it's potentially easier to maintain them and keep them clean (think of the work required just to wash an equal number of solar panels mounted on poles or rooftops, compared to just driving a street sweeper down the road).
The obvious disadvantage is that they need to be super sturdy to handle thousands of cars driving over them every day. But if they've already solved this problem, who knows? It might be a good idea.
Github is much much more than version control. It's also bug tracking, feature tracking, discussions, web hosting, wiki, release management, etc. When all that goes down, you can still write code, but you can't communicate with the other devs anymore.
He's totally wrong in assuming you need secrecy to maintain a conspiracy. Everyone knows that global warming is a hoax and that vaccines are harmful. They've both been revealed many times. You can find information about them all over the internet. But everyone keeps believing the conspirators lies anyway. You don't need secrecy, you just need most people to be really gullible and believe whatever they read, instead of questioning it and checking the facts. You know, the way any smart conspiracy theorist would do.
(In case you can't tell, yes I'm being sarcastic here. But I'm also being serious: you can't cite the difficulty of keeping a secret as an argument against a belief that, according to its adherents, isn't secret anymore.)
Slashdot Mirror
> And when they include the weight of the car in the statement, they are implying that the weight of the vehicle is somehow relevant.
It is relevant. Walk up to a car that's in neutral and sitting still and press lightly on the back end. It won't start rolling. It's not that it rolls very slowly. It doesn't roll at all. You could sit there for an hour and nothing would happen. You have to push pretty hard to get it started (as anyone who's helped move a stalled car can tell you), and while the details are very complicated, that force is roughly proportional to its weight.
No, the article was just written by a completely clueless person who had no idea what they were talking about. I looked up the original paper, and the answer is right there in the abstract:
For many years, however, it has been implicitly assumed that this scheme is of inherently nonlocal nature, and therefore exclusive to quantum systems[...] We present an optical implementation of the teleportation protocol solely based on classical entanglement between spatial and modal degrees of freedom, entirely independent of nonlocality.
This effect is, in their words, "entirely independent of nonlocality." The information is being transmitted through space in the ordinary way, traveling no faster than light. The person who wrote the summary just made up the part about "instantly" and "without loss of time."
> if you're in a car and the fucking wheel falls off making you crash into someone you're still at fault currently from an insurance perspective
You are not at fault from any perspective (insurance or otherwise), unless it was your fault the wheel fell off. Now, if you knew the wheel was badly damaged, and chose to drive around anyway, that's another matter. If it then falls off and causes a crash and kills someone, you can be charged with manslaughter. But if it fell off because of a manufacturing defect, it's the manufacturer who's responsible (and can be charged). And if it fell off because you just had work done on the car and the mechanic forgot to tighten the bolts holding it on, that's who is responsible.
Depending where you live, your insurance might pay regardless. That's called "no-fault insurance". The goal is to avoid expensive disputes about who is responsible. But that's another matter.
Except when they don't. For example, many carbon tax proposals call for simply dividing up the revenue and paying it back out to the public again. The poor tend to use less energy than the rich, so most of them would end up receiving more money back than they paid.
Incentives for energy efficiency are not about increasing government revenue. They're about encouraging certain behaviors while keeping revenue unchanged.
Maybe that was the theory at the start, but it's certainly not the practice, and has almost nothing to do with how the courts have interpreted it. That's because the powers granted to the government are so broad and vague, they can cover almost anything. For example, Article I section 8 gives the government the power to "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." It also says it can "make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers." So the government can pass any law which is "necessary and proper" for promoting the "general welfare" of the country. I'm having trouble thinking of anything that couldn't be justified under that.
By the way, that "necessary and proper" bit is often referred to as the "elastic clause", specifically because it's so vague and can so easily be stretched to permit almost anything.
Actually, tons of schools get grants for all sorts of things all the time. The only reason you're hearing about this one is that it just happened to involve the school Obama's daughters go to. You don't hear anything about the hundreds of other grants given to other schools they don't go to, because talking about them wouldn't fit the political narrative.
People have the right to speak, and other people have the right not to listen. If someone wants to browse a version of the internet where everything "inappropriate" has been removed, they have that right. This company is trying to provide that for them. When they block certain content, that isn't censorship. It's giving their customers what they want, and performing exactly the function those customers came to their site for in the first place.
You can argue this will never be very effective. Possibly that's true. You can disagree with their choices about what's inappropriate. Well, don't use their site if you don't like the policies they've chosen. If a lot of people feel the same way, they probably won't get much business. I sure wouldn't invest in this company. And you might feel parents shouldn't be so protective of their children, that it's important to be exposed to these things. Maybe or maybe not, but parents have the right to decide how they'll raise their children.
But the one thing this site absolutely is not doing is censoring the internet. They're not doing anything to block you from reaching content you want to get. Instead, they're providing a service to block content you want to have blocked. A service that you go to specifically because you don't want that content appearing on your computer. That's no more censorship than the spam filter on my email.
If you give more money to some people, that certainly has to come from somewhere. The question is where. One option is to set it super low, below what people on social security or disability currently get, and fund it entirely by taking money away from those people. Another option is to set it a bit higher, comparable to current social security levels, and make up the difference through increased taxes on the rich. Either one of those could happen. Which one actually happens is a political choice.
I've actually tried to calculate this. If you just take all the current benefits that would be replaced by UBI (social security, standard deduction, welfare, etc.) and spread that money evenly over the whole population, I estimate it would come out to about $6000 per person per year. That's not enough to live on, though it is a significant part. For comparison, the poverty limit is currently about $12,000. So if we really wanted this to be enough to survive on, we would need some additional money that would have to come from the rich, not the poor.
The question is whether it actually would reduce productivity. The summary mentions "a world facing structural unemployment due to jobs taken by automated AI, robotics and machines." If you believe (as I do, and as the people behind this study clearly do) that we're heading toward a world where productivity isn't driven by human labor, we'd better start figuring out how to support all those people who won't be needed to maintain productivity.
Besides, there are many kinds of "productivity", and economists are much better at measuring some than others. A parent who stays home to raise their children may be contributing far more to society than if they were running a cash register at the grocery. But conventional economic measures only include the latter while ignoring the former.
What's new this time around is that we're approaching a point where machines can do almost anything better than humans. Service sector jobs are being eliminated just as quickly as any others. In the past, machines replaced physical labor, so people moved to jobs that involved mental labor. But now the machines are replacing mental labor as well. And the machines keep getting more capable every year, while the humans don't. So the set of jobs where humans are better than machines keeps shrinking, and that's likely to continue until it completely vanishes.
I really don't understand the perspective of people who insist we need to work to find life meaningful. Like this quote from the article:
“I do not find this a promising future, as I do not find the prospect of leisure-only life appealing,” he said. “I believe that work is essential to human wellbeing.”
You know what? For hundreds of years, the definition of a "gentleman" was someone who didn't need to work. And you know what else? Most of those people were just fine with that. Sure, there were some gentry who wanted to work anyway, and there were specific approved professions they could go into: the military, the clergy, politics. But tons of people were quite satisfied with not having to work.
So I welcome a time when no one has to work unless they want to. If you're a workaholic, if you can't be happy without a job, then go for it. There will always be ways people can strive for achievement. But for most people, work is a necessity and an obligation, and I look forward to that changing.
Exactly. I have NoScript installed. That isn't an ad blocker as such, but it does end up blocking a lot of ads. But that's the advertisers' fault, not mine. There's no reason ads should need scripting or plugins. If you can't make your ads work within reasonable security constraints, that's your problem.
Here's a much more detailed article:
http://news.nus.edu.sg/press-r...
Ok then, what do you suggest doing instead? Let's start by accepting the goals of protecting minors and encouraging compassion and empathy. (Maybe you don't agree with those goals, but that's irrelevant. Twitter has set them as goals, and it's their platform. Besides, most people outside the Slashdot bubble would agree with them.) So what do you recommend they should do to promote them?
Citation needed.
The latest IPCC report included predictions about future climate change for six different scenarios, ranging from "no further increase in atmospheric CO2" to "ongoing rapid global development, mainly powered by fossil fuels." The different scenarios led to radically different predictions, with the expected temperatures in 2100 differing by more than 3 degrees between the best case and worst case scenarios.
So please, don't go around spouting nonsense about, "relative to natural processes human contributions to greenhouse gases are a drop in the bucket." It's simply not true. If you don't know what you're talking about, either look up the facts (it would have taken you all of about three minutes), or else remain silent. But don't make things up and then spread disinformation online.
That's like saying, "It's settled science that diseases kill people, so we don't need any more scientists working to study diseases." The argument sounds totally ludicrous to anyone who hasn't already decided that climate science is worthless. It's not even that it's a bad argument, it simply doesn't make any sense at all. It simply provides a glaring illustration of the biases of the person trying to make it. If climate change is a serious problem, and human activity is responsible for it, then of course we need the clearest understanding we can get of what's happening and how our actions affect it. And no, economists and agronomists are not even vaguely qualified to answer those questions.
That's not what this article is talking about. These are fixed charging stations at Google's headquarters. Here's one of the companies they're working with. As they describe on their website, it's something where you drive up to the charger, stop your car, use your phone to monitor the progress of charging, etc.
I wonder if you could use lasers to beam energy up to it from the ground? You'd need good tracking, but that shouldn't be hard, and you'd need to be careful not to fry birds that got in the way, but that also seems manageable. The biggest problem might be dealing with clouds or rain.
Actually, hydrogen's energy/weight is much higher than gasoline's. In fact, no other chemical fuel even comes close. Unfortunately, it's energy/volume is pretty bad, which is why storage is so difficult.
It's such a little thing to fix, and it drives me crazy. I'll be looking at the front page, reading a story, when... bang! The browser window goes blank, then reloads, jumps around a few times in the process, and after 5-10 seconds finally settles down somewhere that's different from where I was, so I have to scroll back to find the story I was reading. If I want to reload the page, I'll hit the reload button!
Do a web search for "prevent slashdot automatic reloading", and you'll find lots of pages with people complaining about this problem and suggesting not very satisfactory solutions to it. For example, https://webapps.stackexchange....
Actually, the chance is 1 in 64. That's more than 1%, though not a lot more.
It takes five minutes to run the numbers on that and find that it takes way more energy than could ever be considered reasonable.
Actually it doesn't. See, for example, this article from a few days ago: http://www.theatlantic.com/tec.... Heating the road can sometimes be much less expensive than traditional approaches with snowplows and chemicals.
I just can't comprehend how this is even a proposal in the first place.
That was my first thought too. My second thought was, "Some people who know a lot more about this than I do clearly think it's a good idea, so perhaps they know things I don't." After thinking about it more, I came up with some potential advantages: installation is very easy (just huge sheets of panels lying flat on the ground), it allows huge solar installations (the cost of hooking up to the grid isn't proportional to the number of panels, so the bigger your installation, the cheaper it is), it requires no new land, they're going somewhere that's owned by the government (you might choose to put solar panels on your roof, but that's completely your choice, not something the government can force on you), and it's potentially easier to maintain them and keep them clean (think of the work required just to wash an equal number of solar panels mounted on poles or rooftops, compared to just driving a street sweeper down the road).
The obvious disadvantage is that they need to be super sturdy to handle thousands of cars driving over them every day. But if they've already solved this problem, who knows? It might be a good idea.
Github is much much more than version control. It's also bug tracking, feature tracking, discussions, web hosting, wiki, release management, etc. When all that goes down, you can still write code, but you can't communicate with the other devs anymore.
He's totally wrong in assuming you need secrecy to maintain a conspiracy. Everyone knows that global warming is a hoax and that vaccines are harmful. They've both been revealed many times. You can find information about them all over the internet. But everyone keeps believing the conspirators lies anyway. You don't need secrecy, you just need most people to be really gullible and believe whatever they read, instead of questioning it and checking the facts. You know, the way any smart conspiracy theorist would do.
(In case you can't tell, yes I'm being sarcastic here. But I'm also being serious: you can't cite the difficulty of keeping a secret as an argument against a belief that, according to its adherents, isn't secret anymore.)