Depends on how you define "idiot". Remember that half the population has an IQ of under 100 on an approximately bell shaped curve, and also remember how tunnel visioned some rather smart people can be.
So while many people are not "idiots" on any particular subject, a much larger number are.
Now, of course, the definition of idiot isn't exactly fixed, but you were clearly using it in a figurative way rather then meaning, say, someone who was too stupid to tie his shoes or speak a grammatical sentence. (I think the original definition was something like "a person with an IQ below 70", which would include, e.g. a Kalahari bushman who could knap a flint edge, fashion a spear, start a fire using some flint and steel, and track down a giraffe. So it's a very culturally biased concept...and historically speaking it was intentionally designed as such.)
Sorry, but the Native Americans (I'm not sure about the Innuit) belong with the light skinned people. Possibly the first migration, and possibly the last migration, into North America were different, but the vast majority fit with the light skinned people. Skin color is only a simple genetic change, and living in areas with lots of sun and few clothes will quickly cause a darker pigmentation to evolve. (I think it's only a change to one regulatory gene.) The first migration we can't say much about because they seem to have either died out or been totally absorbed. (I haven't heard of any studies of DNA found in their bones. I suspect they haven't been done. Some of the later ones have been done and were fairly clearly related to the northern Asiatic genepool, and I'm pretty sure that means the light skinned people.
That said, some mixing wouldn't be a real surprise. I'm rather sure the Innuit used to go back and forth across the Bering strait all the time. And I rather suspect that the Aleutian islanders are as closely related to the Kuril islanders as to the mainland neighbors...or at least used to be before national boundaries caused travel restrictions. So for the Innuit to be Oriental would be no big surprise. That said, the Innuit used to go on long oceanic hunts, and the Bering strait isn't that wide, but sometimes storms will render it impassible. So I'm sure there was a lot of back and forth.
Sorry, this is from multiple different sources, not one, and different pieces were in different places. The scientific stuff was from places like Science News, and I only read the printed edition, so I don't have links to ANY of it.
And no, orientals isn't a technical term, but I wanted to lump Melanesians, Polynesians, Chinese, Mongols, Korean, Japanese, and various south-east Asians together without including Australian aborigines or their close relatives. This isn't a closely related group, but it's a group that has had a lot of connected gene-flow over the centuries. Among these, I think the most variant are the Polynesians...though that's a guess. Even so, what I said doesn't quite fit for folks at the edges, and applies more closely as you get closer to central China. (Also, e.g., Japanese doesn't include such as the Ainu. I'm not sure where the Tibetans fit. etc.)
Were I to guess the reason, I'd guess that it's because the lighter skinned peoples tended to live in small groups that moved around and were slightly more xenophobic than the orientals, while the Africans tended to stay in one place in small groups that were near close relatives. So neither of the two mixed much (relatively speaking). Also most of the African groups tended to be rather conservative, in the sense of resistant to change, which I attribute to low energy cause by the prevalence of parasites and diseases.
In the summary the problem was stated to be the frequency of images in the training set data.
The technical details you specify may be correct, but they are irrelevant to this particular problem. And they wouldn't explain the problem with recognizing women in any case.
That's not the problem. The problem is the training set data. The algorithms weren't trained on many Gorilla photos, so they were extremely poor at recognizing them.
It doesn't work exactly this way, but consider:
1. you're given a photo a photo to classify 2. So you compare it against the things you've already classified 3. One of your rules is that categories that more commonly appear are more likely choices than categories that rarely appear. 4. You compare it against your match set, but it doesn't exactly match any of them 5. So you pick out certain feature:
a) It's sort of vaguely human shaped
b) The skin color is dark
c) What the most common picture category that matches that? 6. So you identify a gorilla as a black man, because pictures of gorillas are really unlikely.
As I said, it doesn't exactly work that way, but that has many features of what caused the problem. But an example of how it doesn't really work that way is the picture of a plastic turtle that gets identified as a rifle.
Are you sure? My guess is that melanin radiates in the infrared when exposed to light, so I would guess you've just altered the problem.
Better to improve the dynamic sensitivity of the CCDs.
OTOH, the real problem, as mentioned in the summary, was the set of training data. It learned to handle the most commonly appearing faces in the training data well, and didn't do as well on those things that were rare in the training data set, which happened to be both non-Caucasian faces and female faces.
Actually, light skinned people have more variations in facial shape than do other groups. Second is darker skinned people. Orientals have the fewest.
OTOH, in any particular area, the people from outside the area are likely to have more variation, because they have a wider variety of ancestors.
That said, this *is* a bit strange, because the greatest genetic variation is among the population native to Africa. (Note I'm not even including the Australian aborigines. Which are a part of the facial variation of the darker skinned people.) So one would expect the largest variation among the darker skinned people.
Additionally the homogeneity of the orientals is probably due to their long period of civilization. This is a guess, but it's a reasonable one. So there was a longer period of undisturbed gene flow among groups. Even so there are distinct sub-groups, just not as many as among other categories.
A problem with this analysis is that I didn't include the population of the Indian sub-continent, as I couldn't figure out in which group to place them. They have darker skin colors, but have facial features that more closely align with the lighter skinned peoples. This is readily explained by historical analysis, but it does make categorization difficult.
Rejecting it isn't clearly appropriate. I suspect the reason is to avoid self-defamation, but that's just a suspicion. Since FCC chairman is a political post, it is clearly appropriate for the public to know how he comports himself at official events.
OTOH, rejecting is was probably the expected reaction. Gizmodo gets a story out of it, anyway, and the FCC chairman gets to partially conceal what a bastard he is. But it would (probably) have been a better story if Gizmodo had gotten the jokes, and when "grab them by the pussy" can get elected president, it's hard to imagine what jokes would so defame the FCC chair that he couldn't function.
It's not strict implication in the sense of symbolic logic, but symbolic logic borrowed the term from normal English, and the use of implies in the G.P. post follows the rules of usage in normal English. You may disagree with the conclusion (I don't), but it is within the scope of normal usage.
OTOH, it does indicate that there is an unspoken, perhaps unverbalized, chain of reasoning between the two statements. I could construct one, though it would have flaws, but I have no idea whether my chain would match that that the G.P. poster would construct.
Essentially all governments overspend. At some point this stops working and there's a currency collapse. Sometimes a major one, sometimes a minor one.
The thing to notice is that it's the Republicans, who talk about small government, who are worst at managing the budget. Occasionally a Democrat will even manage to reduce the deficit. There are two reasons for this (that I know of and believe): 1) The Republicans are less willing to tax the rich, so the income to the government decreases. 2) The Republicans are more tied to those who benefit from the government owing them money. Holders of Treasury bonds, etc.
These two reasons don't seem sufficient, so I'm rather certain that there are other causes. For one thing, the Democrats are much more willing to spend money on social projects, and yet they are the party that has repeatedly decreased the deficit. So something unobserved is going on.
Well, I think coconut trees can grow right on the beach, so that's something. And I hear that in places mangrove trees even grow out into the ocean. OTOH, it probably takes a whole bunch of coconut trees to support one person (and that would require trading off the island) and I don't know what the economic utility of mangroves is. But they do require fresh water to reduce the salinity, and an underlying layer of mud.
If it's an atoll, then it's broken up coral skeletons. But that's not the whole story, coral only grows in shallow water, so underneath there must have been a volcano. It may once have extended above the then current sea level, with coral growing on it's sides. As it eroded away the sediments were caught by the coral to form a shallow plateau just under the surface of the water, and coral grew on top of that until it got too shallow. Over time the sea level rose and fell. Rising sea levels would put everything under water, where the coral could grow on top of it, falling sea levels would expose the tops of the area, and restrict coral growth to the sides. Since coral won't grow in deep water, there is a strong limit to the radius around the old volcano that the island can grow, but the coral growth keeps the volcano from eroding further.
If waves and currents are moving sediments onto the island, they must be coming from somewhere. And it's unlikely that they are coming from deep water. So they're probably coming from the sides of the volcano where the coral have been growing. Just what this means is speculation, but it could mean that at the deepest level, the ocean has gotten to deep for the corals to grow, so they died and became loose sediments. In which case the base of the atoll is shrinking, but the top is becoming flatter.
OTOH, it's been my impression that this kind of thing usually happens over a much longer time period. This could be because the books were written by geologist who tend to assume the processes happen slowly, but it could also be because they usually *do* happen slowly. That said, gradualism tends to be overstated. A natural arch doesn't collapse slowly, it stands up apparently unmoved for centuries, and collapses within a month, and usually within a day. There are lots of metastable equilibria, that appear to be stable until they suddenly change state. If you're observing it during the stable period, which is almost all the time, you'll see something that looks almost unchanging. If you're there when it happens, you may not be able to run fast enough to get out of the way.
Actually, I would bet that what they said is that "it has been growing", which is a very different statement.
OTOH, I do wonder is there is a lot of new area suitable for the growth of coral, which would create a barrier reef around the atoll. Of course, this assumes that Tuvalu is far enough from the equator that the water doesn't get too warm for the corals. And I also wonder how fast that would happen.
OTOH, at times in the past Atolls have grown when the sea rose (or the land subsided) because of increased coral growth. I have no idea, however, how rapidly that happened.
So someone ought to look for that. Probably, of course, far enough from the equator that the coral won't be experiencing bleaching events.
Actually, I rather liked PL/1. It's a pity that it died rather than improving. It had a lot going for it. And it *was* intended to replace COBOL as well as FORTRAN. It failed at both. Fortran is still going well in specialized areas. In certain ways it's the fastest language beyond assembler. COBOL....well, as I said above, I never really understood it. But PL/1 had more success with Fortran IV programmers than with COBOL programmers, for whatever reason. And the last version of PL/1 that I heard of was a small subset that ran on the z80. That's quite awhile ago. I've heard of new versions of COBOL occasionally since then. So I think PL/1 is as dead as Snobol.
Well, there's more than one kind of business that could be called "financial services". For a certain kind of "financial services" your description is quite apt, but I guess I was thinking of a different segment...which still isn't anything that I think highly of, but which doesn't merit wholesale condemnation.
The problem is there isn't any significant number of new Cobol programmers. I sure wouldn't want to use it, and I was willing to put up with Fortran II. OTOH, I never really understood Cobol, so take the rest of this post with a large grain of salt.
I was trying to think what other language might be reasonable to rewrite things in, and couldn't come up with anything. The two that seem closest are Lisp and Ada, and if you have any idea how different those are, it might give you an idea of how poor a fit everything seemed. (And also notice that neither was very popular.)
My real best guess would be Smalltalk. Another language that isn't wildly popular, and also is having problems with modern developments. (Last I checked there wasn't a concurrent version, and support for unicode was minimal...but that was a couple of years ago.)
The foolish consumers may want "better, faster financial products.", but that's nearly a contradiction, and is one if better includes more secure.
FWIW, I don't want my financial data going over the internet in any way. Well, I can't stop that, but I can restrict the amount of exposure I give myself. You'd think nobody had ever heard of Spectre or Meltdown. I've given up all purchases over the internet until those are widely patched. And I've never been willing to do on-line banking, despite the ads promoting it.
P.S.: To the extent that a "financial service" thinks of me as a consumer rather than a customer, I'd rather not do ANY business with them.
0.1 C is too fast, because of dust, etc. Each increment in speed above the speed of the average flow of dust increases your danger of hitting something too large for you to deal with. Consider the amount of energy you would need to dissipate if you hit a 1 gram meteorite at 0.1 C 1 C = 299 792 458 m / s... lets round that to 1 C = 300,000,000 m/s 0.1 C = 30,000,000 m/s K.E. = 1/2 m v2. impact = 30,000,000 m/s * 30,000,000 m/s * 1 gm
= 9*10^14 gm^2/sec^2 WHOOPS! Your vessel needs to be traveling at just slightly a different speed than the local drift. You need a relative speed difference, because you need to mine it for supplies. The only way for this to work is to become adapted to life in space. (Not necessarily without gravity, you can spin the ship. Etc. for other constraints.) When the ship hits a rich patch, it accumulates supplies and then reproduces.
We can't build that kind of ship now for several reasons, e.g. we don't know how to build stable societies, and this would require one with long term stability. But it's something that's doable in principle, even if we don't yet have all the pieces.
A real problem might be, this kind of ship would be expensive. Once you have all the techniques, what kind of society would spawn the ships? I can imagine societies that would do it for "religious" reasons, or because they found out their star was about to go nova (though humans would apparently just deny to problem), but those are real edge cases. More likely they developed the cities to do local mining, and then got into a political disagreement, but that would seem to mean they didn't know how to manage long term social stability...or weren't willing to apply the knowledge.
That's not at all clear. You won't see stellar empires, or anything like that, but you could well see generation ships that amble along at rather slow speeds.
Actually, generation ship is really the wrong model, but its one might be recognized. But a better model was MacroLife by Zebrowski. He did use FTL, though, to make the story move, which probably is impossible. Stapledon had a similar concept in Star Maker, but his was less well developed, and it was a sort of side issue. MacroLife is the artificial analog of multicellular life.
OTOH, a MacroLife vessel wouldn't want to be noticed, and wouldn't be very interested in the planets. They've be more interested in mining the asteroids. Still, they might send down robot explorers.
That said, any foreign life will almost certainly be profoundly incompatible with everything on earth. They probably wouldn't even have allergic responses to us or vice versa, because of being too different...but it would be quite remarkable of they were in any way biocompatible...and that includes as food. Still bacteria are both prolific and adaptable, so we might find each other carrying bacteria that would find the other a hospitable environment.
So any contacts will almost certainly be managed by robots, or if they are brave, telefactors. But that would require getting close enough that the light-speed delay wouldn't be significant.
Now if you want to ask about odds.... I'd have to rate them as pretty low. Perhaps as high as 1 in 1000 per 1000 years. But that's a Wild Ass Guess based on nearly nothing. It could be 100 times that, or it could be 0.00001 times that, and I'd have no way to know. After people go out and start mining asteroids for awhile there might be better grounds for a guess.
The thing is, MacroLife vessels wouldn't stop to enter a planetary system. They'd be traveling at a speed just a bit different from the general flow of interstellar dust in the area and unwilling to spend mass+energy to alter their speed...and, IIUC, they might well be avoiding this area because we live in a void, where the picking are low.
MacroLife is probably only possible if you have controlled nuclear fusion, though you *might* be able to manage it with fission. And you need a really good closed ecosystem. And you need good social engineering. The smallest one would probably require a population of 500,000, but that's a guess, and you could use stored cells and advanced cloning to reduce that requirement. But you're going to need enough population to give you genetic as well as social stability. So we're a long way from being able to build one in multiple disciplines. But there doesn't seem to be anything intrinsically impossible about the concept. The real question might be what kind of society would spawn them. Once they get started they'll reproduce, though, so the start only has to happen once.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I first heard of this in a story about a woman who started getting ads for pregnancy related items before she knew the test results.
Depends on how you define "idiot". Remember that half the population has an IQ of under 100 on an approximately bell shaped curve, and also remember how tunnel visioned some rather smart people can be.
So while many people are not "idiots" on any particular subject, a much larger number are.
Now, of course, the definition of idiot isn't exactly fixed, but you were clearly using it in a figurative way rather then meaning, say, someone who was too stupid to tie his shoes or speak a grammatical sentence. (I think the original definition was something like "a person with an IQ below 70", which would include, e.g. a Kalahari bushman who could knap a flint edge, fashion a spear, start a fire using some flint and steel, and track down a giraffe. So it's a very culturally biased concept...and historically speaking it was intentionally designed as such.)
Sorry, but the Native Americans (I'm not sure about the Innuit) belong with the light skinned people. Possibly the first migration, and possibly the last migration, into North America were different, but the vast majority fit with the light skinned people. Skin color is only a simple genetic change, and living in areas with lots of sun and few clothes will quickly cause a darker pigmentation to evolve. (I think it's only a change to one regulatory gene.) The first migration we can't say much about because they seem to have either died out or been totally absorbed. (I haven't heard of any studies of DNA found in their bones. I suspect they haven't been done. Some of the later ones have been done and were fairly clearly related to the northern Asiatic genepool, and I'm pretty sure that means the light skinned people.
That said, some mixing wouldn't be a real surprise. I'm rather sure the Innuit used to go back and forth across the Bering strait all the time. And I rather suspect that the Aleutian islanders are as closely related to the Kuril islanders as to the mainland neighbors...or at least used to be before national boundaries caused travel restrictions. So for the Innuit to be Oriental would be no big surprise. That said, the Innuit used to go on long oceanic hunts, and the Bering strait isn't that wide, but sometimes storms will render it impassible. So I'm sure there was a lot of back and forth.
Sorry, this is from multiple different sources, not one, and different pieces were in different places. The scientific stuff was from places like Science News, and I only read the printed edition, so I don't have links to ANY of it.
And no, orientals isn't a technical term, but I wanted to lump Melanesians, Polynesians, Chinese, Mongols, Korean, Japanese, and various south-east Asians together without including Australian aborigines or their close relatives. This isn't a closely related group, but it's a group that has had a lot of connected gene-flow over the centuries. Among these, I think the most variant are the Polynesians...though that's a guess. Even so, what I said doesn't quite fit for folks at the edges, and applies more closely as you get closer to central China. (Also, e.g., Japanese doesn't include such as the Ainu. I'm not sure where the Tibetans fit. etc.)
Were I to guess the reason, I'd guess that it's because the lighter skinned peoples tended to live in small groups that moved around and were slightly more xenophobic than the orientals, while the Africans tended to stay in one place in small groups that were near close relatives. So neither of the two mixed much (relatively speaking). Also most of the African groups tended to be rather conservative, in the sense of resistant to change, which I attribute to low energy cause by the prevalence of parasites and diseases.
Sorry, but that's not the problem.
In the summary the problem was stated to be the frequency of images in the training set data.
The technical details you specify may be correct, but they are irrelevant to this particular problem. And they wouldn't explain the problem with recognizing women in any case.
That's not the problem. The problem is the training set data. The algorithms weren't trained on many Gorilla photos, so they were extremely poor at recognizing them.
It doesn't work exactly this way, but consider:
1. you're given a photo a photo to classify
2. So you compare it against the things you've already classified
3. One of your rules is that categories that more commonly appear are more likely choices than categories that rarely appear.
4. You compare it against your match set, but it doesn't exactly match any of them
5. So you pick out certain feature:
a) It's sort of vaguely human shaped
b) The skin color is dark
c) What the most common picture category that matches that?
6. So you identify a gorilla as a black man, because pictures of gorillas are really unlikely.
As I said, it doesn't exactly work that way, but that has many features of what caused the problem. But an example of how it doesn't really work that way is the picture of a plastic turtle that gets identified as a rifle.
The Summary said it was because they were underrepresented in the training data set.
That's what you should first assume when an AI system fails at some particular kind of categorization, so it should hardly be surprising.
Are you sure? My guess is that melanin radiates in the infrared when exposed to light, so I would guess you've just altered the problem.
Better to improve the dynamic sensitivity of the CCDs.
OTOH, the real problem, as mentioned in the summary, was the set of training data. It learned to handle the most commonly appearing faces in the training data well, and didn't do as well on those things that were rare in the training data set, which happened to be both non-Caucasian faces and female faces.
Actually, light skinned people have more variations in facial shape than do other groups. Second is darker skinned people. Orientals have the fewest.
OTOH, in any particular area, the people from outside the area are likely to have more variation, because they have a wider variety of ancestors.
That said, this *is* a bit strange, because the greatest genetic variation is among the population native to Africa. (Note I'm not even including the Australian aborigines. Which are a part of the facial variation of the darker skinned people.) So one would expect the largest variation among the darker skinned people.
Additionally the homogeneity of the orientals is probably due to their long period of civilization. This is a guess, but it's a reasonable one. So there was a longer period of undisturbed gene flow among groups. Even so there are distinct sub-groups, just not as many as among other categories.
A problem with this analysis is that I didn't include the population of the Indian sub-continent, as I couldn't figure out in which group to place them. They have darker skin colors, but have facial features that more closely align with the lighter skinned peoples. This is readily explained by historical analysis, but it does make categorization difficult.
That's not only predictable, it was predicted.
Rejecting it isn't clearly appropriate. I suspect the reason is to avoid self-defamation, but that's just a suspicion. Since FCC chairman is a political post, it is clearly appropriate for the public to know how he comports himself at official events.
OTOH, rejecting is was probably the expected reaction. Gizmodo gets a story out of it, anyway, and the FCC chairman gets to partially conceal what a bastard he is. But it would (probably) have been a better story if Gizmodo had gotten the jokes, and when "grab them by the pussy" can get elected president, it's hard to imagine what jokes would so defame the FCC chair that he couldn't function.
It's not strict implication in the sense of symbolic logic, but symbolic logic borrowed the term from normal English, and the use of implies in the G.P. post follows the rules of usage in normal English. You may disagree with the conclusion (I don't), but it is within the scope of normal usage.
OTOH, it does indicate that there is an unspoken, perhaps unverbalized, chain of reasoning between the two statements. I could construct one, though it would have flaws, but I have no idea whether my chain would match that that the G.P. poster would construct.
Essentially all governments overspend. At some point this stops working and there's a currency collapse. Sometimes a major one, sometimes a minor one.
The thing to notice is that it's the Republicans, who talk about small government, who are worst at managing the budget. Occasionally a Democrat will even manage to reduce the deficit. There are two reasons for this (that I know of and believe):
1) The Republicans are less willing to tax the rich, so the income to the government decreases.
2) The Republicans are more tied to those who benefit from the government owing them money. Holders of Treasury bonds, etc.
These two reasons don't seem sufficient, so I'm rather certain that there are other causes. For one thing, the Democrats are much more willing to spend money on social projects, and yet they are the party that has repeatedly decreased the deficit. So something unobserved is going on.
Well, I think coconut trees can grow right on the beach, so that's something. And I hear that in places mangrove trees even grow out into the ocean.
OTOH, it probably takes a whole bunch of coconut trees to support one person (and that would require trading off the island) and I don't know what the economic utility of mangroves is. But they do require fresh water to reduce the salinity, and an underlying layer of mud.
Where is the sea level dropping? I know it's rising more slowly along the US East Coast, but I didn't know it was dropping anywhere.
If it's an atoll, then it's broken up coral skeletons. But that's not the whole story, coral only grows in shallow water, so underneath there must have been a volcano. It may once have extended above the then current sea level, with coral growing on it's sides. As it eroded away the sediments were caught by the coral to form a shallow plateau just under the surface of the water, and coral grew on top of that until it got too shallow. Over time the sea level rose and fell. Rising sea levels would put everything under water, where the coral could grow on top of it, falling sea levels would expose the tops of the area, and restrict coral growth to the sides. Since coral won't grow in deep water, there is a strong limit to the radius around the old volcano that the island can grow, but the coral growth keeps the volcano from eroding further.
If waves and currents are moving sediments onto the island, they must be coming from somewhere. And it's unlikely that they are coming from deep water. So they're probably coming from the sides of the volcano where the coral have been growing. Just what this means is speculation, but it could mean that at the deepest level, the ocean has gotten to deep for the corals to grow, so they died and became loose sediments. In which case the base of the atoll is shrinking, but the top is becoming flatter.
OTOH, it's been my impression that this kind of thing usually happens over a much longer time period. This could be because the books were written by geologist who tend to assume the processes happen slowly, but it could also be because they usually *do* happen slowly. That said, gradualism tends to be overstated. A natural arch doesn't collapse slowly, it stands up apparently unmoved for centuries, and collapses within a month, and usually within a day. There are lots of metastable equilibria, that appear to be stable until they suddenly change state. If you're observing it during the stable period, which is almost all the time, you'll see something that looks almost unchanging. If you're there when it happens, you may not be able to run fast enough to get out of the way.
Actually, I would bet that what they said is that "it has been growing", which is a very different statement.
OTOH, I do wonder is there is a lot of new area suitable for the growth of coral, which would create a barrier reef around the atoll. Of course, this assumes that Tuvalu is far enough from the equator that the water doesn't get too warm for the corals. And I also wonder how fast that would happen.
OTOH, at times in the past Atolls have grown when the sea rose (or the land subsided) because of increased coral growth. I have no idea, however, how rapidly that happened.
So someone ought to look for that. Probably, of course, far enough from the equator that the coral won't be experiencing bleaching events.
Actually, I rather liked PL/1. It's a pity that it died rather than improving. It had a lot going for it. And it *was* intended to replace COBOL as well as FORTRAN. It failed at both. Fortran is still going well in specialized areas. In certain ways it's the fastest language beyond assembler. COBOL....well, as I said above, I never really understood it. But PL/1 had more success with Fortran IV programmers than with COBOL programmers, for whatever reason. And the last version of PL/1 that I heard of was a small subset that ran on the z80. That's quite awhile ago. I've heard of new versions of COBOL occasionally since then. So I think PL/1 is as dead as Snobol.
Well, there's more than one kind of business that could be called "financial services". For a certain kind of "financial services" your description is quite apt, but I guess I was thinking of a different segment...which still isn't anything that I think highly of, but which doesn't merit wholesale condemnation.
The problem is there isn't any significant number of new Cobol programmers. I sure wouldn't want to use it, and I was willing to put up with Fortran II. OTOH, I never really understood Cobol, so take the rest of this post with a large grain of salt.
I was trying to think what other language might be reasonable to rewrite things in, and couldn't come up with anything. The two that seem closest are Lisp and Ada, and if you have any idea how different those are, it might give you an idea of how poor a fit everything seemed. (And also notice that neither was very popular.)
My real best guess would be Smalltalk. Another language that isn't wildly popular, and also is having problems with modern developments. (Last I checked there wasn't a concurrent version, and support for unicode was minimal...but that was a couple of years ago.)
The foolish consumers may want "better, faster financial products.", but that's nearly a contradiction, and is one if better includes more secure.
FWIW, I don't want my financial data going over the internet in any way. Well, I can't stop that, but I can restrict the amount of exposure I give myself. You'd think nobody had ever heard of Spectre or Meltdown. I've given up all purchases over the internet until those are widely patched. And I've never been willing to do on-line banking, despite the ads promoting it.
P.S.: To the extent that a "financial service" thinks of me as a consumer rather than a customer, I'd rather not do ANY business with them.
Well, 0.34% doesn't give any measure of control, so my guess would be they hope the value recovers a bit and then they sell it.
0.1 C is too fast, because of dust, etc. Each increment in speed above the speed of the average flow of dust increases your danger of hitting something too large for you to deal with. Consider the amount of energy you would need to dissipate if you hit a 1 gram meteorite at 0.1 C ... lets round that to
1 C = 299 792 458 m / s
1 C = 300,000,000 m/s
0.1 C = 30,000,000 m/s
K.E. = 1/2 m v2.
impact = 30,000,000 m/s * 30,000,000 m/s * 1 gm
= 9*10^14 gm^2/sec^2
WHOOPS!
Your vessel needs to be traveling at just slightly a different speed than the local drift. You need a relative speed difference, because you need to mine it for supplies. The only way for this to work is to become adapted to life in space. (Not necessarily without gravity, you can spin the ship. Etc. for other constraints.) When the ship hits a rich patch, it accumulates supplies and then reproduces.
We can't build that kind of ship now for several reasons, e.g. we don't know how to build stable societies, and this would require one with long term stability. But it's something that's doable in principle, even if we don't yet have all the pieces.
A real problem might be, this kind of ship would be expensive. Once you have all the techniques, what kind of society would spawn the ships? I can imagine societies that would do it for "religious" reasons, or because they found out their star was about to go nova (though humans would apparently just deny to problem), but those are real edge cases. More likely they developed the cities to do local mining, and then got into a political disagreement, but that would seem to mean they didn't know how to manage long term social stability...or weren't willing to apply the knowledge.
That's not at all clear. You won't see stellar empires, or anything like that, but you could well see generation ships that amble along at rather slow speeds.
Actually, generation ship is really the wrong model, but its one might be recognized. But a better model was MacroLife by Zebrowski. He did use FTL, though, to make the story move, which probably is impossible. Stapledon had a similar concept in Star Maker, but his was less well developed, and it was a sort of side issue. MacroLife is the artificial analog of multicellular life.
OTOH, a MacroLife vessel wouldn't want to be noticed, and wouldn't be very interested in the planets. They've be more interested in mining the asteroids. Still, they might send down robot explorers.
That said, any foreign life will almost certainly be profoundly incompatible with everything on earth. They probably wouldn't even have allergic responses to us or vice versa, because of being too different...but it would be quite remarkable of they were in any way biocompatible...and that includes as food. Still bacteria are both prolific and adaptable, so we might find each other carrying bacteria that would find the other a hospitable environment.
So any contacts will almost certainly be managed by robots, or if they are brave, telefactors. But that would require getting close enough that the light-speed delay wouldn't be significant.
Now if you want to ask about odds.... I'd have to rate them as pretty low. Perhaps as high as 1 in 1000 per 1000 years. But that's a Wild Ass Guess based on nearly nothing. It could be 100 times that, or it could be 0.00001 times that, and I'd have no way to know. After people go out and start mining asteroids for awhile there might be better grounds for a guess.
The thing is, MacroLife vessels wouldn't stop to enter a planetary system. They'd be traveling at a speed just a bit different from the general flow of interstellar dust in the area and unwilling to spend mass+energy to alter their speed...and, IIUC, they might well be avoiding this area because we live in a void, where the picking are low.
MacroLife is probably only possible if you have controlled nuclear fusion, though you *might* be able to manage it with fission. And you need a really good closed ecosystem. And you need good social engineering. The smallest one would probably require a population of 500,000, but that's a guess, and you could use stored cells and advanced cloning to reduce that requirement. But you're going to need enough population to give you genetic as well as social stability. So we're a long way from being able to build one in multiple disciplines. But there doesn't seem to be anything intrinsically impossible about the concept. The real question might be what kind of society would spawn them. Once they get started they'll reproduce, though, so the start only has to happen once.