Oh it'll sell. The advantages are HUMONGOUS - once it's technically feasible, the public will damn well DEMAND that it be available, if nessecary by changing the laws -- the advantage really is that huge.
People may not like not being in control - but they *do* like getting safely back home after a night on the town. They may like driving, but not so much they don't see the advantage of a car that is capable of picking someone up -- without needing a driver. They may like someone-to-blame, but not so much they wouldn't rather read the newspaper, or check their email rather than spend their time driving themselves to and from work. Parking would also be a lot less of a problem if you could have the car drop you off by your office/airport/wherever and then go park itself a mile or 3 away, where parking is abundant and a lot cheaper or free. And people -do- worry about the accident-stats, and the risks associated with letting your 17-year-old or whatever drive to some party, on friday evening.
Last, but not least, 50K dead is insane. That means, after you adjust for population and driven miles - American traffic is more than 3 times as dangerous as Norwegian traffic. (i.e. if you had our accident-stats, it'd be 15K dead) If and when software-cars can have demonstrably significantly lower accident-rates, they WILL become legal. (and may even, if the stats are clear enough, eventually become mandated)
Witness what happened with seatbelts and airbags. Both are technologies that hurt and kill people every year. It's just that it's been demonstrated conclusively that they help a lot more than they hurt. Once in a while, someone is seriously hurt or even killed by an airbag. That's still a cost worth paying - when reality is that a lot more often, someone is saved by the same device.
There's two responses to this. First, my argument was intended somewhat more narrow. I didn't intend to argue that the current business-model of cable-tv would work equally well without advertising, offcourse it wouldn't. Instead, I intended to argue that calculations based on the assumption that all cable-tv-stations send exclusively new content with no repeats 24/7 -- are deeply flawed, since the reality is that an average program is shown many times.
A $1M half-hour episode, needs to be shown 20 times (in sum over all channels) to break even if the available income is $50K/half-hour. A $100K reality-show, only needs to be shown *twice*. Neither numbers actually seem out of the question. Certainly successful shows will easily break this, Season one of Gilmore girls have been shown -atleast- 4 times in Germany alone -- worldwide it's CERTAINLY way higher than 20 times, and that is ignoring DVD-sales and thelike.
Second: It's not my problem if their business-model is broken. Being presented insulting and harmful advertising, in order to save $1/hour, is a bad deal for me, thus I'm not taking it -- even if the cable-tv-stations wishes I would.
In a world where there are people who're willing to pay me $40 to pay attention to them for one hour, it's a horrendously bad deal to subject me to an hour worth of advertising, and gain $1 from it. Even if you're liberal and say that half the time I go to the bathroom or do something else productive, then we're still left with only $2/hour of generated income.
Frankly, I'm -hugely- much better off working for 1 hour, and buy 30 hours worth of a series I like, rather than watch the same 30 hours on cable-tv, and suffer trough approximately 10 hours worth of advertising.
This is true for anyone, who don't consider watching 10 hours worth of advertising, superior to working for a single hour.
True, but this assumes that all of the channels show exclusive shows 24/7 that have to justify their existence by this single showing.
This ENTIRELY fails to be the case. First there's reruns. How large a fraction of say Discovery consists of shows that have been shown previously ? I'd guess 75%, that alone, quadruples the money available to produce a show.
Then there's the shows that are sold and bought and end up being shown on more than one channel. It's the norm rather than the exception that a show is shown on several channels, if successful, it could even easily get into hundreds of channels. (keep in mind that shows are -also- sold to foreign channels)
So, how much of a average channels schedule consists of first-runs? (i.e. content that has not been shown previously anywhere, neither on this channel, nor on another)
It varies wildly by channel, offcourse, but I don't think there's -any- channels who approach 100%, and many channels seem to be in the 10% or thereabout range.
$43.000 for an half-hour show, may or may not be enough. It's not enough for a high-profile show, but MOST of the self-produced programming on those 200 channels isn't high-profile shows.
It would require a large investment, but no new technology at all. Building a straight pipe that can withstand a vacuum, is trivial, air-pressure is only equivalent to about 10m of waterpressure afterall, so it's the same thing as building a pipe that can withstand being immersed in 10m of water. And we've built undersea road-tunnels in the form of tubes at depths significantly larger than that. (and those are larger-diametre than a train-pipe would need to be)
Building a passenger-compartment that can withstand 1 standard atmospheric pressure from the inside, is also trivial technically. Pretty much every passenger-plane on the planet already have a passenger-compartment withstanding a partial vacuum, and those are a) larger, b) more weight-constrained and c) it's literally 80 year old technology.
The most high-tech component is infact the maglev track and lifting-magnets. But even that is technology that was first developed in the 1970ies, and which has been in comercial operation since 1993, so it hardly requires any technological breaktroughs.
The technology to build vactrains are not "a little way off" -- infact I'd say the technology-level needed to build them where reached more than a decade ago.
The reason we're still not seeing them isn't technology -- it's economics. Building such a line would be very expensive.
Not really. It's as easy as installing Firefox Sync, and setting up an account there. This is a 3-minute operation. If they'd stayed open until FF-4 (which will come with sync built-in), it'd have been even less of an effort.
Also, Xmarks has been getting increasingly annoying for a while now, with added antifeatures like manipulating search-results with their opinion of the links and thus submitting your search-history to them. Yes you can turn this off, but it's still an annoyance.
In contrast, Firefox sync encrypts everything, so even if you sync to their servers, they don't even know what bookmarks you have. And it's open source.
Frankly, the only advantage of Xmarks, is that it's cross-browser. (so you can share bookmarks between Firefox and IE, for example)
Realistically, most people aren't consciously aware of having a "home network" at all, and a majority of them, if they have one, simply use the wlan on the nat-router they use to connect to the internet in the first place. Worrying about what kind of adressing is used on their home-network is FAR off the radar.
I -do- have a wired home-network, part fibre-optical and part copper-based, aswell as 2 wireless routers, and around a dozen devices that connect either wirelessly or wired, 3 of which I can access from outside my home-network. But I'm not so far into the nerd-woods that I'm unaware how untypical this is.
If anything, I see a opposite trend: NAT is becoming less and LESS of a hassle, because more and more devices and protocols come with enhancements to deal with it, precisely BECAUSE that is the de-facto standard. (a home-network with NAT was a major hassle before STUN became common, for example)
But car-accidents *ARE* adressed seriously -- very much so. The improvements have been DRAMATIC, even over short timescales.
Back when I got my drivers licence, 15 years ago, we learned, as a rule of thumb, that one person died in traffic every day, aproximately 400/year here in Norway. By now, we're down to half that. And that is despite the fact that there's a lot more cars, and the average car is driven more.
Measured in a mile-by-mile way, traffic-risk is reduced by more than 2/3rds in 15 years. That is, frankly, spectacular.
And it's the result of concerted effort on a multitude of areas: better roads. better crossings. better cars. better driver-education. better signs. better light. better snow-removal and so on and on and on.
If this is an example of things NOT being fixed, I can live with it.
Yeah. The entire internal network in my house uses 10.*.*.* adresses as it is, and aslong as all webservers are on ipv4, none of them need to change that. Wake me up when there's a significant mass of internet-services only available over ipv6.
575km/h is about half the speed of sound too, so assuming you hear the sound the train emitted when it was 1km away, the train will be only half a km away by the time the sound reaches your ears. And half a km at 575km/h is 3 seconds. Which is enough time to leap away, but NOT enough time to first turn and see what's going on, then get away.
For real speed, you want vactrains. Maglevs with a pressure-cabin, in an evacuated pipe. This has numerous advantages. First, there's less risk that anything will be on the line, if the line is in an enclosed pipe. Second, if there's a near-vacuum in the pipe, then it requires substantially less energy to push the train since air-resistance is the primary energy-waste at these speeds, and third, it cuts noise enormously, if the train is floating in vacuum, there's less vibration to begin with, and there's little transmission of noise to the surroundings too. (vacuum is a very good way of stopping noise!)
First, the 2 first digits are hardly random, instead they can be guesstimated very well from the users aproximate location, for example if the user is American, the latitude is somewhere in the 30-50 range, which is a much smaller searchspace than -90 to 90.
Secondly, aproximately 99% of anywhere is NOTHING. Nobody is going to choose as their password points which have no map-features nearby. Third, one meter resolution, is unrealistic. You might select a building, and if we're pushing it, you might even choose some prominent spot on that building, such as the north-west corner or whatever. But even if everyone does that, you're still just talking ~5 potential points for each building, not hundreds as would be required for 1m resolution.
More like 50M buildings in USA, for a keyspace around 25 bits, but that keyspace won't be anywhere near evenly used, you're going to have a lot more people select the statue of liberty, compared to some random farm-building in Utah. Entropy would thus be significantly lower, perhaps 15 bits.
Forcing people to select multiple, say 5, would not help so much. It'd make it more of a hassle, thus people would, to avoid needing to spend an half-hour logging in, select either even more prominent features, or select 5 different points in the immediate viscinity of eachothers, which doesn't help so much.
In short, not really a good strategy.
Passwords, of any kind, are challenging. The problem being that the needed entropy is high, and there's few methods of easily, and quickly inputing high-entropy information that is at the same time easy to remember.
Personally I think 2-factor is the way to go. My debit-card is protected only by a 4-digit pin, afterall. But that still works reasonably well, because you need posession of the physical card, thus it's 2-factor. 1: the card, and 2: the pin.
Google already launched 2-factor authenthication, where they use your password + your mobile phone as the 2 factors.
Yes, someone could steal the phone AND the password. But it's a lot more secure than the password alone.
Or alternatively: don't take jobs from employers who think that being a perfectly average normal human being is unacceptable. Seriously.
Yes, if you behave like a complete idiot -- your employment-chances might go down. Did you think this wasn't the case prior to social media ? Most communities aren't -that- huge, and your reputation matters, and no, your work reputation and private reputation aren't magically completely separate.
Besides, if you're passionate about what you're doing, odds are your online presence will help you more than it'll hurt. If potential employers choose to google me, they'll find I care deeply about openness, they'll find I've contributed to various open source software for more than a decade, they'll find I've participated in public hearings on technology-topics, they'll find I have a strong net of contacts in unlikely places, and they'll find several examples of work I've performed at earlier employers.
Yes, they'll also find that I was once dressed up as a CHICKEN on a treasure-hunt, while studying, and that I'm the world record-holder for most ridicolous-looking windsurfing fail. But honestly, if that sort of stuff is going to stop them from hiring me, I don't want the job in the first place.
But realistically, chances aren't ANYWHERE near either number. We simply don't know how likely it is for life to exist on planets with a certain temperature and composition.
We know there's life on earth. That's a single data-point. Any scientist knows that drawing strong conclusions from a single datapoint is nuts.
Sure, if we had investigated 23 earth-similar planets, and found life on every single one of them, then we'd have enough data to say that earth-similar planets tend to have life on them.
But that's not presently the case. He may *believe* we will find it to be the case, in the future. But random hunches, don't typically hit with 99.99999999% probability.
Certainly. Letting humans communicate, but preventing them from saying "bad things" by way of black or whitelists, or even pre-determined phrases (if you can call that communication at all) is a lost battle.
How'd the disney-story go again ?
I want to put my strong giraffe in your fluffy rabbit ?
The major problem now is that 99% of all good edits submitted to wikipedia are reverted anyways as false positives.
That's just nonsense, and you know it. It does indeed happen that good edits are reverted, but it does not happen 99% of the time, not even in close to that.
It's hard to say what the bigger problem is -- good edits that are reverted -- or bad edits that aren't. My guess is that both these problems are about equal at the moment, and neither of them are particularily large. That is, Wikipedia seems to be progressing nicely, and it's not at all a problem for most good-faith contributors to have their contributions "stick".
AI will deliver real useful advances any day now. And those advances have been right around the corner for the last 25 years. I agree, the field has been decidedly nonimpressive. What tiny advancement we've seen, has almost entirely been attributable to the VAST advances of raw computing-power and storage.
Meanwhile, we're still at a point where trivial algorithms, perhaps backed by a little data, outperform the ai-approach by orders of magnitude. Yes, you can make neural nets, train them with a few thousand common names to separate female names from male names, and achieve 75% hitrate or thereabouts. There's no reason to do that though, because a lot better results are achieved trivially by including lookup-tables with the most common male and female names -- and guessing randomly at the few that aren't in the tables. Including only the top 1000 female and male names, is enough to get a hitrate of 99.993% for the sex of Norwegians, for example. Vastly superior to the ai-approach and entirely trivial.
Translator-programs, work at a level slightly better than automatic dictionaries. That is, given an input-text, look up each sequential word in the dictionary, and replace it with the corresponding word in the target language. Yes, they are -slightly- better than this, but the distance is limited. The machine-translation allows you to read the text, and in most cases correctly identify what the text is about. You'll suffer loss of detail and precision, and a few words will be -entirely- wrong, but enough is correct that you can guesstimate reasonably. But that's true for the dictionary-approach too.
Roombas and friends do the same: Don't even -try- to build a mental map of the room, much less plan vacuuming in a fashion that covers the entirety. Instead, do the trivial thing and take advantage of the fact that machines are infinitely patient: simply drive around in an entirely random way, but do so for such a long time that at the end of it, pure statistical odds say you've likely covered the entire floor.
Acting on your own free will is what gives you the ability to do harm unto others, deliberately or acidentally.
Not at all. It is what allows you to be *responsible* for that harm. Because you had free will, you could choose to do it, or choose to be carless, even knowing that this might hurt someone. Thus we can (and frequently do) hold you responsible for the harm.
Agents with no free will, nevertheless have the ability to do harm. What they lack, is the ability to choose. Thus a volcano can kill people, but it makes no sense to hold the volcano responsible for doing so. It does not possess free will, and thus there's no entity there to blame.
Not at all. I prefer buying eggs from hens that -are- allowed walking around freely, and being outdoors. These eggs are somewhat more expensive, but I think it's well worth the price.
Not fixed. The OSS community does NOT consist only (perhaps not even mainly, by this point) of volunteers. You need only look at the commit-logs of pretty much any of the more serious pieces of open source software to confirm this.
Furthermore, the OSS community - volunteer or not -- demonstrably created a large selection of security-related software already, so saying that this community clearly cannot do it is somewhat disingenoious. Because in effect you're saying: "Allthough X demonstrably and repeatedly did Y in the past, X is clearly unably to do Y". And that's just a nonsense statement.
To be fair though, it's a lot less work to catch you speeding. I don't know precise numbers, but even a moderate guess says an hour of work with a radar, is sufficient to catch several speeders.
How much work is it realistically to talk to you, and investigate the bearbottle-throwing, finding out who did it and get him convicted ?
I don't know the answer to that either, but it seems reasonable to expect that it'd be several hours work at a minimum, and unless you had -very- good information, it'd be several hours work for possibly naught.
I personally find modern factory-farming to be a lot more hostile to animal-welfare than hunting a wild animal is.
Yes, the farmed animal can be killed in a more controlled fashion, so the death will be swifter and involve less pain. But on the flipside, that farmed animal might have spent it's entire life on a letter-sized piece of wiremesh, and never once even seen the sun.
What would you choose for yourself ? Life your entire life free, and then some day be shot from a distance. Or live your entire life in a prison, then one day be executed. I don't know your answer, but my guess would be, the overwhelming majority, would prefer living free.
Offcourse some people are of the opinion we shouldn't be eating meat at all. I can respect that, though I don't agree. it's atleast internally consistent.
But happily munching eggs from modern cage-hens, while complaining about hunting on animal-welfare grounds, seems rather strange to me.
Paint it. Pink with purple stripes, works well, or any other colorscheme far away from metallic-grey.
Seriously, it's cheap. It's effective. It makes it a hell of a lot easier to refind your car on the giant parking-lot, and it's zero overhead in your normal daily routine.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh it'll sell. The advantages are HUMONGOUS - once it's technically feasible, the public will damn well DEMAND that it be available, if nessecary by changing the laws -- the advantage really is that huge.
People may not like not being in control - but they *do* like getting safely back home after a night on the town. They may like driving, but not so much they don't see the advantage of a car that is capable of picking someone up -- without needing a driver. They may like someone-to-blame, but not so much they wouldn't rather read the newspaper, or check their email rather than spend their time driving themselves to and from work. Parking would also be a lot less of a problem if you could have the car drop you off by your office/airport/wherever and then go park itself a mile or 3 away, where parking is abundant and a lot cheaper or free. And people -do- worry about the accident-stats, and the risks associated with letting your 17-year-old or whatever drive to some party, on friday evening.
Last, but not least, 50K dead is insane. That means, after you adjust for population and driven miles - American traffic is more than 3 times as dangerous as Norwegian traffic. (i.e. if you had our accident-stats, it'd be 15K dead) If and when software-cars can have demonstrably significantly lower accident-rates, they WILL become legal. (and may even, if the stats are clear enough, eventually become mandated)
Witness what happened with seatbelts and airbags. Both are technologies that hurt and kill people every year. It's just that it's been demonstrated conclusively that they help a lot more than they hurt. Once in a while, someone is seriously hurt or even killed by an airbag. That's still a cost worth paying - when reality is that a lot more often, someone is saved by the same device.
Very much true.
I quit long ago, initially thinking I'd miss some aspects of it. But I haven't.
Rationally though, the software doesn't need to be error-free. It just needs to make -less- serious and/or less common errors than human drivers do.
Human drivers kill thousands every year, afterall. If software can do it -better- it should be acceptable, even if it's not doing it PERFECTLY
There's two responses to this. First, my argument was intended somewhat more narrow. I didn't intend to argue that the current business-model of cable-tv would work equally well without advertising, offcourse it wouldn't. Instead, I intended to argue that calculations based on the assumption that all cable-tv-stations send exclusively new content with no repeats 24/7 -- are deeply flawed, since the reality is that an average program is shown many times.
A $1M half-hour episode, needs to be shown 20 times (in sum over all channels) to break even if the available income is $50K/half-hour. A $100K reality-show, only needs to be shown *twice*. Neither numbers actually seem out of the question. Certainly successful shows will easily break this, Season one of Gilmore girls have been shown -atleast- 4 times in Germany alone -- worldwide it's CERTAINLY way higher than 20 times, and that is ignoring DVD-sales and thelike.
Second: It's not my problem if their business-model is broken. Being presented insulting and harmful advertising, in order to save $1/hour, is a bad deal for me, thus I'm not taking it -- even if the cable-tv-stations wishes I would.
In a world where there are people who're willing to pay me $40 to pay attention to them for one hour, it's a horrendously bad deal to subject me to an hour worth of advertising, and gain $1 from it. Even if you're liberal and say that half the time I go to the bathroom or do something else productive, then we're still left with only $2/hour of generated income.
Frankly, I'm -hugely- much better off working for 1 hour, and buy 30 hours worth of a series I like, rather than watch the same 30 hours on cable-tv, and suffer trough approximately 10 hours worth of advertising.
This is true for anyone, who don't consider watching 10 hours worth of advertising, superior to working for a single hour.
True, but this assumes that all of the channels show exclusive shows 24/7 that have to justify their existence by this single showing.
This ENTIRELY fails to be the case. First there's reruns. How large a fraction of say Discovery consists of shows that have been shown previously ? I'd guess 75%, that alone, quadruples the money available to produce a show.
Then there's the shows that are sold and bought and end up being shown on more than one channel. It's the norm rather than the exception that a show is shown on several channels, if successful, it could even easily get into hundreds of channels. (keep in mind that shows are -also- sold to foreign channels)
So, how much of a average channels schedule consists of first-runs? (i.e. content that has not been shown previously anywhere, neither on this channel, nor on another)
It varies wildly by channel, offcourse, but I don't think there's -any- channels who approach 100%, and many channels seem to be in the 10% or thereabout range.
$43.000 for an half-hour show, may or may not be enough. It's not enough for a high-profile show, but MOST of the self-produced programming on those 200 channels isn't high-profile shows.
It would require a large investment, but no new technology at all. Building a straight pipe that can withstand a vacuum, is trivial, air-pressure is only equivalent to about 10m of waterpressure afterall, so it's the same thing as building a pipe that can withstand being immersed in 10m of water. And we've built undersea road-tunnels in the form of tubes at depths significantly larger than that. (and those are larger-diametre than a train-pipe would need to be)
Building a passenger-compartment that can withstand 1 standard atmospheric pressure from the inside, is also trivial technically. Pretty much every passenger-plane on the planet already have a passenger-compartment withstanding a partial vacuum, and those are a) larger, b) more weight-constrained and c) it's literally 80 year old technology.
The most high-tech component is infact the maglev track and lifting-magnets. But even that is technology that was first developed in the 1970ies, and which has been in comercial operation since 1993, so it hardly requires any technological breaktroughs.
The technology to build vactrains are not "a little way off" -- infact I'd say the technology-level needed to build them where reached more than a decade ago.
The reason we're still not seeing them isn't technology -- it's economics. Building such a line would be very expensive.
This is true. And it's a major obstacle for any new method of transport. My guess is, we'll get vactrains in Japan first.
They already have maglevs. They already have high-speed-trains. And they love new technology.
Not really. It's as easy as installing Firefox Sync, and setting up an account there. This is a 3-minute operation. If they'd stayed open until FF-4 (which will come with sync built-in), it'd have been even less of an effort.
Also, Xmarks has been getting increasingly annoying for a while now, with added antifeatures like manipulating search-results with their opinion of the links and thus submitting your search-history to them. Yes you can turn this off, but it's still an annoyance.
In contrast, Firefox sync encrypts everything, so even if you sync to their servers, they don't even know what bookmarks you have. And it's open source.
Frankly, the only advantage of Xmarks, is that it's cross-browser. (so you can share bookmarks between Firefox and IE, for example)
No. I'm the kind of person who's realistic.
Realistically, most people aren't consciously aware of having a "home network" at all, and a majority of them, if they have one, simply use the wlan on the nat-router they use to connect to the internet in the first place. Worrying about what kind of adressing is used on their home-network is FAR off the radar.
I -do- have a wired home-network, part fibre-optical and part copper-based, aswell as 2 wireless routers, and around a dozen devices that connect either wirelessly or wired, 3 of which I can access from outside my home-network. But I'm not so far into the nerd-woods that I'm unaware how untypical this is.
If anything, I see a opposite trend: NAT is becoming less and LESS of a hassle, because more and more devices and protocols come with enhancements to deal with it, precisely BECAUSE that is the de-facto standard. (a home-network with NAT was a major hassle before STUN became common, for example)
But car-accidents *ARE* adressed seriously -- very much so. The improvements have been DRAMATIC, even over short timescales.
Back when I got my drivers licence, 15 years ago, we learned, as a rule of thumb, that one person died in traffic every day, aproximately 400/year here in Norway. By now, we're down to half that. And that is despite the fact that there's a lot more cars, and the average car is driven more.
Measured in a mile-by-mile way, traffic-risk is reduced by more than 2/3rds in 15 years. That is, frankly, spectacular.
And it's the result of concerted effort on a multitude of areas: better roads. better crossings. better cars. better driver-education. better signs. better light. better snow-removal and so on and on and on.
If this is an example of things NOT being fixed, I can live with it.
Yeah. The entire internal network in my house uses 10.*.*.* adresses as it is, and aslong as all webservers are on ipv4, none of them need to change that. Wake me up when there's a significant mass of internet-services only available over ipv6.
575km/h is about half the speed of sound too, so assuming you hear the sound the train emitted when it was 1km away, the train will be only half a km away by the time the sound reaches your ears. And half a km at 575km/h is 3 seconds. Which is enough time to leap away, but NOT enough time to first turn and see what's going on, then get away.
For real speed, you want vactrains. Maglevs with a pressure-cabin, in an evacuated pipe. This has numerous advantages. First, there's less risk that anything will be on the line, if the line is in an enclosed pipe. Second, if there's a near-vacuum in the pipe, then it requires substantially less energy to push the train since air-resistance is the primary energy-waste at these speeds, and third, it cuts noise enormously, if the train is floating in vacuum, there's less vibration to begin with, and there's little transmission of noise to the surroundings too. (vacuum is a very good way of stopping noise!)
It's worse than that. A LOT worse than that.
First, the 2 first digits are hardly random, instead they can be guesstimated very well from the users aproximate location, for example if the user is American, the latitude is somewhere in the 30-50 range, which is a much smaller searchspace than -90 to 90.
Secondly, aproximately 99% of anywhere is NOTHING. Nobody is going to choose as their password points which have no map-features nearby. Third, one meter resolution, is unrealistic. You might select a building, and if we're pushing it, you might even choose some prominent spot on that building, such as the north-west corner or whatever. But even if everyone does that, you're still just talking ~5 potential points for each building, not hundreds as would be required for 1m resolution.
More like 50M buildings in USA, for a keyspace around 25 bits, but that keyspace won't be anywhere near evenly used, you're going to have a lot more people select the statue of liberty, compared to some random farm-building in Utah. Entropy would thus be significantly lower, perhaps 15 bits.
Forcing people to select multiple, say 5, would not help so much. It'd make it more of a hassle, thus people would, to avoid needing to spend an half-hour logging in, select either even more prominent features, or select 5 different points in the immediate viscinity of eachothers, which doesn't help so much.
In short, not really a good strategy.
Passwords, of any kind, are challenging. The problem being that the needed entropy is high, and there's few methods of easily, and quickly inputing high-entropy information that is at the same time easy to remember.
Personally I think 2-factor is the way to go. My debit-card is protected only by a 4-digit pin, afterall. But that still works reasonably well, because you need posession of the physical card, thus it's 2-factor. 1: the card, and 2: the pin.
Google already launched 2-factor authenthication, where they use your password + your mobile phone as the 2 factors.
Yes, someone could steal the phone AND the password. But it's a lot more secure than the password alone.
Or alternatively: don't take jobs from employers who think that being a perfectly average normal human being is unacceptable. Seriously.
Yes, if you behave like a complete idiot -- your employment-chances might go down. Did you think this wasn't the case prior to social media ? Most communities aren't -that- huge, and your reputation matters, and no, your work reputation and private reputation aren't magically completely separate.
Besides, if you're passionate about what you're doing, odds are your online presence will help you more than it'll hurt. If potential employers choose to google me, they'll find I care deeply about openness, they'll find I've contributed to various open source software for more than a decade, they'll find I've participated in public hearings on technology-topics, they'll find I have a strong net of contacts in unlikely places, and they'll find several examples of work I've performed at earlier employers.
Yes, they'll also find that I was once dressed up as a CHICKEN on a treasure-hunt, while studying, and that I'm the world record-holder for most ridicolous-looking windsurfing fail. But honestly, if that sort of stuff is going to stop them from hiring me, I don't want the job in the first place.
But realistically, chances aren't ANYWHERE near either number. We simply don't know how likely it is for life to exist on planets with a certain temperature and composition.
We know there's life on earth. That's a single data-point. Any scientist knows that drawing strong conclusions from a single datapoint is nuts.
Sure, if we had investigated 23 earth-similar planets, and found life on every single one of them, then we'd have enough data to say that earth-similar planets tend to have life on them.
But that's not presently the case. He may *believe* we will find it to be the case, in the future. But random hunches, don't typically hit with 99.99999999% probability.
Certainly. Letting humans communicate, but preventing them from saying "bad things" by way of black or whitelists, or even pre-determined phrases (if you can call that communication at all) is a lost battle.
How'd the disney-story go again ?
I want to put my strong giraffe in your fluffy rabbit ?
The major problem now is that 99% of all good edits submitted to wikipedia are reverted anyways as false positives.
That's just nonsense, and you know it. It does indeed happen that good edits are reverted, but it does not happen 99% of the time, not even in close to that.
It's hard to say what the bigger problem is -- good edits that are reverted -- or bad edits that aren't. My guess is that both these problems are about equal at the moment, and neither of them are particularily large. That is, Wikipedia seems to be progressing nicely, and it's not at all a problem for most good-faith contributors to have their contributions "stick".
Let me get this straight: You drive 50 miles to the recycling-center in your gaz-guzzler: bringins along a SINGLE worn out lightbulb ?
You're doing it wrong.
AI will deliver real useful advances any day now. And those advances have been right around the corner for the last 25 years. I agree, the field has been decidedly nonimpressive. What tiny advancement we've seen, has almost entirely been attributable to the VAST advances of raw computing-power and storage.
Meanwhile, we're still at a point where trivial algorithms, perhaps backed by a little data, outperform the ai-approach by orders of magnitude. Yes, you can make neural nets, train them with a few thousand common names to separate female names from male names, and achieve 75% hitrate or thereabouts. There's no reason to do that though, because a lot better results are achieved trivially by including lookup-tables with the most common male and female names -- and guessing randomly at the few that aren't in the tables. Including only the top 1000 female and male names, is enough to get a hitrate of 99.993% for the sex of Norwegians, for example. Vastly superior to the ai-approach and entirely trivial.
Translator-programs, work at a level slightly better than automatic dictionaries. That is, given an input-text, look up each sequential word in the dictionary, and replace it with the corresponding word in the target language. Yes, they are -slightly- better than this, but the distance is limited. The machine-translation allows you to read the text, and in most cases correctly identify what the text is about. You'll suffer loss of detail and precision, and a few words will be -entirely- wrong, but enough is correct that you can guesstimate reasonably. But that's true for the dictionary-approach too.
Roombas and friends do the same: Don't even -try- to build a mental map of the room, much less plan vacuuming in a fashion that covers the entirety. Instead, do the trivial thing and take advantage of the fact that machines are infinitely patient: simply drive around in an entirely random way, but do so for such a long time that at the end of it, pure statistical odds say you've likely covered the entire floor.
Acting on your own free will is what gives you the ability to do harm unto others, deliberately or acidentally.
Not at all. It is what allows you to be *responsible* for that harm. Because you had free will, you could choose to do it, or choose to be carless, even knowing that this might hurt someone. Thus we can (and frequently do) hold you responsible for the harm.
Agents with no free will, nevertheless have the ability to do harm. What they lack, is the ability to choose. Thus a volcano can kill people, but it makes no sense to hold the volcano responsible for doing so. It does not possess free will, and thus there's no entity there to blame.
Not at all. I prefer buying eggs from hens that -are- allowed walking around freely, and being outdoors. These eggs are somewhat more expensive, but I think it's well worth the price.
Not fixed. The OSS community does NOT consist only (perhaps not even mainly, by this point) of volunteers. You need only look at the commit-logs of pretty much any of the more serious pieces of open source software to confirm this.
Furthermore, the OSS community - volunteer or not -- demonstrably created a large selection of security-related software already, so saying that this community clearly cannot do it is somewhat disingenoious. Because in effect you're saying: "Allthough X demonstrably and repeatedly did Y in the past, X is clearly unably to do Y". And that's just a nonsense statement.
To be fair though, it's a lot less work to catch you speeding. I don't know precise numbers, but even a moderate guess says an hour of work with a radar, is sufficient to catch several speeders.
How much work is it realistically to talk to you, and investigate the bearbottle-throwing, finding out who did it and get him convicted ?
I don't know the answer to that either, but it seems reasonable to expect that it'd be several hours work at a minimum, and unless you had -very- good information, it'd be several hours work for possibly naught.
I personally find modern factory-farming to be a lot more hostile to animal-welfare than hunting a wild animal is. Yes, the farmed animal can be killed in a more controlled fashion, so the death will be swifter and involve less pain. But on the flipside, that farmed animal might have spent it's entire life on a letter-sized piece of wiremesh, and never once even seen the sun. What would you choose for yourself ? Life your entire life free, and then some day be shot from a distance. Or live your entire life in a prison, then one day be executed. I don't know your answer, but my guess would be, the overwhelming majority, would prefer living free. Offcourse some people are of the opinion we shouldn't be eating meat at all. I can respect that, though I don't agree. it's atleast internally consistent. But happily munching eggs from modern cage-hens, while complaining about hunting on animal-welfare grounds, seems rather strange to me.
Paint it. Pink with purple stripes, works well, or any other colorscheme far away from metallic-grey. Seriously, it's cheap. It's effective. It makes it a hell of a lot easier to refind your car on the giant parking-lot, and it's zero overhead in your normal daily routine.