Nothing is run by AI because AI does not exist. Atleast I don't think any current software-system deserves the term "intelligence".
Several of the armed, flying things which are sent out to kill humans are however perfectly independent for hours, many are capable of performing the entire mission from launch to kill independently and with zero communication either way between the device and the operators.
Consider a cruise-missile. It is launched by humans, from a ship for example. Thereafter it can fly independently, navigating according to maps, gyroscopes and GPS. When it gets close to its target it uses visual identification to find the intended target and aim for it. It is perfectly capable of say circling an area searching for a enemy vehicle.
The difference is that you're not there. So you can't be fired back at.
Removing you from the theatre of war makes the entire thing more impersonal. It's a lot easier to fight a war if you can do it from 1000km away, against enemies that can't possibly get to you.
Yeah, this trend is nothing new. Firing an artillery-round from 10miles away is a lot less "personal" than killing someone with a sword.
I'm skeptical, current warfare is very assymetric, and I think it's likely that falling casualty-rates ENCOURAGE the administration to engage in more and bloodier wars with less and less of a real reason. In short, lower US casualty-rates could easily lead to higher US-inflicted casualties.
Nothing says "war is bad" as efficiently as lines of dead soldiers being delivered back home.
I don't think a future where being a soldier at war means sitting in a office and operating remote war-robots, thereafter returning home for dinner, is a desireable outcome.
Individuals are different, but that doesn't prevent groups from being real.
For example, there are tall and short japanese, and tall and short norwegians. Some japanese are taller than some norwegians.
This doesn't mean statements such as: "Japanese are on the average shorter than Norwegians" are wrong. To the contrary, that is correct and not in the least controversial.
Similarily, some women are taller than some men, but despite this it's correct to say that women are generally shorter than men.
Tallness is uncontroversial, because it's so blindingly obvious you'd just be an IDIOT if you denied this obvious fact.
Still, apply the same logic to more hidden traits, like behaviour, social norms or god forbid intelligence, and people start vigorously protesting.
There is no doubt, statistically that Americans of African descent are in many ways statistically significantly different from Americans of for example European descent. Not saying anything about -why- (don't feel like stepping into -that- particular waspnest) but it's just stupid to pretend that there are no differences. There obviously are.
Realistically, it's not as if we'll "run out" of oil short-term. The worst that'll happen is that prices rise significantly. Which medium-term means people adjust their behaviour to use less oil.
Wouldn't make much of a difference either way to global warming.
To the degree it increases marine biomass, it's just as effective as increasing any OTHER biomass for capyuring CO2. So in theory it would decrease global warming.
Much too small an effect to be measurable.
It -has- been suggested that spreading iron on the ocean in areas where lack of iron is the limiter on plant-growth would allow much more plants to grow and thus capture a lot of CO2. I think the biggest uncertanity there was for how -long- the CO2 would stay out of the atmosphere.
If a significant fraction of the dead plants sink, retention would be good, hundreds of years at the very least. If most of them decompose near the surface and the CO2 is released from the water, there wouldn't be much benefit.
I do. And I've taken steps to mitigate that problem for the artists (creators really, it's not just artists) that I care about.
I visit concerts. I buy stuff direct from the artist when possible. In some cases I've even simply sent money. It's not hard, and it's a hell of a lot more efficient to send $25 -directly- to the creator of some work with a note saying: "Thanks for the good work, keep it up!" rather than pay the same for a CD and have perhaps $1 thereof actually benefiting someone you care about while the other 24 goes to people who overwhelmingly never created ANYTHING.
That's beside the point here though, my point was it's easy to enjoy good movies, good music etc for near-free, perfectly legally.
Infact, in my jurisdiction the el-cheapo variante would be simply to borrow the material from the public library, total cost -zero-.
There -WAS- a time when you needed to "register" your copyright in order to have it take effect, and doing so may in some jurisdictions still make it easier to assert it, but it's no longer a requirement. (and hasn't been for a considerable number of years)
True enough. A $10 DVD from 2 years back (Hi, movies don't MAGICALLY become worse with age) provides good value even if you just watch it -once- with a few friends, and then toss it in the trash.
If you -really- care about saving you pick up a used DVD off eBay or whatever, watch it, and resell it, for the cost of a ordinary stamp you've got a good-quality movie that can be watched by a whole group of friends. Hard to beat.
Indeed, with electronic entertainment, patience is an excellent money-saver. If you're willing to have exactly the same fun as everyone else, but are willing to wait one year longer to have it, you can frequently have it for half the price.
What was fun 3 years ago is STILL fun.
What was an excellent movie 3 years ago, is STILL an excellent movie.
But then again, with something like disk-drives where price/performance keeps going down rapidly, it doesn't make that much economical difference if the disks last on the average 3 or on the average 5 years.
If disk-space is half the price after 18 months (a fair estimate I think), then that means that two disks that fail after 18 months can be replaced with -one- new, after 36 months (3 years) 4 failed disks can be replaced with 1 new one. After 5 years 8 failed disks can be replaced with a single one.
So, in financial terms, a disk that will last for 3 years is worth 75% of one that will last forever. And one that will last 5 years is worth 85% of one that will last forever.
This ain't -strictly- true offcourse, there's managment overhead in addition to the cost of the physical new disks. Still, the general idea is sound: If you've paid to store data for 18 months, you've paid half of what it costs to store it forever.
There is absolutely nothing you can do, or fail to do, to "lose" a copyright.
Trademarks yes, those can be commoditized. But that is completely irrelevant as Lucas does not, infact, have a trademark on the design of the stormtrooper-armour.
Perfectly true. Being nervous makes -sense- in many situations and is frequently a GOOD thing. It is only when you are *TOO* scared, and it gets in the way of your well-being more than is warranted or prevents you from doing something that would be good for you that it's a problem. So this rises the question of how nervouse is -too- nervous ?
I sure as hell don't want to go mountain-climbing with someone who truly honestly is not even a tiny bit scared. (but also not with someone who is totally panicked)
Because absorbtion is not linear to the area of the event-horizon. It would be if the hole posessed no gravity. But it does, and larger ones posess more.
So everything, including background-radiation, bends "inward" so that some photons that otherwise would not end up hitting the hole DOES end up hitting it.
Similarily, the creation of particle-pairs is indeed proportional to the area of the event-horizon.
But the odds that one-half of such a pair escapes so the hole ends up losing mass is larger for a smaller hole, since with a large hole gravity will do it's damnest to prevent that from happening.
Oh, taking it just a -wee- bit personally, are we ?
There's not really much connection between bad/good and smart/dumb, there are smart-good, smart-bad, dumb-good and dumb-bad people in the world so you ain't got much of a point to begin with.
Second, you should realize that an the -average- military person being somewhat sub-average in education and brains does not mean there are -NOBODY- smart in the military. I'm just saying a person with IQ 150 is LESS likely to end up working for the military than one with IQ 90. Not that he is -ZERO- likely.
I'm not even going to bother responding to your 2 straw-men.
What you said WOULD be true if you sent a tcp-stream by doing this:
Send packet 1
Wait for confirmation (or timeout) of packet 1
Send packet 2
Wait for confirmation (or timeout) of packet 2
..
But that's not how anyone does it. Instead a window is used, and the size of the window is scaled. You allow being one window ahead of the confirmations.
So, you may send p1, get confirmation, send p2-p3 wait for confirmation, send p4-p5-p6-p7 wait for confirmation.
At some point either you start getting confirmations before you've managed to send all you where prepared to send (say in the above example the confirmation for p4 arrives before you've managed to actually send p7) that happens if the limit is your uplink, and that link is now full. You're now sending at full-speed so all is good.
Or you -don't- get confirmation in a reasonable time, the packet is lost, in which case you re-send it and if these things happen too often, shrink your window.
This all happens dynamically. For example the definition of "reasonable" time for a confirmation would in a primitive implementation be calculated as perhaps 1.5 times the AVERAGE confirmation-time for the last 50 packets.
A more mature implementation would take standard deviation into account so that 21ms 21ms 20ms 22ms 21ms 19ms *30ms* would count as a late confirmation (and probably be resent after 26ms or something of that order) whereas 30ms 100ms 47ms 62ms 112ms 51ms *150ms* would NOT count as late, it -is- more than 1.5 times the average, but the stream has high standard deviation so that's probably just randomness.
The short of it; You're plain wrong.
It is, infact NOT rare to see a "single tcp-stream" over the net carry a LOT more than 1-2Mbps, infact I'm downloading the newset ubuntu-iso this very moment, using a single ftp-session in a single tcp-stream. Speed: 22Mbps, nothing uncommon about that.
A black hole over a certain size cannot shrink in this universe, because the background-radiation from the big bang ADDS more mass than can evaporate trough hawking-radiaton. Thus this black-hole was certainly SMALLER in the past, not larger, not even a TINY bit larger.
In non-fascist states employers powers to surveil their employees are limited. Yes it's work-time and work-equipment. No the employer STILL can't legally operate his own little private police-state 8-16 with no limitations.
Besides, making an announcement like that with high-value employees that actually have a choice would simply result in half of them quitting the job. Seriously.
We do traffic-monitoring, but anonymized. (we chop off the last byte of the ip-adress so we see *what* is done, but not by *whom* more accurately than -someone-among-those-200-) And we have a written and known policy that certain use is inacceptable and that if such use is seen, we may need to investigate further.
Because sane copyright-laws have an exception where NORMAL copies that are needed for NORMAL usage of the work are exempt, as are temporary copies arising as a natural side-effect of the use.
To run a computer-program, for example, you MUST copy the bits from CD-rom to hard-disc, from hard-disc to RAM, from RAM to CPU, some parts of the program end up in CPU-cache. Parts of the artwork end up in RAM on the graphics-card. Temporary copies exist as electrical signals traveling towards screen and speakers, as soundwaves in the air and as photons of various frequencies between your screen and your eyes.
Similarily, just listening to a CD creates (more or less temporary) copies in wires, buffers, DACs and assorted cabling.
Even just reading a book creates short-lived copies. There's a continous stream of photons containing the page you're on traveling outwards in all directions from the page. Fragments of the work will stick more or less permanently in various neural structures in your head and so on.
Nevertheless, doing these things are not equivalent, in a practical sense, to COPYING the work. Rather they are nessecary and natural consequences of USING the work in the ordinary way.
As I said, in sane copyright-law, such copies are explicitly allowed. In Norway, for example, copying a CD to a different format like a mp3-player, or to a backup-tape is explicitly allowed.
The problem is that you're a two-party state. Or atleast thats one of the major problems.
The system is such that it is effectively impossible for a third party to play a major role, and the rules are unlikely to change since that would require atleast one of the big two to vote in favor of changing the rules to their own detriment.
Fat chance !
Democracies with a multi-party system has MUCH more variation among political parties, and you are much more able to vote your true opinion rather than as in the USA where you may in many situations merely choose the lesser of the two evils.
Won't work. Most of the cholesterol in your body is PRODUCED by your body, not obtained from ingested food.
Indeed there's some controversy in medical-science circles currently over to what degree food-cholesterol (like in eggs) influence blood-cholesterol at all.
Regardless of how that particular debate ends though, you'll have cholesterol in your blood even if you eat -zero- of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing is run by AI because AI does not exist. Atleast I don't think any current software-system deserves the term "intelligence".
Several of the armed, flying things which are sent out to kill humans are however perfectly independent for hours, many are capable of performing the entire mission from launch to kill independently and with zero communication either way between the device and the operators.
Consider a cruise-missile. It is launched by humans, from a ship for example. Thereafter it can fly independently, navigating according to maps, gyroscopes and GPS. When it gets close to its target it uses visual identification to find the intended target and aim for it. It is perfectly capable of say circling an area searching for a enemy vehicle.
The difference is that you're not there. So you can't be fired back at.
Removing you from the theatre of war makes the entire thing more impersonal. It's a lot easier to fight a war if you can do it from 1000km away, against enemies that can't possibly get to you.
Yeah, this trend is nothing new. Firing an artillery-round from 10miles away is a lot less "personal" than killing someone with a sword.
I'm skeptical, current warfare is very assymetric, and I think it's likely that falling casualty-rates ENCOURAGE the administration to engage in more and bloodier wars with less and less of a real reason. In short, lower US casualty-rates could easily lead to higher US-inflicted casualties.
Nothing says "war is bad" as efficiently as lines of dead soldiers being delivered back home.
I don't think a future where being a soldier at war means sitting in a office and operating remote war-robots, thereafter returning home for dinner, is a desireable outcome.
Individuals are different, but that doesn't prevent groups from being real.
For example, there are tall and short japanese, and tall and short norwegians. Some japanese are taller than some norwegians.
This doesn't mean statements such as: "Japanese are on the average shorter than Norwegians" are wrong. To the contrary, that is correct and not in the least controversial.
Similarily, some women are taller than some men, but despite this it's correct to say that women are generally shorter than men.
Tallness is uncontroversial, because it's so blindingly obvious you'd just be an IDIOT if you denied this obvious fact.
Still, apply the same logic to more hidden traits, like behaviour, social norms or god forbid intelligence, and people start vigorously protesting.
There is no doubt, statistically that Americans of African descent are in many ways statistically significantly different from Americans of for example European descent. Not saying anything about -why- (don't feel like stepping into -that- particular waspnest) but it's just stupid to pretend that there are no differences. There obviously are.
It's not that easy.
If the events are truly genuinely RANDOM, then they also aren't influenced by your "will" whatever the hell THAT means.
"free will" requires events to be NOT pre-determined, but also NOT random. It's a tricky one.
Much too late. The US has deployed armed flying "hunter-killer" robots for several years.
But pretty eleastic medium to long-term.
Realistically, it's not as if we'll "run out" of oil short-term. The worst that'll happen is that prices rise significantly. Which medium-term means people adjust their behaviour to use less oil.
Wouldn't make much of a difference either way to global warming.
To the degree it increases marine biomass, it's just as effective as increasing any OTHER biomass for capyuring CO2. So in theory it would decrease global warming.
Much too small an effect to be measurable.
It -has- been suggested that spreading iron on the ocean in areas where lack of iron is the limiter on plant-growth would allow much more plants to grow and thus capture a lot of CO2. I think the biggest uncertanity there was for how -long- the CO2 would stay out of the atmosphere.
If a significant fraction of the dead plants sink, retention would be good, hundreds of years at the very least. If most of them decompose near the surface and the CO2 is released from the water, there wouldn't be much benefit.
I do. And I've taken steps to mitigate that problem for the artists (creators really, it's not just artists) that I care about.
I visit concerts. I buy stuff direct from the artist when possible. In some cases I've even simply sent money. It's not hard, and it's a hell of a lot more efficient to send $25 -directly- to the creator of some work with a note saying: "Thanks for the good work, keep it up!" rather than pay the same for a CD and have perhaps $1 thereof actually benefiting someone you care about while the other 24 goes to people who overwhelmingly never created ANYTHING.
That's beside the point here though, my point was it's easy to enjoy good movies, good music etc for near-free, perfectly legally.
Infact, in my jurisdiction the el-cheapo variante would be simply to borrow the material from the public library, total cost -zero-.
There aren't.
There -WAS- a time when you needed to "register" your copyright in order to have it take effect, and doing so may in some jurisdictions still make it easier to assert it, but it's no longer a requirement. (and hasn't been for a considerable number of years)
True enough. A $10 DVD from 2 years back (Hi, movies don't MAGICALLY become worse with age) provides good value even if you just watch it -once- with a few friends, and then toss it in the trash.
If you -really- care about saving you pick up a used DVD off eBay or whatever, watch it, and resell it, for the cost of a ordinary stamp you've got a good-quality movie that can be watched by a whole group of friends. Hard to beat.
Indeed, with electronic entertainment, patience is an excellent money-saver. If you're willing to have exactly the same fun as everyone else, but are willing to wait one year longer to have it, you can frequently have it for half the price.
What was fun 3 years ago is STILL fun.
What was an excellent movie 3 years ago, is STILL an excellent movie.
This is true for most apps, certainly most web-thingamajigs.
It's not as if Ebay or Facebook does anything that is particularily tricky to figure out how to do.
You've not met the right ones then.
Those say; "Cool, can I drive it ?"
But then again, with something like disk-drives where price/performance keeps going down rapidly, it doesn't make that much economical difference if the disks last on the average 3 or on the average 5 years.
If disk-space is half the price after 18 months (a fair estimate I think), then that means that two disks that fail after 18 months can be replaced with -one- new, after 36 months (3 years) 4 failed disks can be replaced with 1 new one. After 5 years 8 failed disks can be replaced with a single one.
So, in financial terms, a disk that will last for 3 years is worth 75% of one that will last forever. And one that will last 5 years is worth 85% of one that will last forever.
This ain't -strictly- true offcourse, there's managment overhead in addition to the cost of the physical new disks. Still, the general idea is sound: If you've paid to store data for 18 months, you've paid half of what it costs to store it forever.
You may -think- so. But you're simply wrong.
There is absolutely nothing you can do, or fail to do, to "lose" a copyright.
Trademarks yes, those can be commoditized. But that is completely irrelevant as Lucas does not, infact, have a trademark on the design of the stormtrooper-armour.
Perfectly true. Being nervous makes -sense- in many situations and is frequently a GOOD thing. It is only when you are *TOO* scared, and it gets in the way of your well-being more than is warranted or prevents you from doing something that would be good for you that it's a problem. So this rises the question of how nervouse is -too- nervous ?
I sure as hell don't want to go mountain-climbing with someone who truly honestly is not even a tiny bit scared. (but also not with someone who is totally panicked)
Because absorbtion is not linear to the area of the event-horizon. It would be if the hole posessed no gravity. But it does, and larger ones posess more.
So everything, including background-radiation, bends "inward" so that some photons that otherwise would not end up hitting the hole DOES end up hitting it.
Similarily, the creation of particle-pairs is indeed proportional to the area of the event-horizon.
But the odds that one-half of such a pair escapes so the hole ends up losing mass is larger for a smaller hole, since with a large hole gravity will do it's damnest to prevent that from happening.
Oh, taking it just a -wee- bit personally, are we ?
There's not really much connection between bad/good and smart/dumb, there are smart-good, smart-bad, dumb-good and dumb-bad people in the world so you ain't got much of a point to begin with.
Second, you should realize that an the -average- military person being somewhat sub-average in education and brains does not mean there are -NOBODY- smart in the military. I'm just saying a person with IQ 150 is LESS likely to end up working for the military than one with IQ 90. Not that he is -ZERO- likely.
I'm not even going to bother responding to your 2 straw-men.
What you said WOULD be true if you sent a tcp-stream by doing this:
But that's not how anyone does it. Instead a window is used, and the size of the window is scaled. You allow being one window ahead of the confirmations.
So, you may send p1, get confirmation, send p2-p3 wait for confirmation, send p4-p5-p6-p7 wait for confirmation.
At some point either you start getting confirmations before you've managed to send all you where prepared to send (say in the above example the confirmation for p4 arrives before you've managed to actually send p7) that happens if the limit is your uplink, and that link is now full. You're now sending at full-speed so all is good.
Or you -don't- get confirmation in a reasonable time, the packet is lost, in which case you re-send it and if these things happen too often, shrink your window.
This all happens dynamically. For example the definition of "reasonable" time for a confirmation would in a primitive implementation be calculated as perhaps 1.5 times the AVERAGE confirmation-time for the last 50 packets.
A more mature implementation would take standard deviation into account so that 21ms 21ms 20ms 22ms 21ms 19ms *30ms* would count as a late confirmation (and probably be resent after 26ms or something of that order) whereas 30ms 100ms 47ms 62ms 112ms 51ms *150ms* would NOT count as late, it -is- more than 1.5 times the average, but the stream has high standard deviation so that's probably just randomness.
The short of it; You're plain wrong.
It is, infact NOT rare to see a "single tcp-stream" over the net carry a LOT more than 1-2Mbps, infact I'm downloading the newset ubuntu-iso this very moment, using a single ftp-session in a single tcp-stream. Speed: 22Mbps, nothing uncommon about that.
Not possible. There exists no such size.
If we find a really big black hole, it either was created big a short time ago, or was created smaller earlier and grew.
If we find a really tiny one, it was created that size just now, or it was created larger earlier and evaporated.
The second is unlikely, the size where evaporation beats growth from incoming background-radiation alone is very small.
But in either case, there's no size where the conclusion is: Must be older than the universe.
You're right. Actually it's stronger than that:
A black hole over a certain size cannot shrink in this universe, because the background-radiation from the big bang ADDS more mass than can evaporate trough hawking-radiaton. Thus this black-hole was certainly SMALLER in the past, not larger, not even a TINY bit larger.
Dunno about that. It's hard to end up without the "bottom half of the bell curve" when hardly anyone of above average intelligence will even apply.
My guess is that the army mostly consist of people in the 3rd quartile, which is hardly above-average.
In non-fascist states employers powers to surveil their employees are limited. Yes it's work-time and work-equipment. No the employer STILL can't legally operate his own little private police-state 8-16 with no limitations.
Besides, making an announcement like that with high-value employees that actually have a choice would simply result in half of them quitting the job. Seriously.
We do traffic-monitoring, but anonymized. (we chop off the last byte of the ip-adress so we see *what* is done, but not by *whom* more accurately than -someone-among-those-200-) And we have a written and known policy that certain use is inacceptable and that if such use is seen, we may need to investigate further.
Because sane copyright-laws have an exception where NORMAL copies that are needed for NORMAL usage of the work are exempt, as are temporary copies arising as a natural side-effect of the use.
To run a computer-program, for example, you MUST copy the bits from CD-rom to hard-disc, from hard-disc to RAM, from RAM to CPU, some parts of the program end up in CPU-cache. Parts of the artwork end up in RAM on the graphics-card. Temporary copies exist as electrical signals traveling towards screen and speakers, as soundwaves in the air and as photons of various frequencies between your screen and your eyes.
Similarily, just listening to a CD creates (more or less temporary) copies in wires, buffers, DACs and assorted cabling.
Even just reading a book creates short-lived copies. There's a continous stream of photons containing the page you're on traveling outwards in all directions from the page. Fragments of the work will stick more or less permanently in various neural structures in your head and so on.
Nevertheless, doing these things are not equivalent, in a practical sense, to COPYING the work. Rather they are nessecary and natural consequences of USING the work in the ordinary way.
As I said, in sane copyright-law, such copies are explicitly allowed. In Norway, for example, copying a CD to a different format like a mp3-player, or to a backup-tape is explicitly allowed.
The problem is that you're a two-party state. Or atleast thats one of the major problems.
The system is such that it is effectively impossible for a third party to play a major role, and the rules are unlikely to change since that would require atleast one of the big two to vote in favor of changing the rules to their own detriment.
Fat chance !
Democracies with a multi-party system has MUCH more variation among political parties, and you are much more able to vote your true opinion rather than as in the USA where you may in many situations merely choose the lesser of the two evils.
Won't work. Most of the cholesterol in your body is PRODUCED by your body, not obtained from ingested food.
Indeed there's some controversy in medical-science circles currently over to what degree food-cholesterol (like in eggs) influence blood-cholesterol at all.
Regardless of how that particular debate ends though, you'll have cholesterol in your blood even if you eat -zero- of it.