For anyone not in on the joke, it's from way back near the beginning of the webcomic, Schlock Mercenary. (The art's a lot better now, and I recommend it to anyone interested in good, silly sci-fi.)
Err. The point is that they MADE a normal, magnetic strip card out of the data.
Assuming they can pass off a forged swipe card (by for example, using the self-swipe stations at many retail stores, where nobody looks at it), that particular security device does jack shit.
What they really want is to have the direct income that indie developers have--no huge take from publishers, no license fees to various console makers, etc. They basically have no idea why they're paying money to people like EA instead of actually getting $50 for each $50 game sold. That's why they think that they are supposed to, at once, charge a lot of money and get a lot in return.
Granted, that dollar amount is probably too high, and probably for the wrong reasons (as determined by the publisher, MS, etc), but if they wanted to do indie development, they'd have to take the risks that came with it, including disappearing into obscurity.
It find it ironic that despite all the Congressional rhetoric surrounding piracy and copyright infringement, these campaign folks (who are of course being advised by lawyers) simply rip off 30 seconds of copyrighted work and then cry "fair use."
That's not ironic. It's basically the entire point.
The people being elected to congress are not prepared to pass legislation that has actual consequences. They think they're doing the boring job of maintaining the country, which is why hardly anyone takes it seriously. They think it's okay to be selfish and accomplish nothing. They think that peace and prosperity will never end--or worse, they think that you have to have to be superstitious and cowardly, maintaining the previous order at any cost. The proper way to go about it would be to take it seriously, take it slow, and not do anything drastic just because of momentary industry pressure.
Only people in the tech industry see now (by which I mean plus or minus a decade) as being a crossroads, where legislation can make things better, can keep things the same, or can utterly decimate technological and cultural innovation. Congress sees it as kids playing, and like a lot of bad parents, they equate "kids playing" with "slacking off" rather than growth and development.
That depends on where your existing mail is coming from. If you have a small number of legitimate sources, you can add a filter that makes sure nothing bad happens to their mail (select any mail from them, "filter messages like these;" you can select multiple emails, each from a different source, to make a single large filter). You'll also want to change your "reply-to" address in your gmail settings to a new canon, to prevent complications from people you email. This suggests you may soon be able to filter by google+ circle, which may help with this task.
Aside from that, you may be out of luck. If you get email for a wide variety of sources, or you can be reasonably assured that you will get a lot of miscellaneous email that's hard to filter, I don't have a clever solution. It's possible there are other solutions out there from REAL power-users, but I don't know them.
yes, but you can have a canonical email address with dots in it (your.name@gmail), and filter out email addresses without dots (yourname@gmail). They'll all get delivered, but you can set it up to tag anything with a wrongly-formatted to: address, kick it out of your inbox, or even automatically delete it.
That's not how monopolies work. Or I guess I should say, that's not how anti-competitive leverage works.
Take manufacturer "X". X wants to sell laptops and desktops running Windows, servers running both Windows and various UNIX flavors, and tablets running Windows and maybe Android.
X, naturally, must purchase licenses for Windows in bulk from Microsoft. Possibly tens of thousands of licenses, or more if they're a very large manufacturer. You understand at this point that this is a significant expense.
So they come to Microsoft, who them sits down at a conference table and says, "So, you're going to make sure people can't use your tablets (and anything else that's running off ARM with UEFI) to boot anything but Windows, right?"
The X execs look at each other. "Hadn't thought about it."
"Well, we can give you a bigger discount if you do..."
The X execs now get to choose between turning down money or not turning down money. We'll leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
It's not "Everything good is done by Google, everything bad is done by lone employees who do not really represent Google."
It's, "When your employees surprise you by doing something good, reward them and stand by them in the hopes it happens more. When your employees surprise you by doing something bad, punish them and take steps to ensure it doesn't happen." I don't understand what you mean when you say "Take the bad as well as the good." They're setting policy, not watching a crappy TV show, and their actions determine the future of the company.
I enjoy my job enough...I'm not unhappy. I wouldn't do it if there wasn't some pleasure in it, HOWEVER, if I won the powerball tomorrow, I doubt I'd even go back in to collect the few personal things I keep at my desk.
I, like I think most would do...would never work again a day in my life!!
If I won the powerball, I'd start a business so that I'd never have to work for anyone else for the rest of my life.
Then I'd go and do things I want to with the business and the money. My hours, my ideas, that sort of thing. Money is* the power to make your problems going away. My problem isn't having a job, it's having a stupid arbitrary job that I can't control.
*Disclaimer: Speaking broadly. I'm not a money=power absolutist, but you have to admit, it has an effect.
That also implies that if a plant is unsafe, it still gets 40 years. Otherwise, what does the time limit mean?
It means that they expect plants to be worn down by use. Plants that are less worn are deemed less likely to be a problem, even if they have fewer safeguards. Plants that are both worn and with fewer safeguards will (ostensibly) not be tolerated.
Representative government is a myth. It's a contradiction; there are rulers (those who govern) and there are subjects (those who are governed).
In principle, it's specialization of labor. The problem is that that specialization went from governance to cronyism, and none of us know how to stop it. Well, not peaceably, anyway.
I don't think you understand revolution, and in particular why the US had one. Two, if you count the civil war as an attempt at revolution that failed.
At the time of the US revolution, a minority approved of it. However, at the time, virtually everyone was self-reliant, or could be. The choice was essentially between the old European governments establishing control over the colonies, or them having their own, local government. Civil war (by which I still mean the US revolution) was acceptable because there was no horrible consequence to temporary anarchy. It turned out to be an excellent idea, because a bunch of idealists were able to determine the form of government, which is in the end what you (and I, were it practical) are espousing.
In the modern US, specialization of labor has replaced self-reliance to an ungodly degree. The existence of metropolises, and suburbs, is proof of that. There are many places where even temporary anarchy would spell the deaths of hundreds of thousands, or millions, because food and medicine is not produced locally. That means any attempt at violent revolution would be, in effect, telling those people to sacrifice themselves for your idealism. Considering the focus of your idealism is on a bill that regulates theft from the entertainment industry, you're going to have a hard time convincing Joe Public.
Meanwhile, the existing government has a 100% foolproof way to convince Joe Public: Thousands will die. There is somewhere on the order of zero chance that a violent populist uprising will work.
The best chance the US has of "revolution" is someone getting elected who takes up the mantle of tyrrany only long enough to put the people in jail who deserve to be in jail (politicians, corporates, and the sleazeballs who encourage their behavior), and changes the system to remove the vulnerabilities, before stepping back and letting Democracy work again. Sort of a modern-day George Washington; remember, at the time of the revolution, he had control of the military, and many people wondered if he would honor his promise to step down and hold elections, especially since there was still turmoil going on.
Is this a good idea? No, because you have to look very, very closely at anyone who would take up the mantle of tyranny, and make sure that they don't do it for the wrong reasons, and given our track record of politicians, we won't look that closely, and they'll probably be bad people. It's not that it can't work, but finding the right person to do it is essentially impossible.
"To summarize: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem." ~The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Some of the best inventions are simple and elegant solutions to historically cumbersome problems. You might one day have a eureka moment in which you realize that a very easily implemented bit of code can increase computations exponentially or work around some issue.
And the sooner these are in public domain, the better off the world will be.
But not you personally! Poor baby.
Your retirement is canceled. THAT is the worst case scenario if you abolish patents.
I'm honestly not sure if you're arguing for or against patents at this point.
Seriously? How first-world-problem is this? Retirement was never guaranteed, much less early retirement. A lot of modern companies got as large as they are today because they weren't founded by idiots who thought that the key to happiness in life was doing as little as possible.
But go ahead. Patent your idea so that others can't use it, explicitly so you don't have to contribute anything for the rest of your life. By all means.
The possibilities for anyone EXCEPT the massive corporations really coming out well with no protections on invention are miniscule. With the funding available to those corporations they can take your idea and have it produced at 1000x the rate and quantity, strongarm distributors and retailers, and saturate the market with a cheaper product.
If you gave away your idea for a software algorithm (the algorithm more than the code itself, mind you, as copyright still applies), it will almost certainly be included in open source projects. There's not a lot of cheaper products than free. Whether or not these are high enough quality to win in the market, who knows, but they'll exist.
It's okay. Mars is the definition of "Not In My Back Yard," so Earthlings are all for it. And if the little grey dudes wanted us to stick to solar, they should have just blown the dust off the previous rovers.
"General purpose computing" is just a synonym for power, in the same way as violence, money, and land are.
When you had land, you could do whatever you wanted on your land, even if it was criminal. When you had money, you could get whatever goods or services money could buy, even if it was criminal. When you had violence, you could take others' land and money, even if it is criminal (it isn't always; Police, in principle, "claim" land and money using violence, but not criminally). Naturally, government came in to regulate all three.
When you have general purpose computing, you can have whatever the peripherals of your computer allow you to have, even if it's criminal. Such peripherals include, but are not limited to, recording devices and displays, CNC machines (fab), and telecom (the internet, VOIP, etc).
The funny thing about computing though, is that it is not consumed in the process the way money and land are. Those have to be invested, because you really can't build a factory on a plot today, and then change it to apartments for a few hours to meet demand. You can't have your paycheck pay for food today, and then have the same money pay for rent tomorrow.
So now users have this virtual land that isn't dedicated to a single purpose and can change at the drop of a hat from producing (or consuming) kitten videos to committing virtual crimes to emailing your mom and back again. It defies the concept of specialization of labor. It defies the concept of investment, because once you pay the overhead and produce something for that virtual land (software), everyone can use it without investing in it themselves.
In other words, it defies the models of money and land. It is its own kind of beast, and computing is our window into that world. What computers we use are our "avatars," to use a tired term, and GP computing is the only avatar that isn't artificially hindered. But an avatar that is unhindered is (for the purposes of law enforcement) no different from allowing all citizens access to weaponry, without even background checks. Maybe it will take care of itself, maybe it won't; the arguments could go on forever.
I would say that the argument for GP computing is more akin to the right to bear arms than the right to free speech. It's individually empowering, to the point of threatening other people. Either you respect that people will someday need it, or you get in the path of that train. Maybe you can derail it with your corpse, maybe not, I don't know, but there are a LOT of people who won't sit idly by as you take their (metaphorical) guns away.
Random? What are you talking about? Are you using the word because a nuclear plant accident can seem random to people not paying attention?
A car that's improperly maintained can cause an accident that seems to happen "randomly." A driver that falls asleep behind the wheel can cause an accident that seems to happen "randomly". An unexpected weather event can cause an accident that seems to happen "randomly". Are you counting those as "cars randomly blowing up"? Because when they happen at a nuclear plant, you would use the same word.
Or are you talking about areas affected? Do you really want to try to compare how much (surface area * time) is wasted by car crashes, or how many people lose time or property because of them, compared to nuclear accidents? Or how much manpower is put into cleaning them up? How many fatalities?
To be perfectly honest, we put up with cars because cars are individually empowering. Nuclear power is not individually empowering, not when compared to other kinds of power generation, and it won't be until we have some sort of cold-fusion device that lets you live off the grid. Power generation is about trust. And nuclear power (right or wrong) is asking us to trust them to deal with scarily powerful forces.
You can mistrust them. That's fine. But, please don't scaremonger. Voice concerns, by all means, but don't scaremonger. Some of us do trust it, and in a vast majority of cases, that trust is not misplaced. Being a dick to people who are actually trustworthy and going out of their way to be of use to us is kind of a dick move.
The question you need to ask with regards to a carrier plane is, what fraction of the propellant mass becomes unnecessary, and can you really carry the rest on with a carrier plane? Remember that the Shuttle took two large solid rockets, and a huge tank of liquid rocket fuel just to get to orbit. Nobody in their right mind would suggest, let alone fund, a project where you launched that off the back of another flying craft.
Orbit is all about the velocity--the kinetic energy put into the vessel. You might get advantages from the high altitude, but unless they make an amazingly huge difference to the amount of propellant used, it's not going to be worth the money spent engineering the plane and the rocket.
Also understand, planes have issues with vibration and turbulence. So do rockets, but a rocket travels forward; this rocket will be strapped horizontally, parallel to travel and perpendicular to turbulence. If it hits a patch of bad air, it will have lateral gee stresses that I'm fairly sure no rocket to date has had to withstand.
...perhaps we should have some better places to go?
Unfortunately, it really does have to work the other way around. It's a very unfortunate Catch-22. Until getting to orbit stops breaking the bank, there's not much you can do to put a livable space in orbit, let alone the moon or mars; until there is a place to go, it's not commercially viable to research spaceflight.
Getting to space is a cost-per-pound proposition. How many pounds of material does it take to make a sustainable habitat on the moon? How many pounds of fuel to get it there? How many pounds of fuel will they keep on the moon in reserve in case someone needs to come home? Without lifting capabilities that far surpass what we have, it won't be practical.
That leaves us with two options for research and development: Convince government to waste money on something the majority of their constituents will never benefit from, or convince millionaires to part with their money for a joyride. As long as the latter works, more power to them. Personally, I wouldn't mind my tax dollars going to space research either, but there are a lot of people in this country who would be better served with a lower tax rate (let alone an actual public service, you know, like health care or the post office) than with space travel.
I have an iPod touch, and an old car that needs a cassette adapter to feed audio into it (so, obviously, no steering wheel controls or anything). From the first time I held the Touch, I knew that the lack of physical "Play/Next/Previous" buttons was going to piss me off royally, and in a car it's the worst. For short to medium rides, I'm usually listening to podcasts, not music, so I don't need to pull up the screen except when I start and when I arrive. The few times I've tried to dick around with the controls while driving, it was decidedly and obviously unsafe, even when it's only a few moments staring at the screen.
The touch also has a minor ability to control it with voice by holding down the home button (no, not Siri, it's pretty much just iPod controls), but it doesn't work well and is still distracting, because I have to be completely focused on listening for the audio cues to start talking, and listen for any sign that it actually understood what I said over the car noise. Less obviously unsafe, but still distracting enough to be capable of causing an accident.
I would be unhappy to have a full-electronics ban while driving, but it's not without merit.
There's probably a fancy way of disabling the hot keys as well
You could, I dunno, remove the F* keys from the keyboard. There's approximately zero chance your java app is going to use them, and you can plug in a good keyboard if you need to do anything fancy with the machine later.
Bits and bytes are just the current implementation of digital logic. If I were to give a thousand-foot view, it would be more along the lines of hardware vs software, or a line of code vs a program, or computers versus networks, that sort of thing. The sort of introductory class that keeps a whole generation of kids from confusing 'the internet' with 'Google' (or AOL, or Apple if you prefer).
The number of bits in a byte, or the very fact that computer logic is based on binary, these aren't terribly consequential. If we found a way to make trinary computers tomorrow, both would change, but the human-facing half of it wouldn't.
Perhaps the manufacturers could man up and offer insurance on all of their vehicles, provided they were running autonomously at the time?
If their self-driving concept is sound, the number of times they're at fault will be small, and they can offer that insurance without going bankrupt. If their self-driving concept is not sound, they have a vested interest in getting those cars off the road until they find a fix, so that they don't lose every cent they have paying for every incident they caused. And when it comes to maintenance, well, it's an autonomous car. I'm sure it can phone home if you haven't kept it up to date.
Unless there is some other part of auto insurance that I don't get, it makes sense to me...
Slashdot Mirror
For anyone not in on the joke, it's from way back near the beginning of the webcomic, Schlock Mercenary. (The art's a lot better now, and I recommend it to anyone interested in good, silly sci-fi.)
Err. The point is that they MADE a normal, magnetic strip card out of the data.
Assuming they can pass off a forged swipe card (by for example, using the self-swipe stations at many retail stores, where nobody looks at it), that particular security device does jack shit.
What they really want is to have the direct income that indie developers have--no huge take from publishers, no license fees to various console makers, etc. They basically have no idea why they're paying money to people like EA instead of actually getting $50 for each $50 game sold. That's why they think that they are supposed to, at once, charge a lot of money and get a lot in return.
Granted, that dollar amount is probably too high, and probably for the wrong reasons (as determined by the publisher, MS, etc), but if they wanted to do indie development, they'd have to take the risks that came with it, including disappearing into obscurity.
It find it ironic that despite all the Congressional rhetoric surrounding piracy and copyright infringement, these campaign folks (who are of course being advised by lawyers) simply rip off 30 seconds of copyrighted work and then cry "fair use."
That's not ironic. It's basically the entire point.
The people being elected to congress are not prepared to pass legislation that has actual consequences. They think they're doing the boring job of maintaining the country, which is why hardly anyone takes it seriously. They think it's okay to be selfish and accomplish nothing. They think that peace and prosperity will never end--or worse, they think that you have to have to be superstitious and cowardly, maintaining the previous order at any cost. The proper way to go about it would be to take it seriously, take it slow, and not do anything drastic just because of momentary industry pressure.
Only people in the tech industry see now (by which I mean plus or minus a decade) as being a crossroads, where legislation can make things better, can keep things the same, or can utterly decimate technological and cultural innovation. Congress sees it as kids playing, and like a lot of bad parents, they equate "kids playing" with "slacking off" rather than growth and development.
That depends on where your existing mail is coming from. If you have a small number of legitimate sources, you can add a filter that makes sure nothing bad happens to their mail (select any mail from them, "filter messages like these;" you can select multiple emails, each from a different source, to make a single large filter). You'll also want to change your "reply-to" address in your gmail settings to a new canon, to prevent complications from people you email. This suggests you may soon be able to filter by google+ circle, which may help with this task.
Aside from that, you may be out of luck. If you get email for a wide variety of sources, or you can be reasonably assured that you will get a lot of miscellaneous email that's hard to filter, I don't have a clever solution. It's possible there are other solutions out there from REAL power-users, but I don't know them.
yes, but you can have a canonical email address with dots in it (your.name@gmail), and filter out email addresses without dots (yourname@gmail). They'll all get delivered, but you can set it up to tag anything with a wrongly-formatted to: address, kick it out of your inbox, or even automatically delete it.
That's not how monopolies work. Or I guess I should say, that's not how anti-competitive leverage works.
Take manufacturer "X". X wants to sell laptops and desktops running Windows, servers running both Windows and various UNIX flavors, and tablets running Windows and maybe Android.
X, naturally, must purchase licenses for Windows in bulk from Microsoft. Possibly tens of thousands of licenses, or more if they're a very large manufacturer. You understand at this point that this is a significant expense.
So they come to Microsoft, who them sits down at a conference table and says, "So, you're going to make sure people can't use your tablets (and anything else that's running off ARM with UEFI) to boot anything but Windows, right?"
The X execs look at each other. "Hadn't thought about it."
"Well, we can give you a bigger discount if you do..."
The X execs now get to choose between turning down money or not turning down money. We'll leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
It's not "Everything good is done by Google, everything bad is done by lone employees who do not really represent Google."
It's, "When your employees surprise you by doing something good, reward them and stand by them in the hopes it happens more. When your employees surprise you by doing something bad, punish them and take steps to ensure it doesn't happen." I don't understand what you mean when you say "Take the bad as well as the good." They're setting policy, not watching a crappy TV show, and their actions determine the future of the company.
I enjoy my job enough...I'm not unhappy. I wouldn't do it if there wasn't some pleasure in it, HOWEVER, if I won the powerball tomorrow, I doubt I'd even go back in to collect the few personal things I keep at my desk.
I, like I think most would do...would never work again a day in my life!!
If I won the powerball, I'd start a business so that I'd never have to work for anyone else for the rest of my life.
Then I'd go and do things I want to with the business and the money. My hours, my ideas, that sort of thing. Money is* the power to make your problems going away. My problem isn't having a job, it's having a stupid arbitrary job that I can't control.
*Disclaimer: Speaking broadly. I'm not a money=power absolutist, but you have to admit, it has an effect.
That also implies that if a plant is unsafe, it still gets 40 years. Otherwise, what does the time limit mean?
It means that they expect plants to be worn down by use. Plants that are less worn are deemed less likely to be a problem, even if they have fewer safeguards. Plants that are both worn and with fewer safeguards will (ostensibly) not be tolerated.
Representative government is a myth. It's a contradiction; there are rulers (those who govern) and there are subjects (those who are governed).
In principle, it's specialization of labor. The problem is that that specialization went from governance to cronyism, and none of us know how to stop it. Well, not peaceably, anyway.
I don't think you understand revolution, and in particular why the US had one. Two, if you count the civil war as an attempt at revolution that failed.
At the time of the US revolution, a minority approved of it. However, at the time, virtually everyone was self-reliant, or could be. The choice was essentially between the old European governments establishing control over the colonies, or them having their own, local government. Civil war (by which I still mean the US revolution) was acceptable because there was no horrible consequence to temporary anarchy. It turned out to be an excellent idea, because a bunch of idealists were able to determine the form of government, which is in the end what you (and I, were it practical) are espousing.
In the modern US, specialization of labor has replaced self-reliance to an ungodly degree. The existence of metropolises, and suburbs, is proof of that. There are many places where even temporary anarchy would spell the deaths of hundreds of thousands, or millions, because food and medicine is not produced locally. That means any attempt at violent revolution would be, in effect, telling those people to sacrifice themselves for your idealism. Considering the focus of your idealism is on a bill that regulates theft from the entertainment industry, you're going to have a hard time convincing Joe Public.
Meanwhile, the existing government has a 100% foolproof way to convince Joe Public: Thousands will die. There is somewhere on the order of zero chance that a violent populist uprising will work.
The best chance the US has of "revolution" is someone getting elected who takes up the mantle of tyrrany only long enough to put the people in jail who deserve to be in jail (politicians, corporates, and the sleazeballs who encourage their behavior), and changes the system to remove the vulnerabilities, before stepping back and letting Democracy work again. Sort of a modern-day George Washington; remember, at the time of the revolution, he had control of the military, and many people wondered if he would honor his promise to step down and hold elections, especially since there was still turmoil going on.
Is this a good idea? No, because you have to look very, very closely at anyone who would take up the mantle of tyranny, and make sure that they don't do it for the wrong reasons, and given our track record of politicians, we won't look that closely, and they'll probably be bad people. It's not that it can't work, but finding the right person to do it is essentially impossible.
"To summarize: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem." ~The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I think you mean, "You must spawn more overlords."
Some of the best inventions are simple and elegant solutions to historically cumbersome problems. You might one day have a eureka moment in which you realize that a very easily implemented bit of code can increase computations exponentially or work around some issue.
And the sooner these are in public domain, the better off the world will be.
But not you personally! Poor baby.
Your retirement is canceled. THAT is the worst case scenario if you abolish patents.
I'm honestly not sure if you're arguing for or against patents at this point.
Seriously? How first-world-problem is this? Retirement was never guaranteed, much less early retirement. A lot of modern companies got as large as they are today because they weren't founded by idiots who thought that the key to happiness in life was doing as little as possible.
But go ahead. Patent your idea so that others can't use it, explicitly so you don't have to contribute anything for the rest of your life. By all means.
The possibilities for anyone EXCEPT the massive corporations really coming out well with no protections on invention are miniscule. With the funding available to those corporations they can take your idea and have it produced at 1000x the rate and quantity, strongarm distributors and retailers, and saturate the market with a cheaper product.
If you gave away your idea for a software algorithm (the algorithm more than the code itself, mind you, as copyright still applies), it will almost certainly be included in open source projects. There's not a lot of cheaper products than free. Whether or not these are high enough quality to win in the market, who knows, but they'll exist.
So I really don't understand your point at all.
OH NOES!!!! NUKES!!! Evil!!!
It's okay. Mars is the definition of "Not In My Back Yard," so Earthlings are all for it. And if the little grey dudes wanted us to stick to solar, they should have just blown the dust off the previous rovers.
"General purpose computing" is just a synonym for power, in the same way as violence, money, and land are.
When you had land, you could do whatever you wanted on your land, even if it was criminal. When you had money, you could get whatever goods or services money could buy, even if it was criminal. When you had violence, you could take others' land and money, even if it is criminal (it isn't always; Police, in principle, "claim" land and money using violence, but not criminally). Naturally, government came in to regulate all three.
When you have general purpose computing, you can have whatever the peripherals of your computer allow you to have, even if it's criminal. Such peripherals include, but are not limited to, recording devices and displays, CNC machines (fab), and telecom (the internet, VOIP, etc).
The funny thing about computing though, is that it is not consumed in the process the way money and land are. Those have to be invested, because you really can't build a factory on a plot today, and then change it to apartments for a few hours to meet demand. You can't have your paycheck pay for food today, and then have the same money pay for rent tomorrow.
So now users have this virtual land that isn't dedicated to a single purpose and can change at the drop of a hat from producing (or consuming) kitten videos to committing virtual crimes to emailing your mom and back again. It defies the concept of specialization of labor. It defies the concept of investment, because once you pay the overhead and produce something for that virtual land (software), everyone can use it without investing in it themselves.
In other words, it defies the models of money and land. It is its own kind of beast, and computing is our window into that world. What computers we use are our "avatars," to use a tired term, and GP computing is the only avatar that isn't artificially hindered. But an avatar that is unhindered is (for the purposes of law enforcement) no different from allowing all citizens access to weaponry, without even background checks. Maybe it will take care of itself, maybe it won't; the arguments could go on forever.
I would say that the argument for GP computing is more akin to the right to bear arms than the right to free speech. It's individually empowering, to the point of threatening other people. Either you respect that people will someday need it, or you get in the path of that train. Maybe you can derail it with your corpse, maybe not, I don't know, but there are a LOT of people who won't sit idly by as you take their (metaphorical) guns away.
Random? What are you talking about? Are you using the word because a nuclear plant accident can seem random to people not paying attention?
A car that's improperly maintained can cause an accident that seems to happen "randomly." A driver that falls asleep behind the wheel can cause an accident that seems to happen "randomly". An unexpected weather event can cause an accident that seems to happen "randomly". Are you counting those as "cars randomly blowing up"? Because when they happen at a nuclear plant, you would use the same word.
Or are you talking about areas affected? Do you really want to try to compare how much (surface area * time) is wasted by car crashes, or how many people lose time or property because of them, compared to nuclear accidents? Or how much manpower is put into cleaning them up? How many fatalities?
To be perfectly honest, we put up with cars because cars are individually empowering. Nuclear power is not individually empowering, not when compared to other kinds of power generation, and it won't be until we have some sort of cold-fusion device that lets you live off the grid. Power generation is about trust. And nuclear power (right or wrong) is asking us to trust them to deal with scarily powerful forces.
You can mistrust them. That's fine. But, please don't scaremonger. Voice concerns, by all means, but don't scaremonger. Some of us do trust it, and in a vast majority of cases, that trust is not misplaced. Being a dick to people who are actually trustworthy and going out of their way to be of use to us is kind of a dick move.
At last I, too, can dream of electric sheep!
The question you need to ask with regards to a carrier plane is, what fraction of the propellant mass becomes unnecessary, and can you really carry the rest on with a carrier plane? Remember that the Shuttle took two large solid rockets, and a huge tank of liquid rocket fuel just to get to orbit. Nobody in their right mind would suggest, let alone fund, a project where you launched that off the back of another flying craft.
Orbit is all about the velocity--the kinetic energy put into the vessel. You might get advantages from the high altitude, but unless they make an amazingly huge difference to the amount of propellant used, it's not going to be worth the money spent engineering the plane and the rocket.
Also understand, planes have issues with vibration and turbulence. So do rockets, but a rocket travels forward; this rocket will be strapped horizontally, parallel to travel and perpendicular to turbulence. If it hits a patch of bad air, it will have lateral gee stresses that I'm fairly sure no rocket to date has had to withstand.
...perhaps we should have some better places to go?
Unfortunately, it really does have to work the other way around. It's a very unfortunate Catch-22. Until getting to orbit stops breaking the bank, there's not much you can do to put a livable space in orbit, let alone the moon or mars; until there is a place to go, it's not commercially viable to research spaceflight.
Getting to space is a cost-per-pound proposition. How many pounds of material does it take to make a sustainable habitat on the moon? How many pounds of fuel to get it there? How many pounds of fuel will they keep on the moon in reserve in case someone needs to come home? Without lifting capabilities that far surpass what we have, it won't be practical.
That leaves us with two options for research and development: Convince government to waste money on something the majority of their constituents will never benefit from, or convince millionaires to part with their money for a joyride. As long as the latter works, more power to them. Personally, I wouldn't mind my tax dollars going to space research either, but there are a lot of people in this country who would be better served with a lower tax rate (let alone an actual public service, you know, like health care or the post office) than with space travel.
I have an iPod touch, and an old car that needs a cassette adapter to feed audio into it (so, obviously, no steering wheel controls or anything). From the first time I held the Touch, I knew that the lack of physical "Play/Next/Previous" buttons was going to piss me off royally, and in a car it's the worst. For short to medium rides, I'm usually listening to podcasts, not music, so I don't need to pull up the screen except when I start and when I arrive. The few times I've tried to dick around with the controls while driving, it was decidedly and obviously unsafe, even when it's only a few moments staring at the screen.
The touch also has a minor ability to control it with voice by holding down the home button (no, not Siri, it's pretty much just iPod controls), but it doesn't work well and is still distracting, because I have to be completely focused on listening for the audio cues to start talking, and listen for any sign that it actually understood what I said over the car noise. Less obviously unsafe, but still distracting enough to be capable of causing an accident.
I would be unhappy to have a full-electronics ban while driving, but it's not without merit.
There's probably a fancy way of disabling the hot keys as well
You could, I dunno, remove the F* keys from the keyboard. There's approximately zero chance your java app is going to use them, and you can plug in a good keyboard if you need to do anything fancy with the machine later.
Bits and bytes are just the current implementation of digital logic. If I were to give a thousand-foot view, it would be more along the lines of hardware vs software, or a line of code vs a program, or computers versus networks, that sort of thing. The sort of introductory class that keeps a whole generation of kids from confusing 'the internet' with 'Google' (or AOL, or Apple if you prefer).
The number of bits in a byte, or the very fact that computer logic is based on binary, these aren't terribly consequential. If we found a way to make trinary computers tomorrow, both would change, but the human-facing half of it wouldn't.
Perhaps the manufacturers could man up and offer insurance on all of their vehicles, provided they were running autonomously at the time?
If their self-driving concept is sound, the number of times they're at fault will be small, and they can offer that insurance without going bankrupt. If their self-driving concept is not sound, they have a vested interest in getting those cars off the road until they find a fix, so that they don't lose every cent they have paying for every incident they caused. And when it comes to maintenance, well, it's an autonomous car. I'm sure it can phone home if you haven't kept it up to date.
Unless there is some other part of auto insurance that I don't get, it makes sense to me...
Irfanview is a legitimate product. We were talking about antivirus software.
Bam.