I also find it hard to believe that a computer cannot get better at driving a car the most people. Sure there are emergency situations the require extreme skill and judgement calls, but how many people are good in those situations?... I have seen many drivers who react 100% wrong in dangerous situations. They don't understand the dynamics of the car.... Computers don't have this problem.
The problem with a computer is that a situation may arise which the guy who programmed it never coded for. You get this with ordinary app coding too (think the Millenium bug), although the consequences do not matter so immediately. Humans are much better at improvising in a new situation, for instance in recognising a good spot to run off the road if an overtaker is coming at you the other way. It is not a matter of the racing-driver type skill of understanding dynamics.
I'm not certain but I'm pretty sure computers are landing airplanes with the pilots overseeing the process.
Routine landing an aircraft is a very predictable operation. Even potential complications (such as tyre burst) are few enough to be programmable. There is nothing like the infinite variation you may meet when driving a car on a public road.
His comment was addressed to "you", ie the/. crowd. We are not "most users".
I found epp_b's comment useful, not silly. I still have a non-smart phone, and when I upgrade it to a smart phone (one day) I now know that it is possible to look for one I can turn off. Many of the comments here have given the impression that you cannot.. Your comment that you can turn off an iOS is also useful, thanks for that, though I won't be buying it.
I don't give a sh#t that the average person might not bother.
My parents are still using one of my hand-me-downs from the '90s!
Are you sure they are still using it? I'd still be using mine too if it were not for the fact that the batteries fail after a couple of years and it is practically impossible to find a replacement. Every model of every make seems to use a different type of battery, sometimes forming part of the case itself.
I once went into Car Phone Warehouse, listed as an "service agent" for my make of phone, and asked for a new battery. The guy looked at me as if I was bonkers. "But sir, he said, this phone is over two years old!".
I asked him what being a "sevice agent" meant if they could not even provide a replacement battery (you could at least remove it, unlike an iPhone). He didn't have a clue that they were a service agent, let alone what it meant.
So I had to trash an otherwise good phone and buy another (not from C-P-W), when politicians are telling us not to waste. Still, no doubt my phone was recycled (ie had the solder and copper picked out by 8-year olds in the backwoods of India).
More and more cellphones today have batteries that cannot be removed by the consumer, though.
But I can switch mine off - can't you? I have a non-smart phone though, if that makes a difference.
Rsbog wrote :
Of course [removing the battery] invalidates half it's usefulness - to get calls.
No, 90% of their usefulness to me is making calls, not receiving them, so I only switch on to make a call. Of course I will switch on if expecting a call, and occasionally to see if I have missed any. So I guess tracking me must be very frustrating for them.
OTOH, I am not so paranoid as to imagine a marketing droid or policeman is sitting crouched over a screen all day trying to follow what little unimportant me is doing. If any of my activities they do manage to spot get melded into some averaged-out database of consumer habits it will probably do no more than very slightly skew the results in an entirely untypical way and they will be the worse off for it..
I don't think you have understood. There is no "conversation". They just said "Fuck off" straight away, or if they were polite they walked away. Otherwise another guy butts in after a few seconds and they turn to him away from me. As I said, I don't even think I am bad looking, and [male] friends and a councillor I once talked to say they don't understand it (or do not believe it). I guess it is something about body language.
One trouble is that I generally met girls in situations where they were outnumbered at least 4:1 by guys, like at work Xmas parties, but the same happened in public dance venues.
I am middle aged and married now (through a dating club). I have never in my life had a "social" conversation with a woman my own age except the ones I met in dating clubs, and would not now attempt to start one. Nor have I ever danced, or will.
Irony is that I was quite a hit with girls in the dating club. In the "captive" 1-to-1 situation of an arranged first date they actually grew to like me. Some were really dishy too, ones I would not have thought I had a chance with at a party. I found I am actually quite good with women, can listen to them and am "kind" to them.
When I see some of the ugly nasty shits that girls choose to consort with, compared with the decent guys I have known who have had similar experiences to mine, it is clear that most girls don't know what is good for them until it is too late.
Africa needs to stop growing in population. They're outstripping our ability to give them food aid, and keep sending their excess population to our countries where we're stuck failing horribly at integrating them.
Why do you call that "our" failure? I don't see it as the West's job to integrate them. You might as well talk about my "failure" to divert the moon from its orbit and send it into outer space. It isn't my job to do that, and what is the point anyway?
It is Africa's failure. Many if not most of those coming to the west are adventurers getting away from some kind of trouble at home, having got a girl pregnant being high on the list, and are looking for new fields.
If you're gettng none , you're not doing it right.
Go to bar, chat up each and every girl that strikes your libido. Ask each and every one a few minutes in,/p>
Stop right there. A few minutes in? My experience is that they tell you to fuck off before then. I don't even think I am that bad looking.
Suppose you built a high speed rail between LA and New York. Its fast, 200mph... faster than I could drive it. But how now that I'm in new york, how do I get to the store that is 5 miles away from the station?
Taxi. You have them in the USA?
Now that I am there, how do I get the shopping cart full of goods back to the train?.... What if my purchase included a piece of plywood and four 3m lengths of pvc for some basic work around the house?
You go from LA to NY to buy stuff in a shopping cart or plywood??!! I know people go a long way to shop in USA, but that far?
How do I get it to my home in a small town 50 miles from the station?
Use your car. It is common in the UK for people to drive to a station and change onto a train for a longer journey. The modes are not mutually exclusive. Some stations are specially built (or adapted from an older station) not to be near a particular place but to have very large car parks to draw custom for a wide area via car. They tend to be called "Parkway" stations.
Most train journeys in the UK are business trips and leisure travel, involving at most a suitcase. More equivalent to domestic air travel in the USA. I have never seen 3m lengths of PVC. People do use them for shopping, but for something special and portable (eg some gadget or a suit) rather than groceries and plywood.
Trains do not work in the US because of what the US is.
Yes, I think your post shows some major cultural differences.
In "The Man Who Was Thursday" by G.K. Chesterton, a detective infiltrates an anarchist meeting and finds out that he is a more persuasive anarchist than the anarchist leaders, and gets elected leader.
At the risk of Godwin's Law, I will remark that Hitler did a similar thing. He joined the early form of the Nazi party as a spy for the German Army. This was just after WWI and it was a revolutionary underground movement at the time. He was persuaded to its cause and ended up as its leader. The rest is history.
People work together better when there is consensus instead of coercion. Anarchism is simply this observation writ large. Nothing about this prohibits organization or leadership.
So what do you do when someone does not join that consensus? Shoot them?
I sometimes wonder what I would do if the "rules" were taken away, like if stranded with 50 others on Pacific Island (shipwreck, aircraft crash landing), like in "Lord of the Flies". I am an engineer and have some survival training from the Navy, and I would know how to make fresh water, rafts etc. However I also know from experiences with 'anarchic' kids' gangs when young that I am not the sort of person others listen to - most people listen to the ones with loudest voices and most charm (recognise today's political leaders?). That is what happens with "consensus". At least with governments there is a structure below the political prima-donnas' charade which has evolved over the centuries as a buffer against them.
So on that Pacific Island I think I would go off on my own, taking a weapon with me if possible, and they would thereby lose a capable potential team member . Then the others would probably hunt me down out of suspicion, but I would rather take my chance that way than be tied to a bunch of no-hopers doing "consensus".
And that is what I would do in your anarchic society too.
The computer industry: more important than not dying of deadly diseases. Who knew?
What is more important is not the issue. It is whether he had obtained that money properly.
Tell me next time you are on a jury, and I will burgle some rich guy's house and tell you at my trial that the stuff I took is more important to me than it was to them.
Yes, because he is doing it with other people's money dishonestly obtained. A little of that money was mine, and even if I had wanted to give it away I would not necessarily have wanted to give it to the charities that he does. In fact I certainly would not.
Guess what, I have some pet causes too. I'd love to con you all of billions of your money and give to those causes, keeping a few billion for myself too. Just like Gates has.
because the "victims" claimed that it was equivalent of robbing 40 banks.
He did make about £140,000 over the years he was running the site.The fact that he pissed it all up the wall does not detract from this being quite a lot of money.
If I robbed 40 banks I would expect to make far more than £140,000 out of it. Where is your ambition?
AC(22:28 Wrote : "Ideas ain't worth shit. You aren't the only guy sitting on his ass thinking he's brilliant."
Not sure I should reply to this sort of thing, but here I go. As I said, I did apply my ideas - while employed within companies. I was not just sitting on arse.
For example I worked once in a large well known transport company which had about 1000 buses with chassis that were cracking in one place. The workshops were welding on thicker and thicker re-inforcement but it still cracked, and the buses were facing premature scrappage. I designed a repair that lasted them another 10 years. Think on what that idea was worth in money terms, a bit more than shit, and if I were like a banker I would have expected a % of it that would have made me a very rich man.
But I regard it as all in a day's work. I never met a good engineer who thought himself "brilliant" and I certainly don't, engineers are too engrossed in their projects for that. As far as I was concerned in that project I was applying an intuitive feel for structures got from doing Meccano as a child (yes, Meccano), confirmed and fine-tuned by computer analysis.
Broadly agreeing with this, I would comment that there are two types of ads.
One type is that which tries to sell you something you would not have bought as you did not know you wanted it, like getting you to switch brands of beer, buy an iPod, or insure your lawn-mower. This is the prime-time TV stuff. I find these adverts actually put me off the stuff they are trying to promote, often because I resent being associated with the idiots they depict 'enjoying' their stuff. For example one recent (UK) advert for a chain of hotels (I cannot even remember which chain - so that didn't work did it?) shows a half-wit couple, shrieking with laughter, having a pillow fight in their room. Do I really want to be in trying to sleep in the room next to people like that?
The other type is factual adverts. For example, if I decide to buy a new camera - eg because my old one is lost or broken - I will buy a few copies of camera magazines and go to review websites to decide which brand and model and any accessories I want, based on the specs and reported performance. I will then look at the smaller sellers' ads in the back of the mags and in seller's websites for the information of what they sell, and its price, postal charges etc. Some of these ads are little more than pricelists and maybe factual specs. These are the adverts I like.
Another idiot here, although that should worry you as I have been responsible as an engineer for checking that trains are not likely to derail and that certain nuclear power stations stay safe.
I have always had a lot of engineering ideas, and have applied them at work but only in a limited area, or have confined them to my own stuff (like around the house and on my cars).
I have considered more than once going into business with an invention, but the thought that some patent holder could come along and sue my pants off is the main factor that has deterred me.
Montgomery was not a homosexual. After his wife's death there was nothing to suggest that he was anything but celibate, notoriously so. As one American aide said, "You just DO NOT get personal with this guy", and he was only meaning having a beer with him.
I am not particularly sympathetic with gays, but they can get on with it as far as I am concerned (as Black Adder said, "leaving more totty for the rest of us"). They score far more than heteros ever do, I gather.
I have always been kicked in the teeth for being hetero, not least by women themselves. People seemed to think that, if you are good at passing exams and understand things like computers, then you should be asexual. Perhaps that was the case with Turing, not that he was gay, but that he was brainy AND gay.
Slashdot Mirror
I also find it hard to believe that a computer cannot get better at driving a car the most people. Sure there are emergency situations the require extreme skill and judgement calls, but how many people are good in those situations? ... I have seen many drivers who react 100% wrong in dangerous situations. They don't understand the dynamics of the car .... Computers don't have this problem.
The problem with a computer is that a situation may arise which the guy who programmed it never coded for. You get this with ordinary app coding too (think the Millenium bug), although the consequences do not matter so immediately. Humans are much better at improvising in a new situation, for instance in recognising a good spot to run off the road if an overtaker is coming at you the other way. It is not a matter of the racing-driver type skill of understanding dynamics.
I'm not certain but I'm pretty sure computers are landing airplanes with the pilots overseeing the process.
Routine landing an aircraft is a very predictable operation. Even potential complications (such as tyre burst) are few enough to be programmable. There is nothing like the infinite variation you may meet when driving a car on a public road.
His comment was addressed to "you", ie the /. crowd. We are not "most users".
I found epp_b's comment useful, not silly. I still have a non-smart phone, and when I upgrade it to a smart phone (one day) I now know that it is possible to look for one I can turn off. Many of the comments here have given the impression that you cannot.. Your comment that you can turn off an iOS is also useful, thanks for that, though I won't be buying it.
I don't give a sh#t that the average person might not bother.
My parents are still using one of my hand-me-downs from the '90s!
Are you sure they are still using it? I'd still be using mine too if it were not for the fact that the batteries fail after a couple of years and it is practically impossible to find a replacement. Every model of every make seems to use a different type of battery, sometimes forming part of the case itself.
I once went into Car Phone Warehouse, listed as an "service agent" for my make of phone, and asked for a new battery. The guy looked at me as if I was bonkers. "But sir, he said, this phone is over two years old!".
I asked him what being a "sevice agent" meant if they could not even provide a replacement battery (you could at least remove it, unlike an iPhone). He didn't have a clue that they were a service agent, let alone what it meant.
So I had to trash an otherwise good phone and buy another (not from C-P-W), when politicians are telling us not to waste. Still, no doubt my phone was recycled (ie had the solder and copper picked out by 8-year olds in the backwoods of India).
More and more cellphones today have batteries that cannot be removed by the consumer, though.
But I can switch mine off - can't you? I have a non-smart phone though, if that makes a difference.
Rsbog wrote :
Of course [removing the battery] invalidates half it's usefulness - to get calls.
No, 90% of their usefulness to me is making calls, not receiving them, so I only switch on to make a call. Of course I will switch on if expecting a call, and occasionally to see if I have missed any. So I guess tracking me must be very frustrating for them.
OTOH, I am not so paranoid as to imagine a marketing droid or policeman is sitting crouched over a screen all day trying to follow what little unimportant me is doing. If any of my activities they do manage to spot get melded into some averaged-out database of consumer habits it will probably do no more than very slightly skew the results in an entirely untypical way and they will be the worse off for it..
Adjust your conversation a bit. ....
I don't think you have understood. There is no "conversation". They just said "Fuck off" straight away, or if they were polite they walked away. Otherwise another guy butts in after a few seconds and they turn to him away from me. As I said, I don't even think I am bad looking, and [male] friends and a councillor I once talked to say they don't understand it (or do not believe it). I guess it is something about body language.
One trouble is that I generally met girls in situations where they were outnumbered at least 4:1 by guys, like at work Xmas parties, but the same happened in public dance venues.
I am middle aged and married now (through a dating club). I have never in my life had a "social" conversation with a woman my own age except the ones I met in dating clubs, and would not now attempt to start one. Nor have I ever danced, or will.
Irony is that I was quite a hit with girls in the dating club. In the "captive" 1-to-1 situation of an arranged first date they actually grew to like me. Some were really dishy too, ones I would not have thought I had a chance with at a party. I found I am actually quite good with women, can listen to them and am "kind" to them.
When I see some of the ugly nasty shits that girls choose to consort with, compared with the decent guys I have known who have had similar experiences to mine, it is clear that most girls don't know what is good for them until it is too late.
Africa needs to stop growing in population. They're outstripping our ability to give them food aid, and keep sending their excess population to our countries where we're stuck failing horribly at integrating them.
Why do you call that "our" failure? I don't see it as the West's job to integrate them. You might as well talk about my "failure" to divert the moon from its orbit and send it into outer space. It isn't my job to do that, and what is the point anyway?
It is Africa's failure. Many if not most of those coming to the west are adventurers getting away from some kind of trouble at home, having got a girl pregnant being high on the list, and are looking for new fields.
As a contraceptive, a picture of Gates above the bed should do the trick.
Why should I be paying for welfare of people in Africa?
If you're gettng none , you're not doing it right. Go to bar, chat up each and every girl that strikes your libido. Ask each and every one a few minutes in,/p>
Stop right there. A few minutes in? My experience is that they tell you to fuck off before then. I don't even think I am that bad looking.
Suppose you built a high speed rail between LA and New York. Its fast, 200mph ... faster than I could drive it. But how now that I'm in new york, how do I get to the store that is 5 miles away from the station?
Taxi. You have them in the USA?
Now that I am there, how do I get the shopping cart full of goods back to the train? .... What if my purchase included a piece of plywood and four 3m lengths of pvc for some basic work around the house?
You go from LA to NY to buy stuff in a shopping cart or plywood??!! I know people go a long way to shop in USA, but that far?
How do I get it to my home in a small town 50 miles from the station?
Use your car. It is common in the UK for people to drive to a station and change onto a train for a longer journey. The modes are not mutually exclusive. Some stations are specially built (or adapted from an older station) not to be near a particular place but to have very large car parks to draw custom for a wide area via car. They tend to be called "Parkway" stations.
Most train journeys in the UK are business trips and leisure travel, involving at most a suitcase. More equivalent to domestic air travel in the USA. I have never seen 3m lengths of PVC. People do use them for shopping, but for something special and portable (eg some gadget or a suit) rather than groceries and plywood.
Trains do not work in the US because of what the US is.
Yes, I think your post shows some major cultural differences.
In "The Man Who Was Thursday" by G.K. Chesterton, a detective infiltrates an anarchist meeting and finds out that he is a more persuasive anarchist than the anarchist leaders, and gets elected leader.
At the risk of Godwin's Law, I will remark that Hitler did a similar thing. He joined the early form of the Nazi party as a spy for the German Army. This was just after WWI and it was a revolutionary underground movement at the time. He was persuaded to its cause and ended up as its leader. The rest is history.
I think you missed the irony tabs. Even if you did, ------
...."
".......responsible Internet Service Providers, such as AOL
------ should have given the game away.
People work together better when there is consensus instead of coercion. Anarchism is simply this observation writ large. Nothing about this prohibits organization or leadership.
So what do you do when someone does not join that consensus? Shoot them?
I sometimes wonder what I would do if the "rules" were taken away, like if stranded with 50 others on Pacific Island (shipwreck, aircraft crash landing), like in "Lord of the Flies". I am an engineer and have some survival training from the Navy, and I would know how to make fresh water, rafts etc. However I also know from experiences with 'anarchic' kids' gangs when young that I am not the sort of person others listen to - most people listen to the ones with loudest voices and most charm (recognise today's political leaders?). That is what happens with "consensus". At least with governments there is a structure below the political prima-donnas' charade which has evolved over the centuries as a buffer against them.
So on that Pacific Island I think I would go off on my own, taking a weapon with me if possible, and they would thereby lose a capable potential team member . Then the others would probably hunt me down out of suspicion, but I would rather take my chance that way than be tied to a bunch of no-hopers doing "consensus".
And that is what I would do in your anarchic society too.
Sorry, no citations from pre-history seem to be available.
The computer industry: more important than not dying of deadly diseases. Who knew?
What is more important is not the issue. It is whether he had obtained that money properly.
Tell me next time you are on a jury, and I will burgle some rich guy's house and tell you at my trial that the stuff I took is more important to me than it was to them.
Yes, because he is doing it with other people's money dishonestly obtained. A little of that money was mine, and even if I had wanted to give it away I would not necessarily have wanted to give it to the charities that he does. In fact I certainly would not.
Guess what, I have some pet causes too. I'd love to con you all of billions of your money and give to those causes, keeping a few billion for myself too. Just like Gates has.
He is tired of games, tired of typing text, tired of developing, tired of Microsoft, and tired of life.
BG was a visionary
Yes., he saw what others were doing, and copied it.
because the "victims" claimed that it was equivalent of robbing 40 banks.
He did make about £140,000 over the years he was running the site.The fact that he pissed it all up the wall does not detract from this being quite a lot of money.
If I robbed 40 banks I would expect to make far more than £140,000 out of it. Where is your ambition?
AC(22:28 Wrote : "Ideas ain't worth shit. You aren't the only guy sitting on his ass thinking he's brilliant."
Not sure I should reply to this sort of thing, but here I go. As I said, I did apply my ideas - while employed within companies. I was not just sitting on arse.
For example I worked once in a large well known transport company which had about 1000 buses with chassis that were cracking in one place. The workshops were welding on thicker and thicker re-inforcement but it still cracked, and the buses were facing premature scrappage. I designed a repair that lasted them another 10 years. Think on what that idea was worth in money terms, a bit more than shit, and if I were like a banker I would have expected a % of it that would have made me a very rich man.
But I regard it as all in a day's work. I never met a good engineer who thought himself "brilliant" and I certainly don't, engineers are too engrossed in their projects for that. As far as I was concerned in that project I was applying an intuitive feel for structures got from doing Meccano as a child (yes, Meccano), confirmed and fine-tuned by computer analysis.
Same here, I first bought a PC as a Wordprocessor
"There is such a desire by the elites to make personal computers just a shopping interface." - brilliantly put.
Broadly agreeing with this, I would comment that there are two types of ads.
One type is that which tries to sell you something you would not have bought as you did not know you wanted it, like getting you to switch brands of beer, buy an iPod, or insure your lawn-mower. This is the prime-time TV stuff. I find these adverts actually put me off the stuff they are trying to promote, often because I resent being associated with the idiots they depict 'enjoying' their stuff. For example one recent (UK) advert for a chain of hotels (I cannot even remember which chain - so that didn't work did it?) shows a half-wit couple, shrieking with laughter, having a pillow fight in their room. Do I really want to be in trying to sleep in the room next to people like that?
The other type is factual adverts. For example, if I decide to buy a new camera - eg because my old one is lost or broken - I will buy a few copies of camera magazines and go to review websites to decide which brand and model and any accessories I want, based on the specs and reported performance. I will then look at the smaller sellers' ads in the back of the mags and in seller's websites for the information of what they sell, and its price, postal charges etc. Some of these ads are little more than pricelists and maybe factual specs. These are the adverts I like.
Another idiot here, although that should worry you as I have been responsible as an engineer for checking that trains are not likely to derail and that certain nuclear power stations stay safe.
I have always had a lot of engineering ideas, and have applied them at work but only in a limited area, or have confined them to my own stuff (like around the house and on my cars).
I have considered more than once going into business with an invention, but the thought that some patent holder could come along and sue my pants off is the main factor that has deterred me.
Montgomery was not a homosexual. After his wife's death there was nothing to suggest that he was anything but celibate, notoriously so. As one American aide said, "You just DO NOT get personal with this guy", and he was only meaning having a beer with him.
I am not particularly sympathetic with gays, but they can get on with it as far as I am concerned (as Black Adder said, "leaving more totty for the rest of us"). They score far more than heteros ever do, I gather.
I have always been kicked in the teeth for being hetero, not least by women themselves. People seemed to think that, if you are good at passing exams and understand things like computers, then you should be asexual. Perhaps that was the case with Turing, not that he was gay, but that he was brainy AND gay.
I thought he had been receiving such recognition for some time now, certainly since I first heard of him some years ago.