No, I think the problem is software patents. Almost every software patent isn't for something novel and unique, most of it is extrapolation of current practices and new ways of using the same, which is seen in the fact that almost all of these patent suits are not going after people who "stole" someone else's idea, but rather came up with the same thing all on their own and didn't even know these people existed until they got sued by them. Aside from a few interesting compression algorithms, I'm struggling to think of any software patent that's been awarded that is actually something novel, unique and worth protecting.
Hell, during the Oracle Java trial their lawyers were going on and on about how amazing these functions that Google "stole" were, until it was revealed that the judge in the case had learned Java himself and realized that many of these functions were necessary for any good programmer to do work with Java and on top of that, the work involved to create them was minutes, not weeks or months like Oracle's lawyers were claiming.
You know, when I was in my 20s and even 30s I thought the same way you did. Looking back on it I realize there were a lot of tech companies that got a lot of free work that was left on the table from me and my peers because of those attitudes. Sure, staying late a couple of nights to finish something or booking time on the weekend is fine *as long as your company is also fine with giving you that time back somewhere else*. Most companies aren't, treating it as a one way street, especially in software/tech and that's not right.
Companies love attitudes like yours because it helps weed out the people who won't be taken advantage of.
On the one hand that sounds unlikely as autopilots on planes are already quite capable of landing a plane if the need arose in anything but the most adverse weather and if the ground connection were jammed or otherwise cut off the planes would have alternative instructions like diverting to another airport or if it was on final approach and the autopilot assessed the landing as do-able then it would just land by itself. On the other hand, a "Die Hard 2" weather situation would be the kind of scenario where what you describe would be possible. Forcing the plane into a situation where the autopilot might not be able to easily manage severely adverse weather but is also cut off from external control would be about the only time I would foresee that as an issue with just jamming.
I'm not talking about computer equipment, I'm talking about TVs, receivers, home theater equipment, headphones and the like. That's where they're losing most of the business to showrooming. And it's not just Amazon, there's a ton of other online sites to buy from after you go to Future Shop and see what you like.
Yes, "stealing business". It's called showrooming, and there's even apps for that. You go down to the local Future Shop or Best Buy and kick the tires of whatever thing you were thinking of buying online but can't see before delivery and then when you find one you like you check its price on Amazon or wherever else and if it's cheaper online after shipping you make your purchase. Frequently you buy online and the retailer has now lost a sale to an online company despite being the one that showed you the product in person and allowed you to make your final decision on its merits. Online retailers don't need to pay for retail space which is why they're almost always able to undercut the retail shops.
I do wonder what the future will look like when many retailers have gone under and everyone orders things online.
But apparently if you're a rising star BBC newsreader and you BITE a producer, you end up as the BBC Director General. Oh, and when that producer complains, you have him sent to Rwanda.
"The bizarre, apparently unprovoked, attack was on senior television journalist Anthony Massey. Thompson's 44-year-old victim suffered clear bite marks through his shirt, and immediately reported the incident.
Their bosses were so determined to hush up the affair, however, that Massey was promptly sent to Rwanda on a perilous assignment. And Thompson, then a rising star, was allowed to continue his soaring career unhindered."
You wouldn't care because you'd be dead. That doesn't mean you would LIKE the idea before it happened. If I walked up to you tomorrow and said I can upload your consciousness and "you" will live forever but after the upload I regrettably have to shoot your meatbag in the forehead, would you agree to it?
It's not a migration, it's a copy. You will cease to exist and your digi-clone goes on. How could that be appealing to anyone is beyond me. It's no different than having a machine that makes a perfect copy of you on another planet and then as you step out of the machine here on Earth, the operator shoots you in the head with a sawed off shotgun. Other you is happy on planet Gletzlplork 12, but YOU you are dead.
He's pointing out that's how it will go in the US when the medium income jobs disappear. You're not going to get a Scandanavian style society with guaranteed basic living standard for all, you're going to get what's happening in Brazil. Either you're rich or you're dirt poor.
Banks fail, even in places like Iceland, the UK and the US. Now, many countries have bodies set up to guarantee a certain amount of a given account's deposits, like the FDIC in the US will guarantee the first $250K in an account if the bank fails. But then again the US also has almost 400 million people and the largest economy in the world. It'd be a little insane to expect that Iceland with a population of less than 350,000 people could offer the same guarantees, especially on foreign deposits in privately operated banks. That would be privatizing profit, but socializing the risk, hardly fair.
There are always risks, you took one, it went badly. Such is life.
I think you vastly underestimate the market. Touchscreen games are like pretzels before dinner. You can only eat so many before you want something more substantial. And with the iOS/Android gaming market heavily F2P-P2W monetized, it feels less like gaming and more like paying rent on something. As those kids gets older they do generally get a handheld, and the numbers break means it's most likely going to be a Nintendo handheld. Most of the kids who won't bother to get a handheld now are the ones who 5-10 years ago wouldn't have bothered then either. Plus, don't underestimate the allure of the handheld crack known as Pokemon, and there's only one way to scratch that itch. Pokemon X and Y sold 12 million copies in the 5 months after launch in 2013, that's not exactly peanuts.
I've been hearing that consoles are dead for at least a decade. "Industry watchers" are about as reliable as a broken clock. They throw out a hundred predictions and when they get one correct by chance they crow from the rooftops about it like they're bloody Kreskin.
That sounds more than a little harsh, and written like you haven't actually used a Nintendo system in some time. The only two consoles that see regular use in my household are the WiiU and 3DS. XBone and PS4 are just the same old same old with a graphics card upgrade. I have a PC for that stuff and I can upgrade my GPU any time I want.
Nintendo's games on the other hand are inventive and not just rehashing things like FIFA version 22 with even better grass or Call of Battlefield Hard Lines Front 12 or whatever.
I live in Canada, and the problem with parole being on the table for all crimes no matter what is you occasionally get a sick sideshow when someone like Clifford Robert Olsen would go up for parole (thankfully he died in prison). For those unfamiliar with that waste of flesh, he raped and killed 11 kids. Anyway, when his hearings would come up, some of the family members of his victims would inevitably show up for various reasons, and Olsen would use his time taunt them.
I think there are some lines that if crossed, you don't get parole. Like raping and killing more than 0 kids.
There's been talk about seeding the upper atmosphere of Venus with plant life and algae that, if properly developed, could thrive in the upper atmosphere and convert CO2 to O2, lowering the density and the greenhouse effect. And 2 HUGE advantages Venus has for terraforming are that nice thick atmosphere, and a molten core which generates a magnetosphere to protect from solar wind like ours on Earth. Mars has neither so you'd need to get the gas from somewhere (comets probably) and then you'd get to watch it slowly get blown back out into space by solar wind.
> and will have the longest development time before it can return resources to the people that invest in it.
Oh I wouldn't say that. Aside from the Moon, it's the only other option with both decent gravity and a nice solid landmass to build on. Building things in microgravity is very hard compared to on the surface of a planetary body, which is one of the chief draws of Mars. I agree that the moon should be a bigger priority for a large number of reasons, but Mars does have an appeal in the human consciousness that the moon just can't match.
I found Red Mars a loooooong slog. But after I finished it, Green and Blue were a lot better. Red took so much effort to go through because it's the foundation for the other two.
You're confusing a penetration tester with a security researcher. Pentesters use existing tools and libraries of known exploits and test targets to see if they are vulnerable to those known exploits. There's lots of companies paying good money for that service.
Starship Troopers does not belong on that list. It was a great movie, just not the one that Heinlein fans expected with the title. I enjoyed both the book and the movie.
Ah yes, the great Democrats Mitt Romney and Bill Koch. How could we possibly have forgotten those great Democrats?
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind >But after more than a dozen years, the $2.6 billion proposal remains on the drawing board, thanks in large part to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, of which Mr. Koch is chairman.
How is it misleading? It says "For local residents, that means a 40% drop in electricity rates." Local residents are residents of the island. Who will be saving 40% or more on what it costs them to have electricity.
To be fair, the guy outlines a process to cleanly sever and then prepare the nerves for reattachment under a very controlled environment, which is an entirely different thing from a spinal cord being damaged in an accident out in the world.
That said, the whole idea is terrifying and if his end goal is literally making head swaps a somewhat common procedure nothing good will come of this. In order to make this possible you need bodies after all, and if this can extend the life of the transplant-ee by a significant margin we're going to see a huge amount of pressure brought to bear to create a supply of those bodies. Maybe something along the lines of Larry Niven's short story "The Jigsaw Man" where capital offense criminals were harvested to fill demand, and as demand grew over time the bar for a capital offense keeps dropping to keep up.
I don't wish to frighten you out of your happy place, but even if the hypothetical aliens never managed to invent gunpowder, a race that can move starships around interstellar space easily can absolutely bring a planet-bound species to their knees, or to extinction just by throwing (large) rocks at the planet using their propulsion systems. And there are a LOT of rocks in our solar system that could be easily harvested for the task.
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No, I think the problem is software patents. Almost every software patent isn't for something novel and unique, most of it is extrapolation of current practices and new ways of using the same, which is seen in the fact that almost all of these patent suits are not going after people who "stole" someone else's idea, but rather came up with the same thing all on their own and didn't even know these people existed until they got sued by them. Aside from a few interesting compression algorithms, I'm struggling to think of any software patent that's been awarded that is actually something novel, unique and worth protecting.
Hell, during the Oracle Java trial their lawyers were going on and on about how amazing these functions that Google "stole" were, until it was revealed that the judge in the case had learned Java himself and realized that many of these functions were necessary for any good programmer to do work with Java and on top of that, the work involved to create them was minutes, not weeks or months like Oracle's lawyers were claiming.
You know, when I was in my 20s and even 30s I thought the same way you did. Looking back on it I realize there were a lot of tech companies that got a lot of free work that was left on the table from me and my peers because of those attitudes. Sure, staying late a couple of nights to finish something or booking time on the weekend is fine *as long as your company is also fine with giving you that time back somewhere else*. Most companies aren't, treating it as a one way street, especially in software/tech and that's not right.
Companies love attitudes like yours because it helps weed out the people who won't be taken advantage of.
On the one hand that sounds unlikely as autopilots on planes are already quite capable of landing a plane if the need arose in anything but the most adverse weather and if the ground connection were jammed or otherwise cut off the planes would have alternative instructions like diverting to another airport or if it was on final approach and the autopilot assessed the landing as do-able then it would just land by itself. On the other hand, a "Die Hard 2" weather situation would be the kind of scenario where what you describe would be possible. Forcing the plane into a situation where the autopilot might not be able to easily manage severely adverse weather but is also cut off from external control would be about the only time I would foresee that as an issue with just jamming.
>Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
Yes. That's one problem with any sort of mission critical wireless. It can be jammed by people with ill intent.
I'm not talking about computer equipment, I'm talking about TVs, receivers, home theater equipment, headphones and the like. That's where they're losing most of the business to showrooming. And it's not just Amazon, there's a ton of other online sites to buy from after you go to Future Shop and see what you like.
What part is doubtful? That people showroom? I've done it and so has everyone else I know.
Yes, "stealing business". It's called showrooming, and there's even apps for that. You go down to the local Future Shop or Best Buy and kick the tires of whatever thing you were thinking of buying online but can't see before delivery and then when you find one you like you check its price on Amazon or wherever else and if it's cheaper online after shipping you make your purchase. Frequently you buy online and the retailer has now lost a sale to an online company despite being the one that showed you the product in person and allowed you to make your final decision on its merits. Online retailers don't need to pay for retail space which is why they're almost always able to undercut the retail shops.
I do wonder what the future will look like when many retailers have gone under and everyone orders things online.
But apparently if you're a rising star BBC newsreader and you BITE a producer, you end up as the BBC Director General. Oh, and when that producer complains, you have him sent to Rwanda.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/the-day-i-was-bitten-by-bbc-boss-7086208.html
"The bizarre, apparently unprovoked, attack was on senior television journalist Anthony Massey. Thompson's 44-year-old victim suffered clear bite marks through his shirt, and immediately reported the incident.
Their bosses were so determined to hush up the affair, however, that Massey was promptly sent to Rwanda on a perilous assignment. And Thompson, then a rising star, was allowed to continue his soaring career unhindered."
Seems a bit of a double standard to me.
You wouldn't care because you'd be dead. That doesn't mean you would LIKE the idea before it happened. If I walked up to you tomorrow and said I can upload your consciousness and "you" will live forever but after the upload I regrettably have to shoot your meatbag in the forehead, would you agree to it?
It's not a migration, it's a copy. You will cease to exist and your digi-clone goes on. How could that be appealing to anyone is beyond me. It's no different than having a machine that makes a perfect copy of you on another planet and then as you step out of the machine here on Earth, the operator shoots you in the head with a sawed off shotgun. Other you is happy on planet Gletzlplork 12, but YOU you are dead.
He's pointing out that's how it will go in the US when the medium income jobs disappear. You're not going to get a Scandanavian style society with guaranteed basic living standard for all, you're going to get what's happening in Brazil. Either you're rich or you're dirt poor.
Banks fail, even in places like Iceland, the UK and the US. Now, many countries have bodies set up to guarantee a certain amount of a given account's deposits, like the FDIC in the US will guarantee the first $250K in an account if the bank fails. But then again the US also has almost 400 million people and the largest economy in the world. It'd be a little insane to expect that Iceland with a population of less than 350,000 people could offer the same guarantees, especially on foreign deposits in privately operated banks. That would be privatizing profit, but socializing the risk, hardly fair.
There are always risks, you took one, it went badly. Such is life.
I think you vastly underestimate the market. Touchscreen games are like pretzels before dinner. You can only eat so many before you want something more substantial. And with the iOS/Android gaming market heavily F2P-P2W monetized, it feels less like gaming and more like paying rent on something. As those kids gets older they do generally get a handheld, and the numbers break means it's most likely going to be a Nintendo handheld. Most of the kids who won't bother to get a handheld now are the ones who 5-10 years ago wouldn't have bothered then either. Plus, don't underestimate the allure of the handheld crack known as Pokemon, and there's only one way to scratch that itch. Pokemon X and Y sold 12 million copies in the 5 months after launch in 2013, that's not exactly peanuts.
I've been hearing that consoles are dead for at least a decade. "Industry watchers" are about as reliable as a broken clock. They throw out a hundred predictions and when they get one correct by chance they crow from the rooftops about it like they're bloody Kreskin.
That sounds more than a little harsh, and written like you haven't actually used a Nintendo system in some time. The only two consoles that see regular use in my household are the WiiU and 3DS. XBone and PS4 are just the same old same old with a graphics card upgrade. I have a PC for that stuff and I can upgrade my GPU any time I want.
Nintendo's games on the other hand are inventive and not just rehashing things like FIFA version 22 with even better grass or Call of Battlefield Hard Lines Front 12 or whatever.
I live in Canada, and the problem with parole being on the table for all crimes no matter what is you occasionally get a sick sideshow when someone like Clifford Robert Olsen would go up for parole (thankfully he died in prison). For those unfamiliar with that waste of flesh, he raped and killed 11 kids. Anyway, when his hearings would come up, some of the family members of his victims would inevitably show up for various reasons, and Olsen would use his time taunt them.
I think there are some lines that if crossed, you don't get parole. Like raping and killing more than 0 kids.
There's been talk about seeding the upper atmosphere of Venus with plant life and algae that, if properly developed, could thrive in the upper atmosphere and convert CO2 to O2, lowering the density and the greenhouse effect. And 2 HUGE advantages Venus has for terraforming are that nice thick atmosphere, and a molten core which generates a magnetosphere to protect from solar wind like ours on Earth. Mars has neither so you'd need to get the gas from somewhere (comets probably) and then you'd get to watch it slowly get blown back out into space by solar wind.
> and will have the longest development time before it can return resources to the people that invest in it.
Oh I wouldn't say that. Aside from the Moon, it's the only other option with both decent gravity and a nice solid landmass to build on. Building things in microgravity is very hard compared to on the surface of a planetary body, which is one of the chief draws of Mars. I agree that the moon should be a bigger priority for a large number of reasons, but Mars does have an appeal in the human consciousness that the moon just can't match.
I found Red Mars a loooooong slog. But after I finished it, Green and Blue were a lot better. Red took so much effort to go through because it's the foundation for the other two.
You're confusing a penetration tester with a security researcher. Pentesters use existing tools and libraries of known exploits and test targets to see if they are vulnerable to those known exploits. There's lots of companies paying good money for that service.
Starship Troopers does not belong on that list. It was a great movie, just not the one that Heinlein fans expected with the title. I enjoyed both the book and the movie.
Ah yes, the great Democrats Mitt Romney and Bill Koch. How could we possibly have forgotten those great Democrats?
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
>But after more than a dozen years, the $2.6 billion proposal remains on the drawing board, thanks in large part to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, of which Mr. Koch is chairman.
How is it misleading? It says "For local residents, that means a 40% drop in electricity rates." Local residents are residents of the island. Who will be saving 40% or more on what it costs them to have electricity.
To be fair, the guy outlines a process to cleanly sever and then prepare the nerves for reattachment under a very controlled environment, which is an entirely different thing from a spinal cord being damaged in an accident out in the world.
That said, the whole idea is terrifying and if his end goal is literally making head swaps a somewhat common procedure nothing good will come of this. In order to make this possible you need bodies after all, and if this can extend the life of the transplant-ee by a significant margin we're going to see a huge amount of pressure brought to bear to create a supply of those bodies. Maybe something along the lines of Larry Niven's short story "The Jigsaw Man" where capital offense criminals were harvested to fill demand, and as demand grew over time the bar for a capital offense keeps dropping to keep up.
I don't wish to frighten you out of your happy place, but even if the hypothetical aliens never managed to invent gunpowder, a race that can move starships around interstellar space easily can absolutely bring a planet-bound species to their knees, or to extinction just by throwing (large) rocks at the planet using their propulsion systems. And there are a LOT of rocks in our solar system that could be easily harvested for the task.