Okay, so we've got the mining robots, the auto-fuelling spaceship dock, the autonomous telephone sanitizers... I can't help feeling there's something we're forgetting... Oh! Right - people. Hang on. Why are we sending people again?
Because we're not smart enough to make a robot that could and would do what we'd do and telepresence would be hopeless with the delay. Take the stupidest person you know that can drive a car. Ask him to write the software for a self-driving car, might as well ask him to jump to the Moon. Not even many man-years of the best and brightest has managed to get their car a driver's license that millions of teenagers manage every year. If there's a real base there will be plenty that goes wrong or becomes defective and plenty to fix. If it's just to have humans in a bunker eating canned food until their return flight, then yeah there's not much point.
If you have system encryption enabled (traditional BIOS, no UEFI support) and you have a strong passphrase and you are the only user and you're not worried that anyone can physically tamper with your system boot or rescue disc - in which case they might just as well use a key logger - then there's no critical issues.
There are several nice to haves that make weak passwords stronger by increasing iterations, close various attacks that other users/processes can do and cleaning up better if you only use containers. The ugliest is probably a privilege escalation attack, malicious software can use the TrueCrypt driver to escalate to admin but if malware is running on your machine you probably have big problems anyway.
Probably the most interesting part about VeraCrypt is the potential for UEFI boot but apparently there's no way to secure erase the keyboard buffer, all you can do is reset it (which they didn't do, but do now) and hope the driver actually overwrites it. But if you can dump the entire UEFI memory area it might still be there. Hopefully legacy BIOS mode will be around for a while longer, in this case simpler is safer.
They couldn't force you with out the lead pipes and rubber hoses, fortunately those aren't allowed in the US yet. What you do in a situation like this is refuse to comply, force them to arrest you and spend the night in jail so you can call the ACLU and get the warrant tossed. See they get away with it because no one refused to comply. Once everyone in the building complies there is no effective way to sue them and set a precedent that will stop this happening again.
Why not? If you think they have an illegal warrant, you sue them as if they had no warrant. Same way you don't sue GPL violators for copyright infringement and not breach of contract, because you have no proof they agreed to the license. They will bring out the warrant and say it's okay, we had a warrant. Then you can challenge it and appeal any dismissals. I wouldn't do it without the ACLU, EFF or someone like that bankrolling it, but it seems to carry less risk since if your challenge fails you were never "rightfully" arrested and perhaps even charged with obstruction of justice. I strongly doubt "Scary guys with guns and fancy papers said I had to or be arrested so I did" counts as consent, immediate compliance does not mean you lose your right to challenge it after reviewing with legal counsel. Same way I'm not about to argue with a SWAT team breaking down the wrong door, I'd comply perfectly. Then sue the shit out of them.
I don't think there's any way to stop gerrymandering other than the voters themselves waking up. California tried appointing a panel of retired judges to draw the boundaries, but it turns out judge panels can be rigged, too. Pretty much any system you can think of can be gamed.
Well the primary reason for gerrymandering is to cause "lost" votes. Here in Norway we have 169 members of parliament, 150 of them are traditional district-specific votes. Since we got 19 districts, there is 150/19 = ~7.9 seats/district though they're actually distributed by population. This means you need like 100/7.9 = ~12.7% of the votes to get a direct seat or even higher in the smaller districts, which is a high bar to pass. But all the spillover votes of parties that got at least 4% nationally - no limit on direct seats - and didn't lead to a direct seat are put in a pool and used to assign the last 19 seats. So the more lucky you got securing direct seats, the less likely you'll get any bonus seats. I'd say it's been quite effective at producing a strong local representation, while making sure it's close to proportional on the national level.
supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
You are reading way too much into this. If the police get a warrant to search a particular house for drugs that is a specific warrant. If it were all houses or to search for any contraband that would be a general warrant and unconstitutional. When they exercise that warrant they're going to search the whole house with everyone's belongings, they don't have to go through the coat rack and assign ownership first then come back with one warrant for Alice's jacket, one for Bob's jacket and not search Eve's jacket because she was just visiting. If they tried to search a whole apartment building because of one occupant that would probably be overreaching, but they don't have to be extremely particular either. And they may search anywhere drugs may be hidden, the only limitation is things obviously out of scope like opening letters, playing movies and other actions that can't possibly lead to the discovery of drugs. But if the evidence could be on the phone, the phone is free game.
I think the same goes with crowds, if it's two room mates they'll search it all even though eventually it might turn out only one sold drugs and the other was innocent. But searching a thousand people at a concert even though you have compelling evidence someone is selling drugs is probably not reasonable, though I can't find any precedent on how strong individual suspicion is necessary. If you're say raiding an illegal gambling club it might be reasonable to suspect all of illegal gambling no matter the size. Now this search may led to finding evidence of other crimes like illegal guns and anything they find specified in the warrant or not may give probable cause for arrest, but that is fine because they're not part of the premise for the warrant. The only time you need to name a person is when issuing an arrest warrant because you intend to seize that person, since you can't have a general warrant to arrest people. That said, we have some gray areas surrounding terror organizations where mere membership is criminalized that is bordering on general arrest.
Localization of the power source doesn't matter. Everything is interconnected by the grid anyway
I'll stop you right there, the moment you say that it means some people might want solar panels and some want a Tesla, but there's no synergy whatsoever. That there's no particular benefit to owing both a solar panel and a Tesla that doesn't exist independently. If that is the case, they don't really have anything to do with each other any more than Tesla and SpaceX. Either or none or both might be a success, but they don't depend on each other at all. It doesn't matter who owns them, they'll succeed or fail on their own merits anyway.
Any AI in the foreseeable future will be under control of human beings, either due to laws or financial ownership. I'm not the least worried about AI, but having watched this election, the humans in my country scare the shit out of me.
I agree that it seems implausible that an AI will "rebel" and set its own goals, that is still sci-fi. But ordinarily those scary men would have to enlist the help of many others, like the old DDR (East Germany) where almost a hundred thousand of a population of 16 million were STASI agents. Use a NSL, use a computer to transcribe it and analyze who is talking to who when and about what and for how long and you could have a quite Orwellian database with only a hundred people involved. Same thing with bank transactions, electronic tickets, number plate scanners, facial recognition, deep packet scanning and whatnot the automatic collection and processing enables a very small but organized and powerful fraction of the population to surveillance and control the rest.
I'm not really sure we could reverse that trend because just like we might discuss the pros and cons of everyone having tiny little digital cameras on them at all times it is still extremely unlikely to change. The average person is leaving more and more electronic traces and even those who try to avoid it is often found by metadata from their friends or they stand out by being the black hole that isn't sharing. Very often the system is rigged towards it, for example we didn't want bus drivers to get robbed so much so now it's a lot more expensive to pay cash than a prepaid subscription or cell phone payment, both of which link to a real identity here in Norway. People do what's cheapest so the few people who pay cash stand out. And really it's no problem until it is a problem, but then you're usually too late to change it.
Not when you have a selection bias, it isn't. If your sample selection is consistently biased, no sample size will be large enough.
Agreed, but outside math class you have to look at the percentage and make an educated guess about how special they realistically could be. If you have a thousand employees your number one is probably a genius and your very worst a moron. The 10th from the top is also probably pretty smart and 10th from the bottom pretty stupid. The 50th smartest isn't aren't all that special though, if he can be more efficient with a Mac well it seems worth trying the top 100 or 200 too. It could of course theoretically be that performance drops off a cliff because it takes some minimum skill and understanding you just dipped below, but realistically if that happens it's probably the kind of thing only 1% or 0.1% of your employees grok. If 5% can use a Mac so can probably most of them.
The way I look at is if the reusable rocket guys get the cost of orbital rockets down to 1/10th of the cost that it is now, lots of options open up. If you can get 10 trips up for the cost of 1 now, suddenly assembling a Mars-distance ship in orbit and all the fuel and supplies to make it happen seems pretty plausible.
Assuming the rocket is really the blocking cost. A Falcon 9 expendable is around $62M * 130% = $80M for 22,800 kg to LEO. Even a hundred launches for 2,280,000 kg payload (Saturn V had 140,000 kg to LEO) would be "just" $8 billion and they've spent more on that developing the SLS before it's flown once. Granted it'd be some assembly required but >20 ton modules aren't trivially small either if we design good interlocks and docking in space is pretty routine now with the ISS. So for the sake of argument, say we're now down to $800 million instead that's basically pocket change in this context. We'll still need everything else, uniquely designed for this particular mission. I think a one-off mission will still be >10 billion. Musk is thinking further out than that though, he'll want to bring the price so far down we'll want to keep going. Not one mission but ten, hundred or a thousand. Good for him, but there's still some pretty big hurdles to cross... they need a customer who's willing to pay.
That's what they said about iTunes, and Apple found a way. So I wouldn't count them out here...
Only because the music industry was totally oblivious to what would happen when they let Apple control the DRM, the same way IBM let Microsoft control the OS. They had to drop DRM because they were being buttfucked by Apple who used their market power to sell cheap music and expensive iPods and all their customers were locked in since FairPlay protected music wouldn't play anywhere else.
The motion picture studios have never been that stupid, even long before iTunes they controlled CSS on DVDs, they control AACS/BD+ on BluRays and AACS 2.0 on UHD BluRay and they have no reason to drop DRM. At worst even if it's broken they can still try using the DMCA and EUCD to make decryption tools illegal. And unlike the iPod that filled a need for a device people didn't have there's already tons of ways to play movies and series.
It's of course possible that Apple could find their Achilles heel but I don't think it's very likely, with or without Jobs. The industry would most certainly smell a trap, even if they couldn't figure out what it was. As much as I'd like them to just give up and have the convenience of a torrent site I think it's just very wishful thinking. That said, there are a lot of cable cutters so maybe...
there were two failures: the parachute release and the burn length. But both were likely set in the software on the lander, so I suspect parameters got borked somehow.
As in hardcoded on a timer? Unlikely. This is quite far into the descent and the parachute was probably supposed to jettison when a certain altitude/velocity was reached. That both the parachute and thusters was off suggests to me a sensor failure led the probe to think it was going much slower or flying much lower than reality. It would be odd for both systems to fail and at the same time be in good enough condition to send radio signals.
The point I was making, that if a human can interpret the visual information it's given, then a car with a bigger sensor set can in theory do it too. It's all about software at that point, but there's no limitation on hardware here that a human doesn't have.
Yeah but... Tesla's claim is like saying the brain consumes about 20W, the car can deliver 20W so it's "ready to support an artifical brain". While that might be technically correct it is also grossly misleading, in that we don't have and don't really expect to have an AI working at all or so well and certainly not within the constraints of a human body in the foreseeable future. Same thing with cameras, I expect the first real SDCs to use optical and radar and lidar and every other trick in the book to overcome the shortcomings of the brain behind it. Same way some talk of trying to simulate the brain with >10 megawatt computers.
You might be able to salvage ~20% of them with humans aboard. Might. Meanwhile, humans are a massive added source of additional risk to a mission; they dramatically increase spacecraft size, complexity / part count, consumables, and just in general make things far more difficult.
Having people on board cause their own problems, you wouldn't have to improvise CO2 filters on Apollo 13 if there was no one that needed oxygen so they might cause aborts too not just salvage them. Having humans on board will also limit your alternatives and lead to its own time constraints because you have to keep the crew alive. And most importantly, humans are not expendable and unmanned probes couldn't have any realistic return plan even if you wanted to so in most cases they still wouldn't be an option.
And it's not like NASA just send things out there with plan A and no plan B or a static programming they're stuck with. They try to find possible failure modes, emergency states, when the rovers get stuck on Mars they have huge team back on Earth trying to find out how to best wiggle free. That said, I think a research outpost on Mars could be useful. But as for the rocketry, most problems will be totally catastrophic no matter what. I'm sure there's a lot more practical issues to having an outpost a human could deal with, though I admit it's a bit circular because the reason to have an outpost is so people can be there. Otherwise you'd just send specialized probes to do their one thing.
Rendering, intermediates, etc all need bucketloads of *local* storage, i.e. you don't want to render on anything that has an IO bottleneck. Is thunderbolt really as fast as the internal bus?
Thunderbolt 1 ~= 2x PCIe 2.0 = ~1GB/s (signal is 4x but won't go full speed) Thunderbolt 2 ~= 4x PCIe 2.0 = ~2GB/s Thunderbolt 3 ~= 4x PCIe 3.0 = ~4GB/s
I guess if you RAID 0 you can go faster but if you have hardware and software that can create video at >4GB/s you're pretty special.
I don't know why people continue to buy their stuff. Sure a regular boxy pc may not be as attractive, but it'll be a lot cheaper, perform better, be infinitely more upgradable, and can be modified to suit your personal demands.
Well you can take it out as same performance for less money or more performance for same money, I think for most it has "enough" though so it's really attractiveness vs price. As for upgrading most people are quite happy with laptops (stats from Norway age 16-65 says 30% use desktops, 80% laptops), I don't think they even consider it the same way I've never considered replacing the engine or gearbox on my car. It's not like any part will be outdated in two years anymore and if my needs radically change I'll sell it and buy a different car.
Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Broadwell, Haswell, Skylake it's not like CPUs are revolutionary improving. Graphics did a huge leap recently because they skipped the 20nm node but I'm pretty sure a GTX 1080 will be a pretty damn decent card five years from now. RAM, SSD/HDD, connectors like USB are quite stable too. It might not be the most economically efficient since I'd buy extra early for it to last, but I could certainly build a PC today I could weld shut and not open for 5-10 years barring hardware failure and not really miss anything. Which means it's again price aka money and so is service/replacement costs.
Basically if you have the money there aren't really that many other downsides. Much like despite what/. says the average consumer doesn't mind a non-replaceable battery.
Not a bad idea. This way a lot of people will just accept the ease of quickly getting a Samsung replacement, and not wander off and buy another brand.
It's mostly to lessen a PR nightmare, the Samsung Note 7 is now a prohibited item. So if you have been totally oblivious and try to bring one through security control you'll basically get the choice to not pass and miss some probably important and expensive flight/trip or to quite literally throw the phone away. These shops mean that if you had a good time buffer getting to the airport you can make a "Hail Mary" save by running off to the Samsung booth, get a replacement and still catch your plane. I doubt they'll get much intentional business, though I suppose some might for the convenience since they're going there anyway. I don't think that's why Samsung's doing it though.
Further risk-reduction is possible, for example by entering into a two-party agreement mediated by the Social Security Administration: the exact rent is direct-deposited to your landlord, and you get the remainder; if either party cancels this agreement, both receive immediate notice. As well, tenants can buy their way out of the cost-of-risk by placing a larger security deposit as an insurance fund against their own risk. All of this means we can rent stably to these people at a profit. (...) assuming everything has a 15-year life. The average life of a kitchen sink or cabinet is 50 years, while the faucet does last about 15; cheap countertops last over a decade and can be relaminated; and bathroom fixtures last 20-50 years at least.
I think you've only imagined this, not tried it. Many of the totally unemployable people with nothing but basic income would have drug problems, mental problems or otherwise be dysfunctional. Here in Norway they usually end up in publicly own housing because no matter how much they guarantee rent and deposit it's not worth the complaints, the eviction process, the claims process, the renovation time which translates to lost income and so on. I have a friend who did that mistake once, the apartment was totally trashed in less than a year, not just the furniture and appliances but like the floors, the walls, everything. I also have a relative that's not all there, he let the dogs pee and shit inside and since he lived alone it went so far the house was condemned and torn down. That's how bad it can get and even under normal circumstances they're not going to take care of it like it's their own. And if you can't prove they broke it, well...
I'd say cut all the lifetime estimates you would have had if it was yours in half and add the risk of disaster and I think you'll be closer to reality. Also if you have a cheap and not that great rental object I wouldn't bet on 100% coverage, if you got an attractive one you'll rent it again quick by lowering price if you have to but if there's an oversupply some of the less desirable ones will remain empty. There are those who manage to do it and make money on it, but usually they're also circling like hawks to spot potential troublemakers and nip it in the bud. It's easier once you reach the kind of prices only "normal" working people with money can afford.
In contrast, speech precipitates no loss and no harm
If you're in front of a firing squad, I'm pretty sure the man giving the orders is part of it. Libel, slander, threats, many forms of speech are illegal. You can easily join a criminal conspiracy by speech alone. The kind of hate speech that is outlawed is generally intended to intimidate or incite, hidden by a thin veil of being non-specific in terms of perpetrators, victims and means. That is to say, the "good people of this town" (KKK) is going to make sure the "people who don't belong" (negros) are "not welcome here" (take your pick). The euphemisms don't really cover up that it's a call to action and to make sure the would-be victims "get the message" and refrain from exercising their freedoms and rights.
Ultimately, your argument would like us to take extra steps up the chain of causality to ban things that aren't directly related to harm. How far up the chain of causality can we really go, or should we go? 2 or 3 steps seem just as arbitrary a demarcation as 20 or 40 steps.
That depends on the strength of the links more than number of links. If a general gives an order it doesn't really matter how many degrees of indirection there is before a private pulls the trigger. If I put a line of candy out into the road hoping your kid will follow it without paying attention and get run over, I think most people would say that's highly malignant even though I had very little control over what, if anything, would happen because the underlying intent to cause a sequence of events leading to harm was there. As opposed to the goodie bag tearing as I cross the street without me noticing and it happening entirely by accident. It's like saying we're here, we want to be there, between us there's private land nobody told anyone to break the law by trespassing. But really everyone can add 2+2.
The jobs aren't going away because people here are being replaced by better technology, the jobs are going away here because people are being replaced by workers in other countries who can work for less.
One is not mutually exclusive of the other. It's not exactly a golden age in emerging economies either.
Continuing high rates of unemployment worldwide and chronic vulnerable employment in many emerging and developing economies are still deeply affecting the world of work, warns a new ILO report.
In fact, some companies are insourcing back to the first world because of robotics. There won't be many jobs to go along with it though:
the two new factories (the other will be in the US) will produce about 1m [shoes] (...) The new Adidas factory will have about 160 staff, a fraction of the number required to make the same number of shoes in Asia.
So 160 people to produce 500.000 shoes if that was 1m total, double that if it was 1m each. That's thousands of shoes per employee per year. I just checked one of the bigger online banks here in Norway, 310 employees and 380,000 customers that's more than a thousand per employee. And we're constantly improving the systems to do more with less. For a long time getting more people into the economy has been driving it, like adding another ground level to the pyramid makes it taller.
I'm not so sure that it will always be that way, at some point we might run into other resource limitations and having less people means there's actually more for each because robots do the work but like you need land to grow food, so the more people the more land you need. The more people, the more waste, the more pollution, the more housing, the more traffic and so on. If you think really far into the the future maybe it's better to have fewer humans and a large robot staff to support them.
Of course I'm not doing to ask anyone to give up on the right to have kids, but many countries in Europe are below replacement numbers and maybe then it wouldn't be such a big deal.
But I don't think it has the same colequal meaning as it does in english. "Besserwisser" (know-it-all) or something similar comes to mind as a better translation for "back seat driver".
Knowing Germans I think the correct translation for "back seat driver" is Fußgänger (pedestrian). If you want to insult a German, talk shit about their car, driving or mother - in that order.
You know, you could read the damn summary, I know TL;DR
not default switched on for most Firefox users (only for users of pre-release Firefox builds)."
There's probably a setting to disable it in preview builds, but the whole point of using them is for Mozilla to test so... don't volunteer as a tester?
No. What you do is let people host their own replies to tweets by assigning them UUIDs. The only centralization you need is to make sure you don't have UUID collisions.
And if the person you tweet a reply to doesn't follow you he'll never see it nor will the 90%+ of his followers that aren't your followers. How is that anything like Twitter? The only way that works in a remotely sane fashion is if everybody is already following each other, it's like reinventing a Facebook group only poorly and you can't limit it to just one topic because you're either following or not. For example say person X makes a tweet. A, B and C are work buddies, 1, 2, 3 are part of his sports team and I, II and III are personal friends. We all reply, but ABC doesn't see 1-3 or I-III's posts because we're not followers of each other. And then X makes a reply to A's reply, does it hang in thin air for 1-3 and I-III? Or does now A's reply get "backdated" into the conversation? Is X aware that all these different groups have only see a fraction of what he sees?
If you think that was the solution, you haven't understood the problem. At all.
But for a technology which is basically a glorified indexed array of char[140]'s, it has little that isn't easily copied in terms of functionality. Given that most users' number of followers is in the 100s, a simple PHP script spewing out RSS feeds is almost good enough for that task (and already way more complex than it needs to be).
The problem is if you want replies to tweets, you'll run into the same uncontrolled spam / troll / junk / harassment / propaganda problem that has driven users from distributed systems towards centralized sites and why so many blogs and other sites disable comments. You need some kind of CAPTCHA for rate control and it needs to be replaced/updated as it is broken. And ideally you'd have some third party moderators following guidelines, because no moderation is troll heaven and owner moderation lets you silence all opposing views and criticism. That's the hard part, not making a char[140] aggregator.
I'd say China and Russia is a completely different beast than Russia alone. Compared to the Cold War they've lost a lot of allies and NATO has gained about as much. The battle lines won't start in East Germany, a united Germany will stand against them. And the Poles. And the Baltic States and most of Ukraine and former Yugoslavia. Putin can try funny business in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea since they're not NATO members but he really has no chance alone (or with their lackeys like Belarus) in an open war with NATO. Now China on the other hand has a massive number of soldiers and massive production industry that could be retooled for war. I guess the ace in the hole is the nukes, but if China develops a rocket shield then all bets are off.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so we've got the mining robots, the auto-fuelling spaceship dock, the autonomous telephone sanitizers... I can't help feeling there's something we're forgetting... Oh! Right - people. Hang on. Why are we sending people again?
Because we're not smart enough to make a robot that could and would do what we'd do and telepresence would be hopeless with the delay. Take the stupidest person you know that can drive a car. Ask him to write the software for a self-driving car, might as well ask him to jump to the Moon. Not even many man-years of the best and brightest has managed to get their car a driver's license that millions of teenagers manage every year. If there's a real base there will be plenty that goes wrong or becomes defective and plenty to fix. If it's just to have humans in a bunker eating canned food until their return flight, then yeah there's not much point.
I would like this answer too, please, someone...
If you have system encryption enabled (traditional BIOS, no UEFI support) and you have a strong passphrase and you are the only user and you're not worried that anyone can physically tamper with your system boot or rescue disc - in which case they might just as well use a key logger - then there's no critical issues.
There are several nice to haves that make weak passwords stronger by increasing iterations, close various attacks that other users/processes can do and cleaning up better if you only use containers. The ugliest is probably a privilege escalation attack, malicious software can use the TrueCrypt driver to escalate to admin but if malware is running on your machine you probably have big problems anyway.
Probably the most interesting part about VeraCrypt is the potential for UEFI boot but apparently there's no way to secure erase the keyboard buffer, all you can do is reset it (which they didn't do, but do now) and hope the driver actually overwrites it. But if you can dump the entire UEFI memory area it might still be there. Hopefully legacy BIOS mode will be around for a while longer, in this case simpler is safer.
They couldn't force you with out the lead pipes and rubber hoses, fortunately those aren't allowed in the US yet. What you do in a situation like this is refuse to comply, force them to arrest you and spend the night in jail so you can call the ACLU and get the warrant tossed. See they get away with it because no one refused to comply. Once everyone in the building complies there is no effective way to sue them and set a precedent that will stop this happening again.
Why not? If you think they have an illegal warrant, you sue them as if they had no warrant. Same way you don't sue GPL violators for copyright infringement and not breach of contract, because you have no proof they agreed to the license. They will bring out the warrant and say it's okay, we had a warrant. Then you can challenge it and appeal any dismissals. I wouldn't do it without the ACLU, EFF or someone like that bankrolling it, but it seems to carry less risk since if your challenge fails you were never "rightfully" arrested and perhaps even charged with obstruction of justice. I strongly doubt "Scary guys with guns and fancy papers said I had to or be arrested so I did" counts as consent, immediate compliance does not mean you lose your right to challenge it after reviewing with legal counsel. Same way I'm not about to argue with a SWAT team breaking down the wrong door, I'd comply perfectly. Then sue the shit out of them.
I don't think there's any way to stop gerrymandering other than the voters themselves waking up. California tried appointing a panel of retired judges to draw the boundaries, but it turns out judge panels can be rigged, too. Pretty much any system you can think of can be gamed.
Well the primary reason for gerrymandering is to cause "lost" votes. Here in Norway we have 169 members of parliament, 150 of them are traditional district-specific votes. Since we got 19 districts, there is 150/19 = ~7.9 seats/district though they're actually distributed by population. This means you need like 100/7.9 = ~12.7% of the votes to get a direct seat or even higher in the smaller districts, which is a high bar to pass. But all the spillover votes of parties that got at least 4% nationally - no limit on direct seats - and didn't lead to a direct seat are put in a pool and used to assign the last 19 seats. So the more lucky you got securing direct seats, the less likely you'll get any bonus seats. I'd say it's been quite effective at producing a strong local representation, while making sure it's close to proportional on the national level.
supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
You are reading way too much into this. If the police get a warrant to search a particular house for drugs that is a specific warrant. If it were all houses or to search for any contraband that would be a general warrant and unconstitutional. When they exercise that warrant they're going to search the whole house with everyone's belongings, they don't have to go through the coat rack and assign ownership first then come back with one warrant for Alice's jacket, one for Bob's jacket and not search Eve's jacket because she was just visiting. If they tried to search a whole apartment building because of one occupant that would probably be overreaching, but they don't have to be extremely particular either. And they may search anywhere drugs may be hidden, the only limitation is things obviously out of scope like opening letters, playing movies and other actions that can't possibly lead to the discovery of drugs. But if the evidence could be on the phone, the phone is free game.
I think the same goes with crowds, if it's two room mates they'll search it all even though eventually it might turn out only one sold drugs and the other was innocent. But searching a thousand people at a concert even though you have compelling evidence someone is selling drugs is probably not reasonable, though I can't find any precedent on how strong individual suspicion is necessary. If you're say raiding an illegal gambling club it might be reasonable to suspect all of illegal gambling no matter the size. Now this search may led to finding evidence of other crimes like illegal guns and anything they find specified in the warrant or not may give probable cause for arrest, but that is fine because they're not part of the premise for the warrant. The only time you need to name a person is when issuing an arrest warrant because you intend to seize that person, since you can't have a general warrant to arrest people. That said, we have some gray areas surrounding terror organizations where mere membership is criminalized that is bordering on general arrest.
Localization of the power source doesn't matter. Everything is interconnected by the grid anyway
I'll stop you right there, the moment you say that it means some people might want solar panels and some want a Tesla, but there's no synergy whatsoever. That there's no particular benefit to owing both a solar panel and a Tesla that doesn't exist independently. If that is the case, they don't really have anything to do with each other any more than Tesla and SpaceX. Either or none or both might be a success, but they don't depend on each other at all. It doesn't matter who owns them, they'll succeed or fail on their own merits anyway.
Any AI in the foreseeable future will be under control of human beings, either due to laws or financial ownership. I'm not the least worried about AI, but having watched this election, the humans in my country scare the shit out of me.
I agree that it seems implausible that an AI will "rebel" and set its own goals, that is still sci-fi. But ordinarily those scary men would have to enlist the help of many others, like the old DDR (East Germany) where almost a hundred thousand of a population of 16 million were STASI agents. Use a NSL, use a computer to transcribe it and analyze who is talking to who when and about what and for how long and you could have a quite Orwellian database with only a hundred people involved. Same thing with bank transactions, electronic tickets, number plate scanners, facial recognition, deep packet scanning and whatnot the automatic collection and processing enables a very small but organized and powerful fraction of the population to surveillance and control the rest.
I'm not really sure we could reverse that trend because just like we might discuss the pros and cons of everyone having tiny little digital cameras on them at all times it is still extremely unlikely to change. The average person is leaving more and more electronic traces and even those who try to avoid it is often found by metadata from their friends or they stand out by being the black hole that isn't sharing. Very often the system is rigged towards it, for example we didn't want bus drivers to get robbed so much so now it's a lot more expensive to pay cash than a prepaid subscription or cell phone payment, both of which link to a real identity here in Norway. People do what's cheapest so the few people who pay cash stand out. And really it's no problem until it is a problem, but then you're usually too late to change it.
Just make sure it's an on-site investigation. After that I don't really see a bad outcome either way.
Not when you have a selection bias, it isn't. If your sample selection is consistently biased, no sample size will be large enough.
Agreed, but outside math class you have to look at the percentage and make an educated guess about how special they realistically could be. If you have a thousand employees your number one is probably a genius and your very worst a moron. The 10th from the top is also probably pretty smart and 10th from the bottom pretty stupid. The 50th smartest isn't aren't all that special though, if he can be more efficient with a Mac well it seems worth trying the top 100 or 200 too. It could of course theoretically be that performance drops off a cliff because it takes some minimum skill and understanding you just dipped below, but realistically if that happens it's probably the kind of thing only 1% or 0.1% of your employees grok. If 5% can use a Mac so can probably most of them.
The way I look at is if the reusable rocket guys get the cost of orbital rockets down to 1/10th of the cost that it is now, lots of options open up. If you can get 10 trips up for the cost of 1 now, suddenly assembling a Mars-distance ship in orbit and all the fuel and supplies to make it happen seems pretty plausible.
Assuming the rocket is really the blocking cost. A Falcon 9 expendable is around $62M * 130% = $80M for 22,800 kg to LEO. Even a hundred launches for 2,280,000 kg payload (Saturn V had 140,000 kg to LEO) would be "just" $8 billion and they've spent more on that developing the SLS before it's flown once. Granted it'd be some assembly required but >20 ton modules aren't trivially small either if we design good interlocks and docking in space is pretty routine now with the ISS. So for the sake of argument, say we're now down to $800 million instead that's basically pocket change in this context. We'll still need everything else, uniquely designed for this particular mission. I think a one-off mission will still be >10 billion. Musk is thinking further out than that though, he'll want to bring the price so far down we'll want to keep going. Not one mission but ten, hundred or a thousand. Good for him, but there's still some pretty big hurdles to cross... they need a customer who's willing to pay.
That's what they said about iTunes, and Apple found a way. So I wouldn't count them out here...
Only because the music industry was totally oblivious to what would happen when they let Apple control the DRM, the same way IBM let Microsoft control the OS. They had to drop DRM because they were being buttfucked by Apple who used their market power to sell cheap music and expensive iPods and all their customers were locked in since FairPlay protected music wouldn't play anywhere else.
The motion picture studios have never been that stupid, even long before iTunes they controlled CSS on DVDs, they control AACS/BD+ on BluRays and AACS 2.0 on UHD BluRay and they have no reason to drop DRM. At worst even if it's broken they can still try using the DMCA and EUCD to make decryption tools illegal. And unlike the iPod that filled a need for a device people didn't have there's already tons of ways to play movies and series.
It's of course possible that Apple could find their Achilles heel but I don't think it's very likely, with or without Jobs. The industry would most certainly smell a trap, even if they couldn't figure out what it was. As much as I'd like them to just give up and have the convenience of a torrent site I think it's just very wishful thinking. That said, there are a lot of cable cutters so maybe...
there were two failures: the parachute release and the burn length. But both were likely set in the software on the lander, so I suspect parameters got borked somehow.
As in hardcoded on a timer? Unlikely. This is quite far into the descent and the parachute was probably supposed to jettison when a certain altitude/velocity was reached. That both the parachute and thusters was off suggests to me a sensor failure led the probe to think it was going much slower or flying much lower than reality. It would be odd for both systems to fail and at the same time be in good enough condition to send radio signals.
The point I was making, that if a human can interpret the visual information it's given, then a car with a bigger sensor set can in theory do it too. It's all about software at that point, but there's no limitation on hardware here that a human doesn't have.
Yeah but... Tesla's claim is like saying the brain consumes about 20W, the car can deliver 20W so it's "ready to support an artifical brain". While that might be technically correct it is also grossly misleading, in that we don't have and don't really expect to have an AI working at all or so well and certainly not within the constraints of a human body in the foreseeable future. Same thing with cameras, I expect the first real SDCs to use optical and radar and lidar and every other trick in the book to overcome the shortcomings of the brain behind it. Same way some talk of trying to simulate the brain with >10 megawatt computers.
You might be able to salvage ~20% of them with humans aboard. Might. Meanwhile, humans are a massive added source of additional risk to a mission; they dramatically increase spacecraft size, complexity / part count, consumables, and just in general make things far more difficult.
Having people on board cause their own problems, you wouldn't have to improvise CO2 filters on Apollo 13 if there was no one that needed oxygen so they might cause aborts too not just salvage them. Having humans on board will also limit your alternatives and lead to its own time constraints because you have to keep the crew alive. And most importantly, humans are not expendable and unmanned probes couldn't have any realistic return plan even if you wanted to so in most cases they still wouldn't be an option.
And it's not like NASA just send things out there with plan A and no plan B or a static programming they're stuck with. They try to find possible failure modes, emergency states, when the rovers get stuck on Mars they have huge team back on Earth trying to find out how to best wiggle free. That said, I think a research outpost on Mars could be useful. But as for the rocketry, most problems will be totally catastrophic no matter what. I'm sure there's a lot more practical issues to having an outpost a human could deal with, though I admit it's a bit circular because the reason to have an outpost is so people can be there. Otherwise you'd just send specialized probes to do their one thing.
Rendering, intermediates, etc all need bucketloads of *local* storage, i.e. you don't want to render on anything that has an IO bottleneck. Is thunderbolt really as fast as the internal bus?
Thunderbolt 1 ~= 2x PCIe 2.0 = ~1GB/s (signal is 4x but won't go full speed)
Thunderbolt 2 ~= 4x PCIe 2.0 = ~2GB/s
Thunderbolt 3 ~= 4x PCIe 3.0 = ~4GB/s
I guess if you RAID 0 you can go faster but if you have hardware and software that can create video at >4GB/s you're pretty special.
I don't know why people continue to buy their stuff. Sure a regular boxy pc may not be as attractive, but it'll be a lot cheaper, perform better, be infinitely more upgradable, and can be modified to suit your personal demands.
Well you can take it out as same performance for less money or more performance for same money, I think for most it has "enough" though so it's really attractiveness vs price. As for upgrading most people are quite happy with laptops (stats from Norway age 16-65 says 30% use desktops, 80% laptops), I don't think they even consider it the same way I've never considered replacing the engine or gearbox on my car. It's not like any part will be outdated in two years anymore and if my needs radically change I'll sell it and buy a different car.
Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Broadwell, Haswell, Skylake it's not like CPUs are revolutionary improving. Graphics did a huge leap recently because they skipped the 20nm node but I'm pretty sure a GTX 1080 will be a pretty damn decent card five years from now. RAM, SSD/HDD, connectors like USB are quite stable too. It might not be the most economically efficient since I'd buy extra early for it to last, but I could certainly build a PC today I could weld shut and not open for 5-10 years barring hardware failure and not really miss anything. Which means it's again price aka money and so is service/replacement costs.
Basically if you have the money there aren't really that many other downsides. Much like despite what /. says the average consumer doesn't mind a non-replaceable battery.
Not a bad idea. This way a lot of people will just accept the ease of quickly getting a Samsung replacement, and not wander off and buy another brand.
It's mostly to lessen a PR nightmare, the Samsung Note 7 is now a prohibited item. So if you have been totally oblivious and try to bring one through security control you'll basically get the choice to not pass and miss some probably important and expensive flight/trip or to quite literally throw the phone away. These shops mean that if you had a good time buffer getting to the airport you can make a "Hail Mary" save by running off to the Samsung booth, get a replacement and still catch your plane. I doubt they'll get much intentional business, though I suppose some might for the convenience since they're going there anyway. I don't think that's why Samsung's doing it though.
Further risk-reduction is possible, for example by entering into a two-party agreement mediated by the Social Security Administration: the exact rent is direct-deposited to your landlord, and you get the remainder; if either party cancels this agreement, both receive immediate notice. As well, tenants can buy their way out of the cost-of-risk by placing a larger security deposit as an insurance fund against their own risk. All of this means we can rent stably to these people at a profit. (...) assuming everything has a 15-year life. The average life of a kitchen sink or cabinet is 50 years, while the faucet does last about 15; cheap countertops last over a decade and can be relaminated; and bathroom fixtures last 20-50 years at least.
I think you've only imagined this, not tried it. Many of the totally unemployable people with nothing but basic income would have drug problems, mental problems or otherwise be dysfunctional. Here in Norway they usually end up in publicly own housing because no matter how much they guarantee rent and deposit it's not worth the complaints, the eviction process, the claims process, the renovation time which translates to lost income and so on. I have a friend who did that mistake once, the apartment was totally trashed in less than a year, not just the furniture and appliances but like the floors, the walls, everything. I also have a relative that's not all there, he let the dogs pee and shit inside and since he lived alone it went so far the house was condemned and torn down. That's how bad it can get and even under normal circumstances they're not going to take care of it like it's their own. And if you can't prove they broke it, well...
I'd say cut all the lifetime estimates you would have had if it was yours in half and add the risk of disaster and I think you'll be closer to reality. Also if you have a cheap and not that great rental object I wouldn't bet on 100% coverage, if you got an attractive one you'll rent it again quick by lowering price if you have to but if there's an oversupply some of the less desirable ones will remain empty. There are those who manage to do it and make money on it, but usually they're also circling like hawks to spot potential troublemakers and nip it in the bud. It's easier once you reach the kind of prices only "normal" working people with money can afford.
In contrast, speech precipitates no loss and no harm
If you're in front of a firing squad, I'm pretty sure the man giving the orders is part of it. Libel, slander, threats, many forms of speech are illegal. You can easily join a criminal conspiracy by speech alone. The kind of hate speech that is outlawed is generally intended to intimidate or incite, hidden by a thin veil of being non-specific in terms of perpetrators, victims and means. That is to say, the "good people of this town" (KKK) is going to make sure the "people who don't belong" (negros) are "not welcome here" (take your pick). The euphemisms don't really cover up that it's a call to action and to make sure the would-be victims "get the message" and refrain from exercising their freedoms and rights.
Ultimately, your argument would like us to take extra steps up the chain of causality to ban things that aren't directly related to harm. How far up the chain of causality can we really go, or should we go? 2 or 3 steps seem just as arbitrary a demarcation as 20 or 40 steps.
That depends on the strength of the links more than number of links. If a general gives an order it doesn't really matter how many degrees of indirection there is before a private pulls the trigger. If I put a line of candy out into the road hoping your kid will follow it without paying attention and get run over, I think most people would say that's highly malignant even though I had very little control over what, if anything, would happen because the underlying intent to cause a sequence of events leading to harm was there. As opposed to the goodie bag tearing as I cross the street without me noticing and it happening entirely by accident. It's like saying we're here, we want to be there, between us there's private land nobody told anyone to break the law by trespassing. But really everyone can add 2+2.
The jobs aren't going away because people here are being replaced by better technology, the jobs are going away here because people are being replaced by workers in other countries who can work for less.
One is not mutually exclusive of the other. It's not exactly a golden age in emerging economies either.
Continuing high rates of unemployment worldwide and chronic vulnerable employment in many emerging and developing economies are still deeply affecting the world of work, warns a new ILO report.
In fact, some companies are insourcing back to the first world because of robotics. There won't be many jobs to go along with it though:
the two new factories (the other will be in the US) will produce about 1m [shoes] (...) The new Adidas factory will have about 160 staff, a fraction of the number required to make the same number of shoes in Asia.
So 160 people to produce 500.000 shoes if that was 1m total, double that if it was 1m each. That's thousands of shoes per employee per year. I just checked one of the bigger online banks here in Norway, 310 employees and 380,000 customers that's more than a thousand per employee. And we're constantly improving the systems to do more with less. For a long time getting more people into the economy has been driving it, like adding another ground level to the pyramid makes it taller.
I'm not so sure that it will always be that way, at some point we might run into other resource limitations and having less people means there's actually more for each because robots do the work but like you need land to grow food, so the more people the more land you need. The more people, the more waste, the more pollution, the more housing, the more traffic and so on. If you think really far into the the future maybe it's better to have fewer humans and a large robot staff to support them.
Of course I'm not doing to ask anyone to give up on the right to have kids, but many countries in Europe are below replacement numbers and maybe then it wouldn't be such a big deal.
But I don't think it has the same colequal meaning as it does in english. "Besserwisser" (know-it-all) or something similar comes to mind as a better translation for "back seat driver".
Knowing Germans I think the correct translation for "back seat driver" is Fußgänger (pedestrian). If you want to insult a German, talk shit about their car, driving or mother - in that order.
You know, you could read the damn summary, I know TL;DR
not default switched on for most Firefox users (only for users of pre-release Firefox builds)."
There's probably a setting to disable it in preview builds, but the whole point of using them is for Mozilla to test so... don't volunteer as a tester?
No. What you do is let people host their own replies to tweets by assigning them UUIDs. The only centralization you need is to make sure you don't have UUID collisions.
And if the person you tweet a reply to doesn't follow you he'll never see it nor will the 90%+ of his followers that aren't your followers. How is that anything like Twitter? The only way that works in a remotely sane fashion is if everybody is already following each other, it's like reinventing a Facebook group only poorly and you can't limit it to just one topic because you're either following or not. For example say person X makes a tweet. A, B and C are work buddies, 1, 2, 3 are part of his sports team and I, II and III are personal friends. We all reply, but ABC doesn't see 1-3 or I-III's posts because we're not followers of each other. And then X makes a reply to A's reply, does it hang in thin air for 1-3 and I-III? Or does now A's reply get "backdated" into the conversation? Is X aware that all these different groups have only see a fraction of what he sees?
If you think that was the solution, you haven't understood the problem. At all.
But for a technology which is basically a glorified indexed array of char[140]'s, it has little that isn't easily copied in terms of functionality. Given that most users' number of followers is in the 100s, a simple PHP script spewing out RSS feeds is almost good enough for that task (and already way more complex than it needs to be).
The problem is if you want replies to tweets, you'll run into the same uncontrolled spam / troll / junk / harassment / propaganda problem that has driven users from distributed systems towards centralized sites and why so many blogs and other sites disable comments. You need some kind of CAPTCHA for rate control and it needs to be replaced/updated as it is broken. And ideally you'd have some third party moderators following guidelines, because no moderation is troll heaven and owner moderation lets you silence all opposing views and criticism. That's the hard part, not making a char[140] aggregator.
I'd say China and Russia is a completely different beast than Russia alone. Compared to the Cold War they've lost a lot of allies and NATO has gained about as much. The battle lines won't start in East Germany, a united Germany will stand against them. And the Poles. And the Baltic States and most of Ukraine and former Yugoslavia. Putin can try funny business in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea since they're not NATO members but he really has no chance alone (or with their lackeys like Belarus) in an open war with NATO. Now China on the other hand has a massive number of soldiers and massive production industry that could be retooled for war. I guess the ace in the hole is the nukes, but if China develops a rocket shield then all bets are off.