Which brings up another point. The US Federal Government can hack the German Chancellor's Iphone, but not the Iphone of some nut in California?
Presumably the Chancellor's phone was hacked while it was running. Just like using full disk encryption doesn't protect you from getting a trojan while surfing, but if your laptop is turned off and gets stolen it will. It's only a strong lock on the door, it doesn't prevent nasty things from slipping in when it's open.
India is a work in progress in many areas, but feeding the economic engine so you can have more skilled workers - yes, no matter what you might think of outsourced Indian developers and helpdesks they're skilled for India - paying taxes so they can build out more schools, power, water, sanitation etc. might be more productive in the long run. These are not the spoilt brats of the western world, if you give them the chance to learn many will work hard to improve their life. A phone is a pretty damn cheap tool to give them opportunities. And they are working on those other things, but like China they pretty much have to pull themselves up. Nobody can afford to really help hundreds of millions of people on foreign aid.
In retrospect it was more of a "if all your friends jump off a bridge, would you jump too" thing. AMD started it by saying low level access like on consoles would be superior, Microsoft and Apple jumped after and despite Mantle not really being much of a success they gave it to Khronos so now OpenGL has a low level API too. So now they all have one but if the market was really crying out for it, well not really. It did make AMD look somewhat better on anemic CPUs which helped their APU offerings but on a gaming rig you're usually GPU limited and then it won't make much of a difference.
For open source the main problem has been manpower, not so much the specification with Mesa trailing the OpenGL spec by about five years. And that doesn't include the tons of load/card/game-specific optimizations involved in the proprietary drivers. The work is still the same and it's not so much that game engines do it better, it's that they have the resources. With this low level API hopefully the OSS drivers can stay current and perform equally well on Vulkan as the proprietary competitors.
TFA didn't say what OS the hospital was using, or if it'd been kept properly updated. I hope, however, that they'll use this as an opportunity to either update all of the computers during the reinstall, or install a more recent version of whatever OS they're using. The same thing goes, of course, for any anti-virus/anti-malware software involved.
Ahahahaha yeah right, it's not the actual upgrade that is the problem. It's all the medical equipment and niche software that won't work right - or at least isn't certified to work right - if you do that. And they certainly won't rush that process in a crisis. This will be a mad scramble to find and isolate the cause, clean the network and restore systems as best they can to exactly how they were.
The people that are best suited to go to mars are those who either explicitly have a death wish or else those who are simply too naive to realize that going there at the technology that we have right now is suicide. Heck, do you know how many people died just trying to sail halfway around the world to the Americas from Europe only a few centuries ago? And that was on a planet with a hospitable atmosphere!
We fairly reliably sent people to the moon with 1960s tech 6/7 times and saved Apollo 13, some 133/135 Shuttle missions were a success, we've operated a space station for 18 years, we got rovers on Mars operating over a decade... okay so space is not exactly like flying from London to New York yet, but we've certainly tamed it quite a bit. Sure, the mission is longer but most things that are critical happen during the launch/landing phase, we have a decade of on-site weather data and the Martian was a movie. And we're likely to have robots making a dry run testing the landing and establishing the habitat first, still considering the complexity I'd give it maybe 90-95% chance of success.
Certainly nothing to sneeze at but nine of out ten times you get an experience only one in a billion will have and the tenth time, well you'd likely be really dead really quick. To be honest, the risk of being in a parachuting or mountain climbing accident and ending up as a cripple is scarier than becoming a fireball, besides I'm not an adrenaline junkie. Going to Mars though, I'd sign up for that. Of course it helps that I don't have any commitments, I wouldn't do it if I had a wife and kids but there's plenty of us around. And shit, 70-75 years ago tens of millions were dying for war. Even if the mission is a wipe, that's like ten deaths for exploration and science? The horror.
To what company does the last statement apply? I can't think of a single instance. Any instance that comes to mind refers to a partially open source situation, not a completely open source situation.
Pretty much every time you see someone complaining about firmware. It doesn't run on the CPU, it could just as well have been read from an EEPROM chip but for cost reasons they want the driver to send the blob during initialization instead. Personally I never understood the vile difference between loading a proprietary blob to a chip once with flashing and sending it in each time on boot, but apparently RMS and friends go mental over the latter. Also, often the firmware is blocking things that could harm the hardware, make it run out of FCC specifications and so on that would hurt the manufacturer through warranty returns or certification problems. I'm perfectly satisfied with open source drivers, but that's far from everyone.
In aggregate, this would almost certainly be true. But UBI is not supposed to create wealth, it is supposed to redistribute it. The "losers" would be people that work and pay taxes. The "winners" would be people that don't. So inequality would be reduced, at the cost of lower production through reduced incentives. But is the reduction in inequality enough to justify the reduction in productivity, especially when compared to alternatives like EITC? We don't know, and that is what this experiment is designed to find out.
Actually if it's really to replace other welfare services the biggest losers would probably be those that genuinely need the disability benefits, because the UBI has to be tuned real low so all the minimum wage people don't all quit. Ordinary people might depend on UBI from time to time then do seasonal work or part time or work full time for a while when they feel the cash is short. But if you're really not in a condition to work and that's how your next 30 years will look like it'd be really depressive.
Usually it's because they're rebuilding the plane while it's airborne, some major subsystem or critical application is always in massive change with regressions. The distros try but with tens of thousands of packages it's pretty hopeless to cherry pick stable versions of everything. It's not going anywhere until they manage to take over the apps though. For example I've heard it said many times here that Office/Outlook was pretty much "done" around 97/2003 and yet here we are in 2016 and they still dominate the business world. Say what you want about the number of games on Steam, the number of gamers is 0.95% (-0.01%) on the last survey. It was cool to see same day support for XCOM 2 though I'm on Windows now, gives me hope at least. Now if only someone could get GTA V working under WINE maybe I'd care to try again.
Not disputing your point, but providing information: (...) It's called the Freedom to Roam.
More like disinformation, almost all significant rights to live off the land belong to the land owner. Here in Norway the freedom to roam gives you the right to do what would normally be considered trespassing in the US, but you can't make any long term campsite, cut down any trees, do any hunting and hardly any fishing in lakes and rivers without paying fees. You can fish on the coast and collect wild berries and mushrooms, herbs and flowers with relatively few restrictions but they're made to discourage any significant commercial use and would also practically make it almost impossible to live off.
It's primary function is that you can roam in nature - walking, biking, swimming, kayaking, canoeing, cross-country skiing and so on. A secondary function is that you can stay a while for say sunbathing or camping out in a tent, you can also collect dead branches and such for firewood but not leave much of a permanent mark. Being able to collect some of nature's produce is a tertiary function and usually only those resources that'd otherwise go to waste, if it's a commercially viable resource there's usually restrictions like salmon fishing or moose hunting. Living off the land pre-agriculture was very tough to begin with, within the modern confines it'd be even harder.
And you'd probably starve anyway, because most people today aren't very familiar with the old ways of preserving foods like drying, curing, smoking etc. which are absolutely essential to survive the ups and down of a hunter-gatherer society. And just the fact that you were a tribe averaging your luck out across many individuals, hopefully at least somebody caught or found something. Agriculture and domestication brought a relative stability to food supply while the natural supply is extremely seasonal.
Poverty is a huge driver of overpopulation. Poor people tend to have more kids to provide for them in their later years. Countries with prosperous economies that are broadly shared tend to have much lower birth rates than poorer countries. That's because raising new humans is a lot of work; if people don't feel like they need to do that, they won't. China, of course, is an exception due to their one-child policy.
And often combined with poor access to contraception, a patriarchy where you want sons to get married not daughters to marry away and a shoddy health care system which means not all your kids might grow up. Even when those things are no longer true it takes time for culture to change and in the meantime you get a huge population bump. That's why we've gone from 2 billion people in 1927 to 7+ billion and counting.
IF there was an actual store that did that I would go in there once a week, fill my cart up, have the cashier ring me up, bag the groceries and then flip out and storm out when they refused to take the cash
And you could do that once. The second time you'll get banned from the store. The third time they call the cops on you for trespassing.
I could probably come up with some plausible-sounding reasons, but in practice I'm guessing it's because the lost tax revenue will be the problem of the next people in office and not the current crop.
What's the difference between a search-and-rescue bot and a kill bot? The function is going to pretty much identical right up to the point the target is located, just duct tape a gun to point in same direction as the camera and wire the "person located" signal to pull the trigger. It's one thing to ban ABC weapons because they're very specific technologies, but this is way too generic to work. And it's not like the military is going to avoid developing it for intelligence gathering and decision support systems, even if you keep a human in the loop it's literally going to be one flip of the switch to full automatic where the computer's recommendations are implemented by itself.
The primary reason to keep soldiers in the loop today is because you're trying to fight a "good war" and avoid antagonizing the civilians so you want manual confirmation of each target, if you take the gloves off and say if you're found outside after curfew we'll shoot to kill and live with the collateral you could automate much more. And don't get up on the high horse, when the US nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki they knew there's be about 100-200k civilian casualties. In a real war nobody's going to give a fuck if the robots are just 99% or 95% right, if it can save our troops and civilians and end the war for sure we're going to let them fight for us.
Hate to break it to you guys, but the GPS will more reliably find you an optimum route than you can find yourself. That is because the GPS "knows" more than you do: current traffic conditions, road closures, etc. I know people pooh pooh GPS directions and say "I know a faster way" but they really don't 90% of the time.
Maybe your navigation system does, but GPS knows absolutely nothing. Unless your maps are up to date it doesn't even know where the road leads, much less how the current conditions are.
I am not surprised that requests are not followed up on when a female calls for them, nor am I surprised that their responses are more often responded to when the gender is hidden/neutral. What I am surprised is that female pull requests are "larger and less likely to serve an immediate project need". Does this mean that female developers are concentrating on "big picture features" more often ?
Would that be so astonishing? We come from a hunter-gatherer society where those out hunting had to think on their feet and seize the opportunities where they presented themselves. Gathering is a lot more about planning and organization, those berries won't run away but you have to harvest when they're ripe. And the women were also taking care of the children, sick and elderly for the long term survival and passing on knowledge of the tribe. We've had many thousands years of selection pressure to that effect, there's no need to exaggerate the differences and it's not like one is always better than the other but statistically we are different.
I'm suggesting if Google is driving, and the passengers are passengers, then why the hell would anybody pay for things like liability insurance for an AI?
Same reason I can lend my car to someone with a driver's license but no car and thus no insurance of his own. Google's driving but it's still your property and that makes you liable. Say you walk into a store and a light fixture falls on your head. Maybe it's a manufacturing error, maybe it's shoddy work in construction, maybe it's sabotage (unlikely) or whatever. It doesn't matter to you because you sue the store, the store manager can't just pass the buck. Even if they find it was a manufacturing error and the manufacturer is bankrupt he still can't pass the buck. I'm guessing they'll keep it as an insurance because then they can also set the conditions of insurance, like if the car is out of spec in any way it can refuse to drive, it might demand to be kept up to date with the latest driving logic, traffic regulations, road maps and whatnot. A product liability is just that the product was in a normal condition on delivery, not beyond.
Most skeptics couldn't tell good science from bad science if their life depended on it, they're just borderline conspiracy theorists who has decided that the establishment or mainstream media are pushing an agenda with cherry-picked data, flawed models and spurious reasoning to give a false, but plausible impression. And because they've found some whack jobs contradicting it they think they're part of a small elite who haven't bought into the lies. They're just as much sheep as the sheep they despise, just going in the opposite direction of the herd.
However, the CPU has now only 1 core instead of 8 and only about 1.6 times the clock frequency. This means a huge decrease in performance...
Amdahl's law says that depends on what you're doing. Also it has 4 cores/8 threads but yeah. This is obviously just for doing it. As someone who started with a 0.985 MHz C64 and got a 1.2GHz Athlon not so long into the new millennium I'm quite underwhelmed though, despite the IPC improvements.
All hyperbole and kidding aside, is it just me or do these BREIN fools sound like just more politicians, completely devoid of any ability to understand technical things? Their argument is like liberals trying to outlaw firearms: they make a basic assumption that 'guns are evil, therefore get rid of guns' when in reality people kill people, and eliminating guns won't really do a damn thing; someone wants to kill, they'll find a way, gun or no gun.
All hyperbole aside.... if that's how you feel why don't you give Daesh the nuclear launch codes? Surely they want to kill us and surely they'll find a way, so just give up now. Yes, a tool is just a tool. That doesn't mean we're going to stop trying to keep it out of the hands of bad people or find ways to make it less suitable for doing bad things. Even the US has restrictions for convicted felons and fully automatic weapons. So say you're convicted of embezzlement, you've never had any violent history in your life. Does that now mean that you won't ever in your life have a need for self defense? Hell no, but we simply don't trust you.
Now don't get me wrong I don't generally believe people are evil, but a few could be mentally ill, a few driven to madness by malice and a few could be in great distress like a break-up, getting fired and so on. If you gave everyone a gun, there will be school shootings. There will be fired employees going postal. There will be crazy ex shootings. Guns make it easier. Sure you could do it with a knife, but it's a lot less dangerous. If you want to pull this "reductio ad absurdum" then a felon could kill with a knife so since we don't take his kitchen knives away it's pointless. It's not, really it isn't.
Of course there's big problems to some people having guns and some not, but I don't see how you could get away from that. Where would you put the bar on that? Minors? Mentally challenged? Demented elderly? I think only a few Texas die hards really believe absolutely everyone should be allowed to carry a gun. I support gun restrictions the same way I support dangerous drugs being restricted to healthcare personnel, explosives to people working in demolitions and so on, if you have a legitimate need for hunting or sports that's fine. On the streets I'd rather have knives and the cops cracking down hard on gun crime. It seems to be working, your average criminal doesn't carry.
To get at least slightly back on topic with digital it's rather black and white, all or nothing, zero or one. And that's why I feel many analogies fail to make the transition, like in the debate about the iPhone cryptography. If it were a safe, they'd drill it but you can't drill your way through AES256. But this particular case is silly, it's essentially torrents in your browser. If they haven't been able to ban torrent clients, surely there's nothing wrong with this application either. It's just annoyingly convenient for copyright holders, but principally it's no different.
The clock is ticking on spinning drives. HDD are still viable, but only for large backups. However, if all you look at is price, then you get what you pay for.
Sure. But apart from the personal content that you should have backed up in multiple+offsite copies for safekeeping and usually just consumes a little bit, for most people the HDD is a n'th level cache of the Internet. For many people that's even true of the SSD content, if you lose your Steam games folder or Spotify offline playlists well you can just download it again. And when it comes to digital media quantity is king, it's a lot easier to have three copies with 95% reliability than one with 99,99% because you could always get a lemon.
If we knew what they were trying to communicate, we'd probably find they have different languages too. Same as with people, without long distance travel/communication there's no reason to believe they'd share a language. We've seen this both on the macro scale through colonization wiping out many local languages and on the micro scale through building bridges to islands, linguists found that dialects became much less distinct. And with mass media and the Internet I'm sure we're converging even stronger now. Wolves have none of that so I'm sure a US wolf wouldn't understand much of what a EU wolf was howling, but I'm sure they'd quickly work out the basics.
People with bit more specialized needs (hardcore gaming, media production, virtual machines, etc.) can probably soon acquire 1 TB SSD for a price like $200.
And you can get an 8TB Seagate Archive HDD for $223 at newegg today, if you need/want to store lots of data it's still cheaper by far. The real issue from the manufacturer's side is that nobody will pay a premium for anything. You get a SSD for all things performance and the cheapest, slowest HDD because for streaming huge media files you just have to be fast enough, they're mostly accessed linearly and even a video server for a big family only serves a handful of video streams at once. And a lot of people are streaming more or doing download & delete, to be honest I hardly ever get around to watching most things again. Every so often I just go cleaning up a few TB of stuff that was just collecting dust.
You think say the Linux kernel isn't useful? They've been on a three month cycle for ages, roughly one month merge window and two months of release candidates. Basically what you want is for everybody to time box what they can do before the next release, but you can't know if you don't know how long that'll be. Maybe if it's two months you'll do some quick enhancements and fixes but if it's six you do a deeper restructuring. If 90% of your developers have finished according to plan and 10% is threatening to hold up the release then the great majority won't be able to effectively use a small extension. It's better to just scrub the parts that aren't ready and say we're releasing now, sorry try again next merge window. Of course assuming that you have a large enough project that there'll be some release-worthy items every cycle and that people don't just submit shit for release no matter what state it's in. There's a lot less drama about who is important and can rush patches and delay releases if the answer is no, you can't. Only bugfixes during RC, if your code breaks shit or needs major rework you're bumped to the next version. If you don't have a person with balls managing that your releases will suck, but if you can't stand up to the developers it'll probably suck on a rolling basis too.
Pretty much. In retrospect, I thought Bitcoin was going to be one of those geek idea that just didn't pass beyond geek circles. I was considering getting in on it when it was like $1/BTC and like.. nah... not going to happen. In retrospect it's prety obvious but hey.. it's like the dotcom boom, even if you recognized it as a bubble you could make a lot of money riding it and cashing out at the right time. Bitcoin worked because it was first and everybody was rooting for some crypocurrency to be taken seriously. All the rest seem like "get rich quick" schemes where you keep some to yourself and try to make it valuable. I still use BTC but I have the feeling it has no "natural" level, it could be worth $10 or $100 or $1000 in a while. That doesn't stop it from being used in transactions, but as an investment it's pretty fucked up.
For having so many small experiments and projects to maintain, a human presence is really not that much more effort compared to building robotic versions of each experiment. The human is also far more adaptable, able to repair and rebuild systems as needed.
Well, except that humans are pretty much stuck at the landing site. Mars has half the circumference of earth or about 20000 km, you can get the equivalent of the lunar rover and cover maybe 20 km before you have to turn back. Sure, the rovers are a snooze feast but we got several of them in different places. For the same reason it's not practical to repair them or return samples to base either, even if we had a man on Mars.
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Which brings up another point. The US Federal Government can hack the German Chancellor's Iphone, but not the Iphone of some nut in California?
Presumably the Chancellor's phone was hacked while it was running. Just like using full disk encryption doesn't protect you from getting a trojan while surfing, but if your laptop is turned off and gets stolen it will. It's only a strong lock on the door, it doesn't prevent nasty things from slipping in when it's open.
India is a work in progress in many areas, but feeding the economic engine so you can have more skilled workers - yes, no matter what you might think of outsourced Indian developers and helpdesks they're skilled for India - paying taxes so they can build out more schools, power, water, sanitation etc. might be more productive in the long run. These are not the spoilt brats of the western world, if you give them the chance to learn many will work hard to improve their life. A phone is a pretty damn cheap tool to give them opportunities. And they are working on those other things, but like China they pretty much have to pull themselves up. Nobody can afford to really help hundreds of millions of people on foreign aid.
In retrospect it was more of a "if all your friends jump off a bridge, would you jump too" thing. AMD started it by saying low level access like on consoles would be superior, Microsoft and Apple jumped after and despite Mantle not really being much of a success they gave it to Khronos so now OpenGL has a low level API too. So now they all have one but if the market was really crying out for it, well not really. It did make AMD look somewhat better on anemic CPUs which helped their APU offerings but on a gaming rig you're usually GPU limited and then it won't make much of a difference.
For open source the main problem has been manpower, not so much the specification with Mesa trailing the OpenGL spec by about five years. And that doesn't include the tons of load/card/game-specific optimizations involved in the proprietary drivers. The work is still the same and it's not so much that game engines do it better, it's that they have the resources. With this low level API hopefully the OSS drivers can stay current and perform equally well on Vulkan as the proprietary competitors.
TFA didn't say what OS the hospital was using, or if it'd been kept properly updated. I hope, however, that they'll use this as an opportunity to either update all of the computers during the reinstall, or install a more recent version of whatever OS they're using. The same thing goes, of course, for any anti-virus/anti-malware software involved.
Ahahahaha yeah right, it's not the actual upgrade that is the problem. It's all the medical equipment and niche software that won't work right - or at least isn't certified to work right - if you do that. And they certainly won't rush that process in a crisis. This will be a mad scramble to find and isolate the cause, clean the network and restore systems as best they can to exactly how they were.
The people that are best suited to go to mars are those who either explicitly have a death wish or else those who are simply too naive to realize that going there at the technology that we have right now is suicide. Heck, do you know how many people died just trying to sail halfway around the world to the Americas from Europe only a few centuries ago? And that was on a planet with a hospitable atmosphere!
We fairly reliably sent people to the moon with 1960s tech 6/7 times and saved Apollo 13, some 133/135 Shuttle missions were a success, we've operated a space station for 18 years, we got rovers on Mars operating over a decade... okay so space is not exactly like flying from London to New York yet, but we've certainly tamed it quite a bit. Sure, the mission is longer but most things that are critical happen during the launch/landing phase, we have a decade of on-site weather data and the Martian was a movie. And we're likely to have robots making a dry run testing the landing and establishing the habitat first, still considering the complexity I'd give it maybe 90-95% chance of success.
Certainly nothing to sneeze at but nine of out ten times you get an experience only one in a billion will have and the tenth time, well you'd likely be really dead really quick. To be honest, the risk of being in a parachuting or mountain climbing accident and ending up as a cripple is scarier than becoming a fireball, besides I'm not an adrenaline junkie. Going to Mars though, I'd sign up for that. Of course it helps that I don't have any commitments, I wouldn't do it if I had a wife and kids but there's plenty of us around. And shit, 70-75 years ago tens of millions were dying for war. Even if the mission is a wipe, that's like ten deaths for exploration and science? The horror.
To what company does the last statement apply? I can't think of a single instance. Any instance that comes to mind refers to a partially open source situation, not a completely open source situation.
Pretty much every time you see someone complaining about firmware. It doesn't run on the CPU, it could just as well have been read from an EEPROM chip but for cost reasons they want the driver to send the blob during initialization instead. Personally I never understood the vile difference between loading a proprietary blob to a chip once with flashing and sending it in each time on boot, but apparently RMS and friends go mental over the latter. Also, often the firmware is blocking things that could harm the hardware, make it run out of FCC specifications and so on that would hurt the manufacturer through warranty returns or certification problems. I'm perfectly satisfied with open source drivers, but that's far from everyone.
In aggregate, this would almost certainly be true. But UBI is not supposed to create wealth, it is supposed to redistribute it. The "losers" would be people that work and pay taxes. The "winners" would be people that don't. So inequality would be reduced, at the cost of lower production through reduced incentives. But is the reduction in inequality enough to justify the reduction in productivity, especially when compared to alternatives like EITC? We don't know, and that is what this experiment is designed to find out.
Actually if it's really to replace other welfare services the biggest losers would probably be those that genuinely need the disability benefits, because the UBI has to be tuned real low so all the minimum wage people don't all quit. Ordinary people might depend on UBI from time to time then do seasonal work or part time or work full time for a while when they feel the cash is short. But if you're really not in a condition to work and that's how your next 30 years will look like it'd be really depressive.
Usually it's because they're rebuilding the plane while it's airborne, some major subsystem or critical application is always in massive change with regressions. The distros try but with tens of thousands of packages it's pretty hopeless to cherry pick stable versions of everything. It's not going anywhere until they manage to take over the apps though. For example I've heard it said many times here that Office/Outlook was pretty much "done" around 97/2003 and yet here we are in 2016 and they still dominate the business world. Say what you want about the number of games on Steam, the number of gamers is 0.95% (-0.01%) on the last survey. It was cool to see same day support for XCOM 2 though I'm on Windows now, gives me hope at least. Now if only someone could get GTA V working under WINE maybe I'd care to try again.
Not disputing your point, but providing information: (...) It's called the Freedom to Roam.
More like disinformation, almost all significant rights to live off the land belong to the land owner. Here in Norway the freedom to roam gives you the right to do what would normally be considered trespassing in the US, but you can't make any long term campsite, cut down any trees, do any hunting and hardly any fishing in lakes and rivers without paying fees. You can fish on the coast and collect wild berries and mushrooms, herbs and flowers with relatively few restrictions but they're made to discourage any significant commercial use and would also practically make it almost impossible to live off.
It's primary function is that you can roam in nature - walking, biking, swimming, kayaking, canoeing, cross-country skiing and so on. A secondary function is that you can stay a while for say sunbathing or camping out in a tent, you can also collect dead branches and such for firewood but not leave much of a permanent mark. Being able to collect some of nature's produce is a tertiary function and usually only those resources that'd otherwise go to waste, if it's a commercially viable resource there's usually restrictions like salmon fishing or moose hunting. Living off the land pre-agriculture was very tough to begin with, within the modern confines it'd be even harder.
And you'd probably starve anyway, because most people today aren't very familiar with the old ways of preserving foods like drying, curing, smoking etc. which are absolutely essential to survive the ups and down of a hunter-gatherer society. And just the fact that you were a tribe averaging your luck out across many individuals, hopefully at least somebody caught or found something. Agriculture and domestication brought a relative stability to food supply while the natural supply is extremely seasonal.
Poverty is a huge driver of overpopulation. Poor people tend to have more kids to provide for them in their later years. Countries with prosperous economies that are broadly shared tend to have much lower birth rates than poorer countries. That's because raising new humans is a lot of work; if people don't feel like they need to do that, they won't. China, of course, is an exception due to their one-child policy.
And often combined with poor access to contraception, a patriarchy where you want sons to get married not daughters to marry away and a shoddy health care system which means not all your kids might grow up. Even when those things are no longer true it takes time for culture to change and in the meantime you get a huge population bump. That's why we've gone from 2 billion people in 1927 to 7+ billion and counting.
IF there was an actual store that did that I would go in there once a week, fill my cart up, have the cashier ring me up, bag the groceries and then flip out and storm out when they refused to take the cash
And you could do that once. The second time you'll get banned from the store. The third time they call the cops on you for trespassing.
I could probably come up with some plausible-sounding reasons, but in practice I'm guessing it's because the lost tax revenue will be the problem of the next people in office and not the current crop.
What's the difference between a search-and-rescue bot and a kill bot? The function is going to pretty much identical right up to the point the target is located, just duct tape a gun to point in same direction as the camera and wire the "person located" signal to pull the trigger. It's one thing to ban ABC weapons because they're very specific technologies, but this is way too generic to work. And it's not like the military is going to avoid developing it for intelligence gathering and decision support systems, even if you keep a human in the loop it's literally going to be one flip of the switch to full automatic where the computer's recommendations are implemented by itself.
The primary reason to keep soldiers in the loop today is because you're trying to fight a "good war" and avoid antagonizing the civilians so you want manual confirmation of each target, if you take the gloves off and say if you're found outside after curfew we'll shoot to kill and live with the collateral you could automate much more. And don't get up on the high horse, when the US nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki they knew there's be about 100-200k civilian casualties. In a real war nobody's going to give a fuck if the robots are just 99% or 95% right, if it can save our troops and civilians and end the war for sure we're going to let them fight for us.
Hate to break it to you guys, but the GPS will more reliably find you an optimum route than you can find yourself. That is because the GPS "knows" more than you do: current traffic conditions, road closures, etc. I know people pooh pooh GPS directions and say "I know a faster way" but they really don't 90% of the time.
Maybe your navigation system does, but GPS knows absolutely nothing. Unless your maps are up to date it doesn't even know where the road leads, much less how the current conditions are.
I am not surprised that requests are not followed up on when a female calls for them, nor am I surprised that their responses are more often responded to when the gender is hidden/neutral. What I am surprised is that female pull requests are "larger and less likely to serve an immediate project need". Does this mean that female developers are concentrating on "big picture features" more often ?
Would that be so astonishing? We come from a hunter-gatherer society where those out hunting had to think on their feet and seize the opportunities where they presented themselves. Gathering is a lot more about planning and organization, those berries won't run away but you have to harvest when they're ripe. And the women were also taking care of the children, sick and elderly for the long term survival and passing on knowledge of the tribe. We've had many thousands years of selection pressure to that effect, there's no need to exaggerate the differences and it's not like one is always better than the other but statistically we are different.
I'm suggesting if Google is driving, and the passengers are passengers, then why the hell would anybody pay for things like liability insurance for an AI?
Same reason I can lend my car to someone with a driver's license but no car and thus no insurance of his own. Google's driving but it's still your property and that makes you liable. Say you walk into a store and a light fixture falls on your head. Maybe it's a manufacturing error, maybe it's shoddy work in construction, maybe it's sabotage (unlikely) or whatever. It doesn't matter to you because you sue the store, the store manager can't just pass the buck. Even if they find it was a manufacturing error and the manufacturer is bankrupt he still can't pass the buck. I'm guessing they'll keep it as an insurance because then they can also set the conditions of insurance, like if the car is out of spec in any way it can refuse to drive, it might demand to be kept up to date with the latest driving logic, traffic regulations, road maps and whatnot. A product liability is just that the product was in a normal condition on delivery, not beyond.
Most skeptics couldn't tell good science from bad science if their life depended on it, they're just borderline conspiracy theorists who has decided that the establishment or mainstream media are pushing an agenda with cherry-picked data, flawed models and spurious reasoning to give a false, but plausible impression. And because they've found some whack jobs contradicting it they think they're part of a small elite who haven't bought into the lies. They're just as much sheep as the sheep they despise, just going in the opposite direction of the herd.
However, the CPU has now only 1 core instead of 8 and only about 1.6 times the clock frequency. This means a huge decrease in performance...
Amdahl's law says that depends on what you're doing. Also it has 4 cores/8 threads but yeah. This is obviously just for doing it. As someone who started with a 0.985 MHz C64 and got a 1.2GHz Athlon not so long into the new millennium I'm quite underwhelmed though, despite the IPC improvements.
All hyperbole and kidding aside, is it just me or do these BREIN fools sound like just more politicians, completely devoid of any ability to understand technical things? Their argument is like liberals trying to outlaw firearms: they make a basic assumption that 'guns are evil, therefore get rid of guns' when in reality people kill people, and eliminating guns won't really do a damn thing; someone wants to kill, they'll find a way, gun or no gun.
All hyperbole aside.... if that's how you feel why don't you give Daesh the nuclear launch codes? Surely they want to kill us and surely they'll find a way, so just give up now. Yes, a tool is just a tool. That doesn't mean we're going to stop trying to keep it out of the hands of bad people or find ways to make it less suitable for doing bad things. Even the US has restrictions for convicted felons and fully automatic weapons. So say you're convicted of embezzlement, you've never had any violent history in your life. Does that now mean that you won't ever in your life have a need for self defense? Hell no, but we simply don't trust you.
Now don't get me wrong I don't generally believe people are evil, but a few could be mentally ill, a few driven to madness by malice and a few could be in great distress like a break-up, getting fired and so on. If you gave everyone a gun, there will be school shootings. There will be fired employees going postal. There will be crazy ex shootings. Guns make it easier. Sure you could do it with a knife, but it's a lot less dangerous. If you want to pull this "reductio ad absurdum" then a felon could kill with a knife so since we don't take his kitchen knives away it's pointless. It's not, really it isn't.
Of course there's big problems to some people having guns and some not, but I don't see how you could get away from that. Where would you put the bar on that? Minors? Mentally challenged? Demented elderly? I think only a few Texas die hards really believe absolutely everyone should be allowed to carry a gun. I support gun restrictions the same way I support dangerous drugs being restricted to healthcare personnel, explosives to people working in demolitions and so on, if you have a legitimate need for hunting or sports that's fine. On the streets I'd rather have knives and the cops cracking down hard on gun crime. It seems to be working, your average criminal doesn't carry.
To get at least slightly back on topic with digital it's rather black and white, all or nothing, zero or one. And that's why I feel many analogies fail to make the transition, like in the debate about the iPhone cryptography. If it were a safe, they'd drill it but you can't drill your way through AES256. But this particular case is silly, it's essentially torrents in your browser. If they haven't been able to ban torrent clients, surely there's nothing wrong with this application either. It's just annoyingly convenient for copyright holders, but principally it's no different.
The clock is ticking on spinning drives. HDD are still viable, but only for large backups. However, if all you look at is price, then you get what you pay for.
Sure. But apart from the personal content that you should have backed up in multiple+offsite copies for safekeeping and usually just consumes a little bit, for most people the HDD is a n'th level cache of the Internet. For many people that's even true of the SSD content, if you lose your Steam games folder or Spotify offline playlists well you can just download it again. And when it comes to digital media quantity is king, it's a lot easier to have three copies with 95% reliability than one with 99,99% because you could always get a lemon.
If we knew what they were trying to communicate, we'd probably find they have different languages too. Same as with people, without long distance travel/communication there's no reason to believe they'd share a language. We've seen this both on the macro scale through colonization wiping out many local languages and on the micro scale through building bridges to islands, linguists found that dialects became much less distinct. And with mass media and the Internet I'm sure we're converging even stronger now. Wolves have none of that so I'm sure a US wolf wouldn't understand much of what a EU wolf was howling, but I'm sure they'd quickly work out the basics.
People with bit more specialized needs (hardcore gaming, media production, virtual machines, etc.) can probably soon acquire 1 TB SSD for a price like $200.
And you can get an 8TB Seagate Archive HDD for $223 at newegg today, if you need/want to store lots of data it's still cheaper by far. The real issue from the manufacturer's side is that nobody will pay a premium for anything. You get a SSD for all things performance and the cheapest, slowest HDD because for streaming huge media files you just have to be fast enough, they're mostly accessed linearly and even a video server for a big family only serves a handful of video streams at once. And a lot of people are streaming more or doing download & delete, to be honest I hardly ever get around to watching most things again. Every so often I just go cleaning up a few TB of stuff that was just collecting dust.
You think say the Linux kernel isn't useful? They've been on a three month cycle for ages, roughly one month merge window and two months of release candidates. Basically what you want is for everybody to time box what they can do before the next release, but you can't know if you don't know how long that'll be. Maybe if it's two months you'll do some quick enhancements and fixes but if it's six you do a deeper restructuring. If 90% of your developers have finished according to plan and 10% is threatening to hold up the release then the great majority won't be able to effectively use a small extension. It's better to just scrub the parts that aren't ready and say we're releasing now, sorry try again next merge window. Of course assuming that you have a large enough project that there'll be some release-worthy items every cycle and that people don't just submit shit for release no matter what state it's in. There's a lot less drama about who is important and can rush patches and delay releases if the answer is no, you can't. Only bugfixes during RC, if your code breaks shit or needs major rework you're bumped to the next version. If you don't have a person with balls managing that your releases will suck, but if you can't stand up to the developers it'll probably suck on a rolling basis too.
Pretty much. In retrospect, I thought Bitcoin was going to be one of those geek idea that just didn't pass beyond geek circles. I was considering getting in on it when it was like $1/BTC and like.. nah... not going to happen. In retrospect it's prety obvious but hey.. it's like the dotcom boom, even if you recognized it as a bubble you could make a lot of money riding it and cashing out at the right time. Bitcoin worked because it was first and everybody was rooting for some crypocurrency to be taken seriously. All the rest seem like "get rich quick" schemes where you keep some to yourself and try to make it valuable. I still use BTC but I have the feeling it has no "natural" level, it could be worth $10 or $100 or $1000 in a while. That doesn't stop it from being used in transactions, but as an investment it's pretty fucked up.
For having so many small experiments and projects to maintain, a human presence is really not that much more effort compared to building robotic versions of each experiment. The human is also far more adaptable, able to repair and rebuild systems as needed.
Well, except that humans are pretty much stuck at the landing site. Mars has half the circumference of earth or about 20000 km, you can get the equivalent of the lunar rover and cover maybe 20 km before you have to turn back. Sure, the rovers are a snooze feast but we got several of them in different places. For the same reason it's not practical to repair them or return samples to base either, even if we had a man on Mars.