Just because it's produced by robots doesn't mean it'll be free, even if you eliminated the farmer you'd still need the land, the seeds, the fertilizer, planting machines, harvesting machines, gas to operate the machinery and so on. Fully automating it won't make it into a horn of plenty, it'll still cost something but you'll be out of a job and don't have anything to pay with. Maybe you think it'll be some kind of socialist paradise, but experience indicates that the "useless" people who produce nothing will have a bloody hard time taxing the "useful" people that still do the jobs that need doing.
Those who work can strike, they can emigrate, they can sell their services dearly while the people trying to give themselves free services might find that they run short on people who'll actually deliver on those promises. It's not unheard of for politicians to conjure up great plans without actually backing it up with funding, voting for free services could end up equally empty. What do you do when the promise of free food falters because farm machinery breaks down and nobody with the necessary skills wants to be a farm machine tech? Pay them handsomely, like in capitalism? Forced labor, like the communists? People won't do the remaining jobs for fun and the people who must work aren't going to let those who don't get off that easy.
Robotics will lead to joblessness and unemployment beyond anything the world has seen before. Get used to it, and figure out how to deal with it now, instead of waiting until it becomes a crisis.
Well currently many parts of the world is experiencing an aging population with far more retirees and non-working to working people, so I think for the next 20-30 years or they'll be happy for every advance robotics can give them. Healthcare and care for the elderly is currently very high on people time and very low on robotics, despite all the fancy equipment a hospital or nursing home doesn't run without a small army of doctors and nurses. If we can have automatic cars to transport goods and people it'd free up tons of people to staff healthcare. And no, that they're not brain surgeons is fine. The main complaint is that there is not enough time to help patients in their everyday lives.
Let's face it, robots are great when it comes to machine tooled things of exact shapes and sizes, but suck massively at dealing with squishy things and I expect it will be a very, very long time until I stick my head in a machine to get a robotic haircut. Despite a few proof of concepts none of the big burger chains actually use robots to make a hamburger and I think a lot of it is quality control, a human would quickly see and smell that there's something wrong with that lettuce while a robot might be totally unaware. I've worked quite a bit with moving manual processes to computer systems and it always ends up much more rigid, people have a tendancy to work it out on the fly where a robot is stumped or oblivious.
My only quibble with Heller is that fundamentally only individuals can have rights; governments, or any collectivist formulation, have only have persuasive or coersive power.
How about the right to due process, should the government have the right to arbitrarily hand out fines or seize assets and property just because they belong to an organization or company? I think most of these rights need to be transitive, you're not getting due process until the organizations you are member of or corporations you're a shareholder of also get due process. But then again I find the civil forfeiture laws wildly unconstitutional, how can you have "The right of the people to be secure in their (...) effects against unreasonable (...) seizures" when the government can grab them on the slimmest of excuses and demand you counterprove wild speculation? So yeah we could start by restoring indiviuals' rights.
Because in the US they want to be the middle man for others, they want to use HBO original series as the hook to get people subscribing to HBO so they can sell network time. In the nordic countries we have HBO Nordic which is a pure Internet solution similar to HBO Go, funny thing is that I subscribe but I still use my one-stop torrent shop to watch those shows as well.
He's a general and his job is to win a military victory, they're generally in the "All's fair in love and war" corner. Of course the US is not actually in a war, but generals are always preparing for one or he's taken the "War on Terror" to mean that the US is always at war against their enemies. He's thinking like on the battle field, if he thinks the enemy is hiding in a building he doesn't ask for a warrant he assaults it because good intent is enough. If there was collateral damage, well it was for the greater good and it was the enemy's fault that the situation started in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if he'd like to do away with large parts of the Bill of Rights.
Stop calling Scientology a church. They are not. They are a tax evading criminal company selling a bogus cult for big money. Nothing else.
The wealth and power of the Church used to rival kings, they built huge churches and cathedrals littered with decorations and ornamentations using exotic materials and fine craftsmanship while normal people lived in simple wooden huts. They used to take 10% of your income in tithe and paid none to the king, being in the Church's disfavor was second only to being an outlaw. Scientology is but a bleak shadow of what the Church used to be 500-1000 years ago. The only difference is that a small religion is a cult and a big cult is a religion.
And does everyone know that in 2014, the health plan tax kicks in? I don't mean the "Cadillac plan" tax, or the tax if you don't have insurance. I mean the 2% tax on every health plan. Yes, in order to make health insurance more "affordable," they are taxing health insurance! Words fail.
Well, I'm assuming the goal is to use that money to provide health plans to those who can't afford them, obviously if more people get coverage than before and the costs per person don't go down the total will go up. Here in Norway it's a tax for employers when they pay me income, essentially for every 100 NOK I get they must pay 7.80 NOK to the government. If there's a street bum with no income, get still gets the same healthcare as me and obviously that's coming out of the pockets of everyone else. If we took away the tax and let everyone get their own insurance I'd be paying for just me, right? And the bum would probably die, but let's leave morality out it for a second.
By making sure everyone is in good health and vaccinated, we reduce the spread of disease and infection. If some of the uncovered people could get back into taxable work they could become an asset or at least less of a tax burden. Desperate people who need money for surgery can lead to crime and exploitation. And most of all, we don't throw hot potatoes around in the system trying to deny or revoke their coverage. The overhead is far less. I'm also fairly confident I will get an appropriate treatment based on medical needs, of course our doctors and nurses are just as human as anyone else but at least I'm not fighting a giant insurance company who want my treatment to be cheap as possible without getting sued and lose.
If you want to take non-tech mishaps then Obamacare is taking on all the challenges and costs of socialized medicine while providing little to none of the benefits other countries have. The Democrats sacrificed the soul of the system, while the Republicans have poisoned the apple so it's set up to fail. In a few years it'll be a disaster and everyone in the US will agree socialized medicine can't work, despite all the pointing to what happens in pinko commie land.
I'm pretty sure religious people claim God exists whether I believe in him or not, so the argument is rather circular. I think a better argument for science is that wanting doesn't make it true.
You don't want to die? Oh, we got immortal souls. The world is unfair? Well we've got a heavenly court and heaven/purgatory/hell.
On the other hand if I think "carrots cause cancer" it's not true just because I want to believe it's true, I must gather actual evidence that people who eat more carrots have more cancer and I have to find some form of causality or there could be an underlying reason that causes people to both eat carrots and get cancer. Of course it's not absolute proof of anything, but it's a whole lot easier to accept answers that we don't like rather than answers that seem very convenient for ourselves.
They plan to get this through sponsorship deals. They're going to broadcast the entire thing on TV. Which makes sense, the olympics receives 6 billion dollars for 1 billion viewers. The moonlanding in 1969 had 500 million viewers. The population of the earth was only 3,5 billion back then and people weren't as well connected as they are now. So imagine how many viewers a colony on Mars would get?
Are you kidding me? The Olympics is a superstar bonanza where every country and region has their local heroes in intense and exciting competitions keeping viewers glued to the chair for hours on end for weeks. The Mars landing is really one critical touchdown and a lot of padding. The actual "travelling in a tin can through space" and "living in a tin can on Mars" is going to be horribly boring everyday life. You could see what the people on ISS are doing most of the time on Nasa TV too, but it gets old very quick. And the Olympics are once every four years, the Apollo program totally burned out the public interest in less than two weeks of moon time over 2.5 years during July 1969 to December 1972.
Everybody remembers Neil Armstrong. Far fewer remember the guy who stepped out behind him, Buzz Aldrin. The rest only space history buffs remember, really. Nobody remembers the third guy to climb Mount Everest or reach the South Pole. If it's already been done not only once but repeated several times, it's of little public interest no matter how extreme it still is for to the invidivual to go to Mars. When the first man sets foot on Mars the whole world will be watching but it's going to be a very short and unique peak, once it's past the public will quickly lose interest in their everyday life and anybody that follows.
Put a hardware driver author in front of a documentation pack and a compiler, and tell him to write a driver, and he'll tell you to fuck off.
Put a hardware driver author in front of many working examples of device, with debug-level access, with example source (that he can't just copy due to licensing), errata, a direct line to cooperative hardware engineers AND this documentation and he'll start.
So in short you're saying the open source community is a bunch of liars and nVidia is right when they say "Well if we gave you X you'd ask for Y and Z until we're really doing all the job anyway, so why give you the little finger when you'll chew off our arm? If you're going to leave it all to us anyway, use the binary." For sure, there are hardware bugs and maybe undocumented ones too because the closed source driver never tripped it but this is like saying you can't program an x86 processor because Intel might decide that 2+2 = 3.99999999999978. You're just looking for an excuse to throw in the towel. For example you could start by writing the code to take Mesa from OpenGL 3.1 to OpenGL 4.4, it's all work and no hardware documentation required. There's tons of work that could be done, and the same is true for drivers as well. The documentation is there, the manpower is not. Stop pretending it's Intel, nVidia and AMD's fault that the open source drivers are lagging far behind the blobs.
Ignoring mining, with Bitcoin there is no function within the current universe of things we value. The only cue I have is what others have previously valued it at, and what it is currently valued. I think that's very interesting, especially when you consider the kind of objects that humans have used as currency throughout history (gold, metals, durable objects like shells, etc.)
I don't see what's so novel about that, cash doesn't serve a function either. You might say it's to pay taxes but kings and lords knew how to take payment in real world goods. It's just a value token, there's no intrinsic value to small bits of paper in a post-collapse economy. If the price of something I like doubles, did it get more expensive or did my money become less worth? Potayto, potahto. Your money is only worth what it buys you.
When you want to bash Bitcoin by saying it has no intrinsic value, ask yourself this: "what other system of payment/transfers allows someone to move $10,000,000 worth of value, to or from anywhere in the world, 24/7, nearly instantaneously, without fees, can't be debased or printed, irreverible, and without anyone being able to freeze or seize it (without direct access to your wallet)?" Regardless of its downsides, that's pretty f***ing powerful. There's a reason it's "could be a big deal."
Except that value is entirely independent of the value of bitcoins themselves. It doesn't matter if I need to buy 1 BTC @ $10M or 1 billion BTC @ $0.01 and if you argue there's not actually 1 billion BTC, we could do it $100 at the time. It's a money scheme where it pays to get in early, which usually means it's bloody stupid to get in late. It's just not clear when "late" is just yet.
A book written in Greek and a book written in English using a cipher are both gibberish to me, but understanding one depends on a parser and the other on a decryption key. In short the understanding of "effective technological measure" seem to be that the protocol is trying to use a secret (CSS key, AACS key, HDMI key etc.) to protect the content. So if you took any file format and wrapped it in AES with a static key with no memory protection whatsoever then decrypting it in any other program would be a DMCA violation, geeks all get caught up in "effective" but in context it just means a measure intended to have that effect specifically to exclude all other attempts at interpreting a protocol as "cracking" it.
Used to be you used to have to upgrade every 2 years. Now you really have to upgrade every 5 or 7 years. Once every 10 years sounds pretty good to me. (...) As a consumer, I like it because I no longer have to shell out hundreds of dollars every other year to keep my computers usable.
Really, you like products that are just marginally better than before? You wouldn't like it if next year there was a car that could get you to work at twice the speed and half the price? I love that in 2013 I can buy a much better processor for the same amount of (inflation-adjusted) dollars than I could in 2003 or in 1993 and ideally I'd like to say the same about 2023 as well. You really think you'd be better off with 1993-era level of technology and two rebuys because they wore out?
With real income stagnating, you should at least hope that you get more for your dollar in ways that can't be easily compared. "Communication expenses" might be measured in dollars but it doesn't mean an old landline (when that was the only thing) and a smart phone are the same thing. What you get with computers today couldn't be had for any price 20 years ago, but you can now through the progress of technology. Take that away and your life would be very similar to that of your grandparents.
Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots.
Persistence is good if it gets you anywhere, but if you're just obsessing over things you can't do, can't change, can't make work, can't achieve then give up and move on. Particularly I hate people who can't ever accept that the team, the project or someone in authority has made a decision they disagree with and continue to reopen the issue, dredge up old discussions and undermine the decision. I've had one extreme case where a person on the project team was trash talking it to the rest of the company during the official presentation, essentially saying this is what we're delivering and it's crap and not what I wanted or how I'd design it.
My impression is that overall people have too much persistence and can't stop flogging the dead horse, if things are that bad or that hopeless stop trying to make it work and get out. If your boss is a total ass hat, find another job don't try to fix it. If your girlfriend is a total fruitcake don't try to reason with crazy. If nobody wants to buy what you're selling, you're probably wrong about what they wanted in the first place. Move on, try again. Except the exceptions of course, where banging your head on the same brick wall many enough times will lead to it cracking. But I wouldn't waste my head on that.
One of my senators, Cornyn, sponsored PIPA. (...) Checking on this, it seems he even tried to rewrite history, suggesting that he opposed PIPA all along.
Sadly you get very little credit for changing your mind as a politician, either you're labeled a flip-flop who can't make up their mind, a populist who'll shift with every breeze in the popular opinion or at worst a turncoat who'll back a proposal until it gets tough and then change sides. At best you backed down because off the potential fallout, not because the initial information you based your position on was misleading or you gained any greater insight in the issue and realized your previous position was wrong. Voters tend to vote for people who pretend they are right, always have been right and continue to be right even if defeated. Having a mindset carved in stone is often mistaken for being principled.
ADSL gradually improved through the 00s first with the providers getting more confident and taking the artificial limits off and then by the providers moving to ADSL2. However while speeds improved so did the gap between the haves and the have nots.
Trust me, it only gets worse not between fiber customers but between the fiber and not-fiber customers. Here in Norway fiber penetration is rather strong (23%) but it's all in the areas that used to have good ADSL2/VDSL/Cable. Those stuck on 1 Mbps ADSL are still stuck on 1 Mbps ADSL.
2: having all that infrastructure spread out like that makes it very difficult to do incremental upgrades. When ADSL was introduced they could start by putting one DSLAM in a phone exchange and patching the subscribers to it, when one DSLAM filled up they could add another. It didn't matter that only a few percent of customers were taking DSL intitially because the phone exchange was large.
Meh, considering how many people I heard who couldn't get DSL because the central was full I really don't think that's accurate.
There's no doubt that the future is FTTH, here in Norway call volume on land lines is down 81% since the top in 2001, last year one in eleven cancelled their subscription and less than half the households even have a land line anymore. The people in the outskirts probably want it to continue, but when all central areas are abandoning it then it won't be enough. I have fiber + cell phone, my parents have cable + cell phone, so do pretty much all my friends and relatives and a few older ones just cell phones. Without the phone traffic the copper network will die, it's definitively the worst current technology to deliver broadband on.
Still, there are many remote houses where they only put down copper because it's a government requirement to deliver phone service, it was never profitable before and it's never going to be profitable to lay fiber or anything else. I hear they plan on scavenging parts from the main shut-down to run these legacy systems for a long time, so they aren't going to get any upgrades. Copper/fiber is going to be the new digital divide in the years to come.
Regarding your last point: South Africa of today is one of the most dangerous and violent places on earth; Mandela did next to nothing to address black on white or even black-on-black violence. There was a huge white-flight out of SA during the 90s. Perhaps you think this is a positive outcome. I don't.
What did you expect? I suspect a lot of "white flight" from certain areas of the US post-1865, it's not easy to have a man you used to have in shackles and call your property now be a free man and your equal - though I doubt most ex-slave owners ever saw it that way. We here in Norway did some very unkind things to children of Nazi soldiers and their mothers (there were 400.000 soldiers = males at the capitulation occupying a country of 3.000.000 and they'd been there for 5 years, contraception was generally not available and the Nazis had their Lebensborn program - shit happens), you don't get a toss-up like that without revenge.
Like you say, a lot of that is black-on-black violence which is more about SA being in the same troubles as many other countries in Africa, they're 15th on the global list of murder rates but only 6th in Africa. The entire continent is so screwed up in more ways than you can count, there are still countries there with <35% literacy rates while South Africa is actually the most literate country in all of Africa, they have the highest GDP south of Sahara and so on. We're all affected by our neighbors and really they got nobody to look up to in a 5000 km radius.
Brakes don't suddenly go from good to bad. They have a very graduate wear and it's easy to detect that they should be replaced in the annual checkup.
The brake pads themselves, generally no. But you can have catastrophic failure in the brake fluid tubes and with no pressure, next to no breaking. Still overall mechanical failure is the reason for very few accidents compared to human error.
6 - We're using subcontractors that are not part of the "intelligence community"
Or as a variation: 11. We're collecting data on everybody except in the US, which we swap with the UK for data they can't collect. This close cooperation with foreign agencies is of course not counted. The only thing you can be sure of from the NSA leaks is that even if your own country doesn't spy on you, all other countries sure do with USA at the head of the class.
India which is much poorer: Win 7 & 8: 58% WinXP: 30%
China: Win 7 & 8: 43% WinXP: 50%
Africa, South America, everywhere else that is poor XP is in massive decline. This is basically China being the odd man out, they're the only ones who want to stick to XP. Now I'm guessing most of those copies aren't legitimate, but I don't see why that should be any different in China than the rest of the world. It's just that XP is the de facto standard I guess.
So what was the outlet there for? If it's on a public building but not meant for public use, it should have been secured, either by locking it or having it shut off inside the building. Actually, the drinking fountain comment is a good point. Obviously, a drinking fountain is there for public use. But what if it's just a faucet? Is getting a drink from a drinking fountain okay, but not a faucet? Is charging a phone okay, but not a car? Where is the line here?
Exactly where the company chooses to draw it, in most production companies taking one chocolate off the production line and with you home is a firing offense even if it's worth five cents. Things that are provided for work (materials, tools, services, products, whatever) are there to let everyone do their job, any other incidental use you might want it for is up to their acceptable use policy. Would a network manager accept that people connected their own devices to the internal networks to siphon off a few bytes of the Internet connection to check their mail? I very much doubt that unless you work in a BYOD workplace or have guest networks set up specifically for that purpose.
Most employers tend to take a reasonable approach on marginal costs (browsing the Internet, private call on work phone, printing two pages or making five photocopies, charge your cell phone) because being an ass works both ways but strictly speaking they could put me in a secure compartmentalized zone and deny me bringing almost anything in and out except myself and the clothes on my back. Of course then I'd say I'm working for paranoid nuts and not Top Secret military systems and find myself a sane employer, but it'd be totally legal. But I have worked on systems that simply didn't have Internet access, go to special terminals if you need it.
So how far could you go in the absence of any written policy, oral approval, signs or any other obvious indications? Well there's implied permission, if they offered parking spaces and those parking spaces had EV chargers on them (like one per space) I'd take permission to park to also imply permission to use the chargers. But if there just happens to be a socket in the parking lot so anyone working there could run a power tool, I'd say you don't have that. It could be things that are so commonplace that you wouldn't ask, like using the bathroom if you already have legitimate business in the building. Charging your car isn't that though.
I think they're technically correct, though I'm a repeat offender of "accidental theft of ballpoint pen" and if the law was applied to the fullest I'd have way more than three strikes. I think it's mostly because siphoning off gas to power your car is generally recognized as a crime, siphoning off electricity to do the same sounds equivalent. It doesn't sound like something you could do without at least some form of permission. It's all fairly relative though, if EVs become common it might be commonly understood that sockets are there for charging them and you'd need to explicitly deny it. But that's ten, twenty years from now and not today.
The guy who pulled the trigger is still fully responsible for where that bullet went flying. Being part of a DDoS is more like being part of a riot, even if you catch one rioter you don't usually don't make that one person pay for all the damage the mob did. But then again it's the same country that'll slap one person with million dollar fines for sharing a couple CDs online because piracy is such a big problem. If they applied the same logic to speeding, you'd probably go in the electric chair if you get caught.
Did you think the same thing about Intel after the Pentium4 too?
This is starting to get ancient history but as I remember it Intel was pushing the PIII hard right up until the launch of PIV, they were never in the "please hold out a little longer, please don't buy an AMD our PIV is going to be twice as fast and give free blowjobs" mode. Of course they did keep pushing it after everyone knew it was a dud, after all that's what they had to sell much like AMD now. It's pre-launch when all you get are "leaks" that are really plants, PR statements and astroturf/fanboy hype but no real benchmarks to compare and the hype goes over the top that it backfires, Bulldozer was hailed as AMD's savior long before it hit the stores. When you build up that kind of hype and don't deliver the pendulum swings the other way, it's not just poor it's outright horrible compared to what you expected.
Wow, who do you work for? Lockheed Martin? Boeing? The US has plenty contractors on hand for cost-plus contracts. And if all else fails I'm sure ESA would give you Ariane rockets for a price. And worst case if everyone had collective amnesia you should be able to pull off an Apollo program much faster and cheaper today than in the 60s. And when it really comes down to it the real "space" war is still 99% ICBMs, which I doubt the military will forget how to make. The ISS isn't exactly critical defense infrastructure.
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Just because it's produced by robots doesn't mean it'll be free, even if you eliminated the farmer you'd still need the land, the seeds, the fertilizer, planting machines, harvesting machines, gas to operate the machinery and so on. Fully automating it won't make it into a horn of plenty, it'll still cost something but you'll be out of a job and don't have anything to pay with. Maybe you think it'll be some kind of socialist paradise, but experience indicates that the "useless" people who produce nothing will have a bloody hard time taxing the "useful" people that still do the jobs that need doing.
Those who work can strike, they can emigrate, they can sell their services dearly while the people trying to give themselves free services might find that they run short on people who'll actually deliver on those promises. It's not unheard of for politicians to conjure up great plans without actually backing it up with funding, voting for free services could end up equally empty. What do you do when the promise of free food falters because farm machinery breaks down and nobody with the necessary skills wants to be a farm machine tech? Pay them handsomely, like in capitalism? Forced labor, like the communists? People won't do the remaining jobs for fun and the people who must work aren't going to let those who don't get off that easy.
Robotics will lead to joblessness and unemployment beyond anything the world has seen before. Get used to it, and figure out how to deal with it now, instead of waiting until it becomes a crisis.
Well currently many parts of the world is experiencing an aging population with far more retirees and non-working to working people, so I think for the next 20-30 years or they'll be happy for every advance robotics can give them. Healthcare and care for the elderly is currently very high on people time and very low on robotics, despite all the fancy equipment a hospital or nursing home doesn't run without a small army of doctors and nurses. If we can have automatic cars to transport goods and people it'd free up tons of people to staff healthcare. And no, that they're not brain surgeons is fine. The main complaint is that there is not enough time to help patients in their everyday lives.
Let's face it, robots are great when it comes to machine tooled things of exact shapes and sizes, but suck massively at dealing with squishy things and I expect it will be a very, very long time until I stick my head in a machine to get a robotic haircut. Despite a few proof of concepts none of the big burger chains actually use robots to make a hamburger and I think a lot of it is quality control, a human would quickly see and smell that there's something wrong with that lettuce while a robot might be totally unaware. I've worked quite a bit with moving manual processes to computer systems and it always ends up much more rigid, people have a tendancy to work it out on the fly where a robot is stumped or oblivious.
My only quibble with Heller is that fundamentally only individuals can have rights; governments, or any collectivist formulation, have only have persuasive or coersive power.
How about the right to due process, should the government have the right to arbitrarily hand out fines or seize assets and property just because they belong to an organization or company? I think most of these rights need to be transitive, you're not getting due process until the organizations you are member of or corporations you're a shareholder of also get due process. But then again I find the civil forfeiture laws wildly unconstitutional, how can you have "The right of the people to be secure in their (...) effects against unreasonable (...) seizures" when the government can grab them on the slimmest of excuses and demand you counterprove wild speculation? So yeah we could start by restoring indiviuals' rights.
Because in the US they want to be the middle man for others, they want to use HBO original series as the hook to get people subscribing to HBO so they can sell network time. In the nordic countries we have HBO Nordic which is a pure Internet solution similar to HBO Go, funny thing is that I subscribe but I still use my one-stop torrent shop to watch those shows as well.
He's a general and his job is to win a military victory, they're generally in the "All's fair in love and war" corner. Of course the US is not actually in a war, but generals are always preparing for one or he's taken the "War on Terror" to mean that the US is always at war against their enemies. He's thinking like on the battle field, if he thinks the enemy is hiding in a building he doesn't ask for a warrant he assaults it because good intent is enough. If there was collateral damage, well it was for the greater good and it was the enemy's fault that the situation started in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if he'd like to do away with large parts of the Bill of Rights.
Stop calling Scientology a church. They are not. They are a tax evading criminal company selling a bogus cult for big money. Nothing else.
The wealth and power of the Church used to rival kings, they built huge churches and cathedrals littered with decorations and ornamentations using exotic materials and fine craftsmanship while normal people lived in simple wooden huts. They used to take 10% of your income in tithe and paid none to the king, being in the Church's disfavor was second only to being an outlaw. Scientology is but a bleak shadow of what the Church used to be 500-1000 years ago. The only difference is that a small religion is a cult and a big cult is a religion.
And does everyone know that in 2014, the health plan tax kicks in? I don't mean the "Cadillac plan" tax, or the tax if you don't have insurance. I mean the 2% tax on every health plan. Yes, in order to make health insurance more "affordable," they are taxing health insurance! Words fail.
Well, I'm assuming the goal is to use that money to provide health plans to those who can't afford them, obviously if more people get coverage than before and the costs per person don't go down the total will go up. Here in Norway it's a tax for employers when they pay me income, essentially for every 100 NOK I get they must pay 7.80 NOK to the government. If there's a street bum with no income, get still gets the same healthcare as me and obviously that's coming out of the pockets of everyone else. If we took away the tax and let everyone get their own insurance I'd be paying for just me, right? And the bum would probably die, but let's leave morality out it for a second.
By making sure everyone is in good health and vaccinated, we reduce the spread of disease and infection. If some of the uncovered people could get back into taxable work they could become an asset or at least less of a tax burden. Desperate people who need money for surgery can lead to crime and exploitation. And most of all, we don't throw hot potatoes around in the system trying to deny or revoke their coverage. The overhead is far less. I'm also fairly confident I will get an appropriate treatment based on medical needs, of course our doctors and nurses are just as human as anyone else but at least I'm not fighting a giant insurance company who want my treatment to be cheap as possible without getting sued and lose.
If you want to take non-tech mishaps then Obamacare is taking on all the challenges and costs of socialized medicine while providing little to none of the benefits other countries have. The Democrats sacrificed the soul of the system, while the Republicans have poisoned the apple so it's set up to fail. In a few years it'll be a disaster and everyone in the US will agree socialized medicine can't work, despite all the pointing to what happens in pinko commie land.
I'm pretty sure religious people claim God exists whether I believe in him or not, so the argument is rather circular. I think a better argument for science is that wanting doesn't make it true.
You don't want to die? Oh, we got immortal souls.
The world is unfair? Well we've got a heavenly court and heaven/purgatory/hell.
On the other hand if I think "carrots cause cancer" it's not true just because I want to believe it's true, I must gather actual evidence that people who eat more carrots have more cancer and I have to find some form of causality or there could be an underlying reason that causes people to both eat carrots and get cancer. Of course it's not absolute proof of anything, but it's a whole lot easier to accept answers that we don't like rather than answers that seem very convenient for ourselves.
They plan to get this through sponsorship deals. They're going to broadcast the entire thing on TV. Which makes sense, the olympics receives 6 billion dollars for 1 billion viewers. The moonlanding in 1969 had 500 million viewers. The population of the earth was only 3,5 billion back then and people weren't as well connected as they are now. So imagine how many viewers a colony on Mars would get?
Are you kidding me? The Olympics is a superstar bonanza where every country and region has their local heroes in intense and exciting competitions keeping viewers glued to the chair for hours on end for weeks. The Mars landing is really one critical touchdown and a lot of padding. The actual "travelling in a tin can through space" and "living in a tin can on Mars" is going to be horribly boring everyday life. You could see what the people on ISS are doing most of the time on Nasa TV too, but it gets old very quick. And the Olympics are once every four years, the Apollo program totally burned out the public interest in less than two weeks of moon time over 2.5 years during July 1969 to December 1972.
Everybody remembers Neil Armstrong. Far fewer remember the guy who stepped out behind him, Buzz Aldrin. The rest only space history buffs remember, really. Nobody remembers the third guy to climb Mount Everest or reach the South Pole. If it's already been done not only once but repeated several times, it's of little public interest no matter how extreme it still is for to the invidivual to go to Mars. When the first man sets foot on Mars the whole world will be watching but it's going to be a very short and unique peak, once it's past the public will quickly lose interest in their everyday life and anybody that follows.
Put a hardware driver author in front of a documentation pack and a compiler, and tell him to write a driver, and he'll tell you to fuck off.
Put a hardware driver author in front of many working examples of device, with debug-level access, with example source (that he can't just copy due to licensing), errata, a direct line to cooperative hardware engineers AND this documentation and he'll start.
So in short you're saying the open source community is a bunch of liars and nVidia is right when they say "Well if we gave you X you'd ask for Y and Z until we're really doing all the job anyway, so why give you the little finger when you'll chew off our arm? If you're going to leave it all to us anyway, use the binary." For sure, there are hardware bugs and maybe undocumented ones too because the closed source driver never tripped it but this is like saying you can't program an x86 processor because Intel might decide that 2+2 = 3.99999999999978. You're just looking for an excuse to throw in the towel. For example you could start by writing the code to take Mesa from OpenGL 3.1 to OpenGL 4.4, it's all work and no hardware documentation required. There's tons of work that could be done, and the same is true for drivers as well. The documentation is there, the manpower is not. Stop pretending it's Intel, nVidia and AMD's fault that the open source drivers are lagging far behind the blobs.
Ignoring mining, with Bitcoin there is no function within the current universe of things we value. The only cue I have is what others have previously valued it at, and what it is currently valued. I think that's very interesting, especially when you consider the kind of objects that humans have used as currency throughout history (gold, metals, durable objects like shells, etc.)
I don't see what's so novel about that, cash doesn't serve a function either. You might say it's to pay taxes but kings and lords knew how to take payment in real world goods. It's just a value token, there's no intrinsic value to small bits of paper in a post-collapse economy. If the price of something I like doubles, did it get more expensive or did my money become less worth? Potayto, potahto. Your money is only worth what it buys you.
When you want to bash Bitcoin by saying it has no intrinsic value, ask yourself this: "what other system of payment/transfers allows someone to move $10,000,000 worth of value, to or from anywhere in the world, 24/7, nearly instantaneously, without fees, can't be debased or printed, irreverible, and without anyone being able to freeze or seize it (without direct access to your wallet)?" Regardless of its downsides, that's pretty f***ing powerful. There's a reason it's "could be a big deal."
Except that value is entirely independent of the value of bitcoins themselves. It doesn't matter if I need to buy 1 BTC @ $10M or 1 billion BTC @ $0.01 and if you argue there's not actually 1 billion BTC, we could do it $100 at the time. It's a money scheme where it pays to get in early, which usually means it's bloody stupid to get in late. It's just not clear when "late" is just yet.
A book written in Greek and a book written in English using a cipher are both gibberish to me, but understanding one depends on a parser and the other on a decryption key. In short the understanding of "effective technological measure" seem to be that the protocol is trying to use a secret (CSS key, AACS key, HDMI key etc.) to protect the content. So if you took any file format and wrapped it in AES with a static key with no memory protection whatsoever then decrypting it in any other program would be a DMCA violation, geeks all get caught up in "effective" but in context it just means a measure intended to have that effect specifically to exclude all other attempts at interpreting a protocol as "cracking" it.
Used to be you used to have to upgrade every 2 years. Now you really have to upgrade every 5 or 7 years. Once every 10 years sounds pretty good to me. (...) As a consumer, I like it because I no longer have to shell out hundreds of dollars every other year to keep my computers usable.
Really, you like products that are just marginally better than before? You wouldn't like it if next year there was a car that could get you to work at twice the speed and half the price? I love that in 2013 I can buy a much better processor for the same amount of (inflation-adjusted) dollars than I could in 2003 or in 1993 and ideally I'd like to say the same about 2023 as well. You really think you'd be better off with 1993-era level of technology and two rebuys because they wore out?
With real income stagnating, you should at least hope that you get more for your dollar in ways that can't be easily compared. "Communication expenses" might be measured in dollars but it doesn't mean an old landline (when that was the only thing) and a smart phone are the same thing. What you get with computers today couldn't be had for any price 20 years ago, but you can now through the progress of technology. Take that away and your life would be very similar to that of your grandparents.
With that in mind, is it a good idea to get people to continue to engage in futile endeavors? Who says quitting is always a bad thing.
I like this one:
Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots.
Persistence is good if it gets you anywhere, but if you're just obsessing over things you can't do, can't change, can't make work, can't achieve then give up and move on. Particularly I hate people who can't ever accept that the team, the project or someone in authority has made a decision they disagree with and continue to reopen the issue, dredge up old discussions and undermine the decision. I've had one extreme case where a person on the project team was trash talking it to the rest of the company during the official presentation, essentially saying this is what we're delivering and it's crap and not what I wanted or how I'd design it.
My impression is that overall people have too much persistence and can't stop flogging the dead horse, if things are that bad or that hopeless stop trying to make it work and get out. If your boss is a total ass hat, find another job don't try to fix it. If your girlfriend is a total fruitcake don't try to reason with crazy. If nobody wants to buy what you're selling, you're probably wrong about what they wanted in the first place. Move on, try again. Except the exceptions of course, where banging your head on the same brick wall many enough times will lead to it cracking. But I wouldn't waste my head on that.
One of my senators, Cornyn, sponsored PIPA. (...) Checking on this, it seems he even tried to rewrite history, suggesting that he opposed PIPA all along.
Sadly you get very little credit for changing your mind as a politician, either you're labeled a flip-flop who can't make up their mind, a populist who'll shift with every breeze in the popular opinion or at worst a turncoat who'll back a proposal until it gets tough and then change sides. At best you backed down because off the potential fallout, not because the initial information you based your position on was misleading or you gained any greater insight in the issue and realized your previous position was wrong. Voters tend to vote for people who pretend they are right, always have been right and continue to be right even if defeated. Having a mindset carved in stone is often mistaken for being principled.
ADSL gradually improved through the 00s first with the providers getting more confident and taking the artificial limits off and then by the providers moving to ADSL2. However while speeds improved so did the gap between the haves and the have nots.
Trust me, it only gets worse not between fiber customers but between the fiber and not-fiber customers. Here in Norway fiber penetration is rather strong (23%) but it's all in the areas that used to have good ADSL2/VDSL/Cable. Those stuck on 1 Mbps ADSL are still stuck on 1 Mbps ADSL.
2: having all that infrastructure spread out like that makes it very difficult to do incremental upgrades. When ADSL was introduced they could start by putting one DSLAM in a phone exchange and patching the subscribers to it, when one DSLAM filled up they could add another. It didn't matter that only a few percent of customers were taking DSL intitially because the phone exchange was large.
Meh, considering how many people I heard who couldn't get DSL because the central was full I really don't think that's accurate.
There's no doubt that the future is FTTH, here in Norway call volume on land lines is down 81% since the top in 2001, last year one in eleven cancelled their subscription and less than half the households even have a land line anymore. The people in the outskirts probably want it to continue, but when all central areas are abandoning it then it won't be enough. I have fiber + cell phone, my parents have cable + cell phone, so do pretty much all my friends and relatives and a few older ones just cell phones. Without the phone traffic the copper network will die, it's definitively the worst current technology to deliver broadband on.
Still, there are many remote houses where they only put down copper because it's a government requirement to deliver phone service, it was never profitable before and it's never going to be profitable to lay fiber or anything else. I hear they plan on scavenging parts from the main shut-down to run these legacy systems for a long time, so they aren't going to get any upgrades. Copper/fiber is going to be the new digital divide in the years to come.
Regarding your last point: South Africa of today is one of the most dangerous and violent places on earth; Mandela did next to nothing to address black on white or even black-on-black violence. There was a huge white-flight out of SA during the 90s. Perhaps you think this is a positive outcome. I don't.
What did you expect? I suspect a lot of "white flight" from certain areas of the US post-1865, it's not easy to have a man you used to have in shackles and call your property now be a free man and your equal - though I doubt most ex-slave owners ever saw it that way. We here in Norway did some very unkind things to children of Nazi soldiers and their mothers (there were 400.000 soldiers = males at the capitulation occupying a country of 3.000.000 and they'd been there for 5 years, contraception was generally not available and the Nazis had their Lebensborn program - shit happens), you don't get a toss-up like that without revenge.
Like you say, a lot of that is black-on-black violence which is more about SA being in the same troubles as many other countries in Africa, they're 15th on the global list of murder rates but only 6th in Africa. The entire continent is so screwed up in more ways than you can count, there are still countries there with <35% literacy rates while South Africa is actually the most literate country in all of Africa, they have the highest GDP south of Sahara and so on. We're all affected by our neighbors and really they got nobody to look up to in a 5000 km radius.
Brakes don't suddenly go from good to bad. They have a very graduate wear and it's easy to detect that they should be replaced in the annual checkup.
The brake pads themselves, generally no. But you can have catastrophic failure in the brake fluid tubes and with no pressure, next to no breaking. Still overall mechanical failure is the reason for very few accidents compared to human error.
6 - We're using subcontractors that are not part of the "intelligence community"
Or as a variation:
11. We're collecting data on everybody except in the US, which we swap with the UK for data they can't collect. This close cooperation with foreign agencies is of course not counted. The only thing you can be sure of from the NSA leaks is that even if your own country doesn't spy on you, all other countries sure do with USA at the head of the class.
India which is much poorer:
Win 7 & 8: 58%
WinXP: 30%
China:
Win 7 & 8: 43%
WinXP: 50%
Africa, South America, everywhere else that is poor XP is in massive decline. This is basically China being the odd man out, they're the only ones who want to stick to XP. Now I'm guessing most of those copies aren't legitimate, but I don't see why that should be any different in China than the rest of the world. It's just that XP is the de facto standard I guess.
So what was the outlet there for? If it's on a public building but not meant for public use, it should have been secured, either by locking it or having it shut off inside the building. Actually, the drinking fountain comment is a good point. Obviously, a drinking fountain is there for public use. But what if it's just a faucet? Is getting a drink from a drinking fountain okay, but not a faucet? Is charging a phone okay, but not a car? Where is the line here?
Exactly where the company chooses to draw it, in most production companies taking one chocolate off the production line and with you home is a firing offense even if it's worth five cents. Things that are provided for work (materials, tools, services, products, whatever) are there to let everyone do their job, any other incidental use you might want it for is up to their acceptable use policy. Would a network manager accept that people connected their own devices to the internal networks to siphon off a few bytes of the Internet connection to check their mail? I very much doubt that unless you work in a BYOD workplace or have guest networks set up specifically for that purpose.
Most employers tend to take a reasonable approach on marginal costs (browsing the Internet, private call on work phone, printing two pages or making five photocopies, charge your cell phone) because being an ass works both ways but strictly speaking they could put me in a secure compartmentalized zone and deny me bringing almost anything in and out except myself and the clothes on my back. Of course then I'd say I'm working for paranoid nuts and not Top Secret military systems and find myself a sane employer, but it'd be totally legal. But I have worked on systems that simply didn't have Internet access, go to special terminals if you need it.
So how far could you go in the absence of any written policy, oral approval, signs or any other obvious indications? Well there's implied permission, if they offered parking spaces and those parking spaces had EV chargers on them (like one per space) I'd take permission to park to also imply permission to use the chargers. But if there just happens to be a socket in the parking lot so anyone working there could run a power tool, I'd say you don't have that. It could be things that are so commonplace that you wouldn't ask, like using the bathroom if you already have legitimate business in the building. Charging your car isn't that though.
I think they're technically correct, though I'm a repeat offender of "accidental theft of ballpoint pen" and if the law was applied to the fullest I'd have way more than three strikes. I think it's mostly because siphoning off gas to power your car is generally recognized as a crime, siphoning off electricity to do the same sounds equivalent. It doesn't sound like something you could do without at least some form of permission. It's all fairly relative though, if EVs become common it might be commonly understood that sockets are there for charging them and you'd need to explicitly deny it. But that's ten, twenty years from now and not today.
The guy who pulled the trigger is still fully responsible for where that bullet went flying. Being part of a DDoS is more like being part of a riot, even if you catch one rioter you don't usually don't make that one person pay for all the damage the mob did. But then again it's the same country that'll slap one person with million dollar fines for sharing a couple CDs online because piracy is such a big problem. If they applied the same logic to speeding, you'd probably go in the electric chair if you get caught.
Did you think the same thing about Intel after the Pentium4 too?
This is starting to get ancient history but as I remember it Intel was pushing the PIII hard right up until the launch of PIV, they were never in the "please hold out a little longer, please don't buy an AMD our PIV is going to be twice as fast and give free blowjobs" mode. Of course they did keep pushing it after everyone knew it was a dud, after all that's what they had to sell much like AMD now. It's pre-launch when all you get are "leaks" that are really plants, PR statements and astroturf/fanboy hype but no real benchmarks to compare and the hype goes over the top that it backfires, Bulldozer was hailed as AMD's savior long before it hit the stores. When you build up that kind of hype and don't deliver the pendulum swings the other way, it's not just poor it's outright horrible compared to what you expected.
Wow, who do you work for? Lockheed Martin? Boeing? The US has plenty contractors on hand for cost-plus contracts. And if all else fails I'm sure ESA would give you Ariane rockets for a price. And worst case if everyone had collective amnesia you should be able to pull off an Apollo program much faster and cheaper today than in the 60s. And when it really comes down to it the real "space" war is still 99% ICBMs, which I doubt the military will forget how to make. The ISS isn't exactly critical defense infrastructure.