The only thing holding back DRM being the primary beneficiary of TPM is the lack of adoption and the fact that TPM is entirely voluntary. If every computer had a TPM module regardless of the users preference you could be damn certain that many DRM schemes would be using this.
Microsoft has announced that from January 1, 2015 all computers will have to be equipped with a TPM 2.0 module in order to pass the Windows 8.1 hardware certification. And while not every computer will run Windows, I very much doubt you'll find a computer that can't run Windows so that's the end of TPM-less hardware. Of course Windows 8.1 will run on non-TPM hardware but I figure in a few years Windows 9 will refuse to run on anything but TPM-enabled hardware. That's the end of the PC as an open platform and you can already prepare for the funeral.
The problem with that line is that it presupposes that there is one correct view. Who gets to decide what is correct?
I think you're twisting the grandparent's words, the point was that truth is not a popularity contest. Moderation often leads to posts towing the party line being modded up and posts contradicting it being modded down, there's lots and lots of examples of groupthink and cliques of people reinforcing each other's opinion in a closed loop. That moderation also tends to "drown out any message they deem incorrect", just in a different way.
I disagree with your premise. Given that every individual invariably believes his own world view to be the correct one, I don't think its even workable.
Just because I overall disagree with your position there's still a difference between a cohoerent argument and incoherent rambling. Decisions are not black and white rather there are pros and cons, we just disagree on how severe and what matters the most. A forum looking to promote a meaningful discussion is looking to bring out informative facts, insightful arguments and relevant interesting subjects while trying to suppress the noise of disruptive trolls, ad hominem flamebait, things going totally off-topic and points that are entirely redundant so there's a good signal-to-noise ratio. It's not supposed to be."+1, Right" and "-1, Wrong", that's what polls are for and the moderation isn't supposed to be a mini-poll. It just gets abused that way.
There are occasionally exceptions where people *need* to remain anonymous for fear of lawsuits or termination from their jobs, but that's about the only exception I can think of
You have a serious lack of imagination because there's a lot of people that will treat you like shit simply for having the wrong opinions or belief or engage in some perfectly reasonable behavior. Like say you're an atheist but know your deeply religious community hates them and maybe you don't want to tout your horn and make it known to any and all, should you then be barred from arguing it anonymously? True, in this case it's probably not worse than that you could stand it but it's not right and it's not fair and it's going to happen if you speak out under your real name. Forcing people to only speak under their real names is the way to self censorship where you avoid saying things that might come back to haunt you. Of course the naive will just say always be true to thy self, just ignore reality and you'll be fine. Sadly in real world reality does not ignore you.
Yeah right, because Europe and USA didn't developed without internet in the 1800s and 1900s. I would like to add that actually the interweb now is doing a favor to the corrupt governments, because now we think that our wild rage in a blog and a couple of night in zuccotti park can change something, while the old way of doing things of, let say, the civil rights movement where far more effective because people were more resilient and less prone to stop the protest to update their bookface profile.
I think the AC is spot on, Internet practically didn't exist to most people until the 1990s. That you took two seconds out of your day to "like" something is a lot less impressive than anyone willing to spend time and effort to show that this is really, really important to them. That the Internet takes away the effort also tends to take away the impact.
Since nobody outside of Thyroid problems understands that, it's easy to rationalize your hate and tell people to exercise and stop eating so much. It's not uncommon to gain 100 pounds in one week after a complete removal.
The only way you could possibly gain 100 pounds in a week is if you eat >14 pounds of food per day. Even if my body suddenly had a 100% food to energy conversion rate and spent no calories at all I doubt I could add more than 3 to 4 pounds a day as that's the gross weight of my food, so the only way that could happen is on an extremely high calorie eating binge. It's exactly this kind of ridiculous exaggeration that leads to people not taking you seriously.
Well to quote the wikipedia page quoting a financial times article:
Due to the costs of this "Energiewende" Germany now has Europes highest energy costs. Costs have risen over the last 5 years even for industrial consumers who are exempted from the costs of the renewable energy subsidy that consumers pay. In 2013, energy was 4 times cheaper in the United States than in Europe, and 6 times cheaper than in Germany.
It comes at a price and the sweet spots to produce renewables have already been picked, to keep it up they must use less and less ideal areas and means. Nice to see them lead but it's not really an act the whole world can follow.
in both cases they appeal to both the fear of death and the person's ego as THEY shouldn't have to just end like everybody else
I don't want to die, it has nothing to do with other people. Nor is it fear of death, it's desire of life. Why should I want a good thing to come to an end? I'm quite content with my mortality, but if I was offered immortality hell yes I'd take it. I'm just not interested in snake oil of pseudo-scientific or supernatural character.
But even if we go to the opposite end of the scale from the bouncing balls to a fully elastic collision momentum is still conserved, meaning that for equal velocity they'll continue to travel in the direction of the greatest mass. Now the cabin must provide the same deformation protection, but keeping the G-forces within acceptable limits is easier if you decelerate from 50 to 5 mph than from 50 to -5 mph. So I think all other things being equal, if you welded 200 kg of lead to the bottom of the Tesla with no absorption or deformation properties and crashed it head-to-head with an unmodified Tesla it'd do marginally better. Though I suspect to get a significant effect you're looking at trailer-to-car ratios, in which case the trailer wins anyway.
I especially hate how they have resisted integrating with the online world. It drives me nuts when a company has both a large online presence and a brick-and-mortar presence. Even though they share the same branding and (usually) the same product selection, they function as if they are separate companies. If you have a problem and try to talk to a person at your local store, they say "we don't deal with the online stuff, they are independent from us." Well great, way to give up your ONE advantage over Amazon.
The problem is that customers want to have their cake and eat it too, they want to be able to order it online at prices that match Amazon's barebone model while at the same time get in-person service at an expensive location, quite a few companies around here have tried that mixed model and they've all gone bankrupt or left that model again as either people are either very unhappy with the prices or they're losing lots of money because their e-tail margins don't cover the retail costs.
Remember that retail shops are usually pushing a rather high $/hour per clerk and per m^2 and one support case can tie up both staff and space for a comparatively long time, leading to annoying waiting times and you get a skewed impression that compared to the number of shoppers there's lots of complaints. And absolutely worst of all are the customers who get annoying and disruptive in an attempt to blackmail you into getting what they want in order to get them out of your hair. You can't help but deal with your own retail customers, but I wouldn't want to take on that extra support burden either. Not without very good internal billing.
While all of that is true downloading a file doesn't grant you any distribution rights to that file, unlike YouTube where you claim to grant them rights to put it on their site. So Prenda Law could seed the torrent, then start a client to downloads bits and pieces from others and sue them for illegal distribution. It would be against the law, but Prenda Law would fall to the "unclean hands" doctrine because they were actively working to cause the infringement. Consider it a bit like your neighbor having a campfire and you pouring a line of gasoline to your house then suing him for burning your house down. It might be your fire, but they can't help make it happen. That doesn't make it legal though, you don't have a license and you are in violation of the law they just can't claim any damages from it.
Sure they'll question it but then they go more manual, pilots screw up and the cycle moves back towards more automation. At our biggest hospital they now have robotic drug dispensers, nurses are supposed to double check but I'm guessing complacency will set in so if the machine screws up shit will hit the fan and they'll question if there's "too much automation", but they're screwing up the medication far less now than with all manual processes so really how could they? Yes the computer could kill patients but so do nurses, I don't mean intentionally but people get tired, people get confused, people forget, people make mistakes and bad shit happens. I think the long term solution won't be reempowering the pilots, it'll be eliminating them entirely.
Unfortunately, I suspect we won't get there for quite some time. I would think the first generations of automated cars would be like adaptive cruise control on steroids, yes the car is sort of driving itself but it's still your responsibility to hit the brakes if someone runs over the road, the computer sensors get clogged or whatever. That means you must have a license, be fit to drive and alert to take over command. Cars that act like taxis where you just get in the back seat and tell it to drive you home and you're not liable for how the car drives I'm guessing is still >20 years out.
Yeah, that'd be the easy way out. Linux is built by people who'd rather take the steep mountain pass with blizzards and danger of rock slides than pay a buck to drive the toll road, sometimes because they don't have a buck but more often on principle against "restricted roads". Whether it's rational is highly debatable, but eventually what was a WTF route becomes an easy road.
That unsupported device/application/service there, do you?: a) Buy the supported platform b) Buy a different product that does support Linux c) Say "Oh no you don't" and hack up a reverse engineered driver, WINE or some other kind of free software reimplementation/replacement/workaround
The people who belong in the c) category are the reason Linux couldn't be killed by nuking it from orbit. I myself have spent silly amounts of time tweaking WINE and dealing with all sorts of bugs and incompatibilities compared to just using Windows, just for the heck of not running it. Not that there's anything wrong with native games, but if I'd have to sit around waiting for AAA titles to come I'd be waiting forever. Granted now I'm back on Win7 (It was Vista that drove me away) and the "easy" life and will let someone else carry the torch, but it's that kind of stubborn refusal that drives it forward.
You beat me to it. I can type in code pretty damned fast - Fast enough that people frequently ask me how often I go through keyboards - Fast enough that I've actually had people in the room with me ask if I had just typed something meaningful or merely mashed keys for the hell of it - And, while coding, I tend to spend far, far more time thinking than coding. Someone watching me program for an hour would see 3-5 minutes at a time of complete inactivity, followed by assaulting the keyboard for a 30 second burst, rinse wash repeat.
I think I can have considerably longer buffer/burst cycles, the challenge is keeping the big picture in your head while doing the little parts, and there I feel the duration of the bursts matter. If I've figured that to solve a business problem I need to change code sections A2, B4, C3 and D1 I'll start working on A2 and if it's quick and easy I won't forget the rest while if I struggle and need to churn out a lot of boilerplate by the time I'm done I might not remember what those other changes were. Either you then have to take notes or pseudocode the whole solution first or recreate it from memory, in those cases faster input would help keep me "in the flow", even though the input itself is only a small fraction of the wall time.
It's bad enough to hear people yelling at their phones in the cubes around. Now one can expect to hear someone yelling at the computer...
You don't already? Granted it's about 80% cursing with sprinkles of frustration, rage, resignation and prayer so it's not exactly voice recognition I need. I've never felt the need to yell though, by then the urge is usually stronger to throw it out the window.
I hear people say that, but my first SSD I used as a scratch disk for everything since it was so fast, it burned through the 10k writes/cell in 1.5 years. My current SSD (WD SiliconEdge Blue 128GB) has been treated far more nicely and has been operational for 1 year 10 months, SSDLife indicates it'll die in about 2 years for a total of 3 years 10 months. Granted it's been running almost 24x7 but apart from downloads running to a HDD it's been idle most of that time, unlike a HDD where the bearings wear out that shouldn't have much to say for SSD life time only bytes written. I'd not buy any consumer disk unless you consider it "expendable" and will die in <5 years, personally I'll be looking at an enterprise disk next time around.
One of the great open questions about the future of humanity is which will happen first: A) we figure out how our minds are able to understand the world and solve the problems involved in surviving and reproducing. B) we figure out how to build machines that are better than humans at understanding the world and solving the problems involved in surviving and reproducing. (...) The whole field of AI is built around the assumption that we can solve B without solving A. They may be right.
Of course you can, if all we care about is survival and reproduction you don't need human intelligence as cockroaches or for that matter bacteria survive and reproduce just fine. Actual replicating machines that don't just virtually exist in computer memory is more in the field of nanotechnology and nanobots than AI. It'd certainly have to work in a completely different way than our current hardware factories.
I have used high speed rail in Europe, including Germany. It's nice but usually slower than planes.
No doubt the plane is much faster with about 500 mph, but who arrives first highly depends on the distance. If you're going city center to city center and need to take the train to the airport, check in, board, fly, collect luggage and take another train to the other city center then any train that takes less than three hours is probably faster. For a napkin calculation you can probably keep a 100 mph average with a 150-200 mph train, so around 300 miles starts being the threshold where you'd rather fly than go by train. New York - Washington DC and LA to San Francisco seem like reasonable HSR distances, obviously if you're going from coast to coast then it's way, way faster by airplane.
An eskimo would have the same problem, does that mean he cannot understand people ?
In this case he wouldn't understand, but because he lacks knowledge not intelligence. Show him an alligator and a 100 meter hurdles race and he'll be able to answer but the AI will still draw a blank. Ignorance can be cured but we still haven't found a cure for stupid, despite all efforts from education systems worldwide. No wonder we're doing no better with computers.
Look, if you've picked a field where there's too few positions or you're haven't performed well enough that anyone wants to hire you or you're just getting screwed over by the job market then tough luck. If you can get a job in some other field then I don't care if you hate it, I don't care if you're not particularly good at it as long as you're doing well enough to be employable that's what you should do rather than go on unemployment benefits and get society's money for free. Doesn't matter if you have a PhD and have to flip burgers or drive a taxi for a living, getting benefits should be the absolutely last resort when there's no job to be had. If they're really trying that hard to beat a square peg into a round hole, find a job suited for a square peg. If not, well you'd better learn to be malleable. They're not asking for excellence, they're asking for adequacy.
Remember, you're not putting down $650 blind. If it doesn't reach the goal, you're out nothing.
Yes, but assuming they'd reach their $32 million they'd take your money now and you might get a product that is roughly what they promised and on time or just one or neither. Chances are there's no canceling, no return, no refund so anything they slap an "Ubuntu Edge" sticker on you're stuck with, at best a class action where you get a silly coupon. There's a huge difference in risk between that and a finished product on the shelf.
Except people might care a little more if they planned to live that long. We're going to run out of oil in 100 years? In 100 years we'll fry from global warming? Almost everybody alive today will be dead and buried by then, so nobody cares much. Sure a few nice speeches about what we leave our children and grandchildren but if people realistically could live 200 years they'd care a lot more.
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The only thing holding back DRM being the primary beneficiary of TPM is the lack of adoption and the fact that TPM is entirely voluntary. If every computer had a TPM module regardless of the users preference you could be damn certain that many DRM schemes would be using this.
Microsoft has announced that from January 1, 2015 all computers will have to be equipped with a TPM 2.0 module in order to pass the Windows 8.1 hardware certification. And while not every computer will run Windows, I very much doubt you'll find a computer that can't run Windows so that's the end of TPM-less hardware. Of course Windows 8.1 will run on non-TPM hardware but I figure in a few years Windows 9 will refuse to run on anything but TPM-enabled hardware. That's the end of the PC as an open platform and you can already prepare for the funeral.
The problem with that line is that it presupposes that there is one correct view. Who gets to decide what is correct?
I think you're twisting the grandparent's words, the point was that truth is not a popularity contest. Moderation often leads to posts towing the party line being modded up and posts contradicting it being modded down, there's lots and lots of examples of groupthink and cliques of people reinforcing each other's opinion in a closed loop. That moderation also tends to "drown out any message they deem incorrect", just in a different way.
I disagree with your premise. Given that every individual invariably believes his own world view to be the correct one, I don't think its even workable.
Just because I overall disagree with your position there's still a difference between a cohoerent argument and incoherent rambling. Decisions are not black and white rather there are pros and cons, we just disagree on how severe and what matters the most. A forum looking to promote a meaningful discussion is looking to bring out informative facts, insightful arguments and relevant interesting subjects while trying to suppress the noise of disruptive trolls, ad hominem flamebait, things going totally off-topic and points that are entirely redundant so there's a good signal-to-noise ratio. It's not supposed to be."+1, Right" and "-1, Wrong", that's what polls are for and the moderation isn't supposed to be a mini-poll. It just gets abused that way.
There are occasionally exceptions where people *need* to remain anonymous for fear of lawsuits or termination from their jobs, but that's about the only exception I can think of
You have a serious lack of imagination because there's a lot of people that will treat you like shit simply for having the wrong opinions or belief or engage in some perfectly reasonable behavior. Like say you're an atheist but know your deeply religious community hates them and maybe you don't want to tout your horn and make it known to any and all, should you then be barred from arguing it anonymously? True, in this case it's probably not worse than that you could stand it but it's not right and it's not fair and it's going to happen if you speak out under your real name. Forcing people to only speak under their real names is the way to self censorship where you avoid saying things that might come back to haunt you. Of course the naive will just say always be true to thy self, just ignore reality and you'll be fine. Sadly in real world reality does not ignore you.
Yeah right, because Europe and USA didn't developed without internet in the 1800s and 1900s.
I would like to add that actually the interweb now is doing a favor to the corrupt governments, because now we think that our wild rage in a blog and a couple of night in zuccotti park can change something, while the old way of doing things of, let say, the civil rights movement where far more effective because people were more resilient and less prone to stop the protest to update their bookface profile.
I think the AC is spot on, Internet practically didn't exist to most people until the 1990s. That you took two seconds out of your day to "like" something is a lot less impressive than anyone willing to spend time and effort to show that this is really, really important to them. That the Internet takes away the effort also tends to take away the impact.
Since nobody outside of Thyroid problems understands that, it's easy to rationalize your hate and tell people to exercise and stop eating so much. It's not uncommon to gain 100 pounds in one week after a complete removal.
The only way you could possibly gain 100 pounds in a week is if you eat >14 pounds of food per day. Even if my body suddenly had a 100% food to energy conversion rate and spent no calories at all I doubt I could add more than 3 to 4 pounds a day as that's the gross weight of my food, so the only way that could happen is on an extremely high calorie eating binge. It's exactly this kind of ridiculous exaggeration that leads to people not taking you seriously.
Well to quote the wikipedia page quoting a financial times article:
Due to the costs of this "Energiewende" Germany now has Europes highest energy costs. Costs have risen over the last 5 years even for industrial consumers who are exempted from the costs of the renewable energy subsidy that consumers pay. In 2013, energy was 4 times cheaper in the United States than in Europe, and 6 times cheaper than in Germany.
It comes at a price and the sweet spots to produce renewables have already been picked, to keep it up they must use less and less ideal areas and means. Nice to see them lead but it's not really an act the whole world can follow.
It's true. It's the same place the data in your RAM goes when you power down.
I didn't know the afterlife was at NSA headquarters, but hey their porn collection should be good...
Then you go to Switzerland, why let your body decide that instead of your mind?
21% of people receiving assisted dying in Dignitas do not have a terminal or progressive illness, but rather "weariness of life".
in both cases they appeal to both the fear of death and the person's ego as THEY shouldn't have to just end like everybody else
I don't want to die, it has nothing to do with other people. Nor is it fear of death, it's desire of life. Why should I want a good thing to come to an end? I'm quite content with my mortality, but if I was offered immortality hell yes I'd take it. I'm just not interested in snake oil of pseudo-scientific or supernatural character.
But even if we go to the opposite end of the scale from the bouncing balls to a fully elastic collision momentum is still conserved, meaning that for equal velocity they'll continue to travel in the direction of the greatest mass. Now the cabin must provide the same deformation protection, but keeping the G-forces within acceptable limits is easier if you decelerate from 50 to 5 mph than from 50 to -5 mph. So I think all other things being equal, if you welded 200 kg of lead to the bottom of the Tesla with no absorption or deformation properties and crashed it head-to-head with an unmodified Tesla it'd do marginally better. Though I suspect to get a significant effect you're looking at trailer-to-car ratios, in which case the trailer wins anyway.
I especially hate how they have resisted integrating with the online world. It drives me nuts when a company has both a large online presence and a brick-and-mortar presence. Even though they share the same branding and (usually) the same product selection, they function as if they are separate companies. If you have a problem and try to talk to a person at your local store, they say "we don't deal with the online stuff, they are independent from us." Well great, way to give up your ONE advantage over Amazon.
The problem is that customers want to have their cake and eat it too, they want to be able to order it online at prices that match Amazon's barebone model while at the same time get in-person service at an expensive location, quite a few companies around here have tried that mixed model and they've all gone bankrupt or left that model again as either people are either very unhappy with the prices or they're losing lots of money because their e-tail margins don't cover the retail costs.
Remember that retail shops are usually pushing a rather high $/hour per clerk and per m^2 and one support case can tie up both staff and space for a comparatively long time, leading to annoying waiting times and you get a skewed impression that compared to the number of shoppers there's lots of complaints. And absolutely worst of all are the customers who get annoying and disruptive in an attempt to blackmail you into getting what they want in order to get them out of your hair. You can't help but deal with your own retail customers, but I wouldn't want to take on that extra support burden either. Not without very good internal billing.
While all of that is true downloading a file doesn't grant you any distribution rights to that file, unlike YouTube where you claim to grant them rights to put it on their site. So Prenda Law could seed the torrent, then start a client to downloads bits and pieces from others and sue them for illegal distribution. It would be against the law, but Prenda Law would fall to the "unclean hands" doctrine because they were actively working to cause the infringement. Consider it a bit like your neighbor having a campfire and you pouring a line of gasoline to your house then suing him for burning your house down. It might be your fire, but they can't help make it happen. That doesn't make it legal though, you don't have a license and you are in violation of the law they just can't claim any damages from it.
Sure they'll question it but then they go more manual, pilots screw up and the cycle moves back towards more automation. At our biggest hospital they now have robotic drug dispensers, nurses are supposed to double check but I'm guessing complacency will set in so if the machine screws up shit will hit the fan and they'll question if there's "too much automation", but they're screwing up the medication far less now than with all manual processes so really how could they? Yes the computer could kill patients but so do nurses, I don't mean intentionally but people get tired, people get confused, people forget, people make mistakes and bad shit happens. I think the long term solution won't be reempowering the pilots, it'll be eliminating them entirely.
Unfortunately, I suspect we won't get there for quite some time. I would think the first generations of automated cars would be like adaptive cruise control on steroids, yes the car is sort of driving itself but it's still your responsibility to hit the brakes if someone runs over the road, the computer sensors get clogged or whatever. That means you must have a license, be fit to drive and alert to take over command. Cars that act like taxis where you just get in the back seat and tell it to drive you home and you're not liable for how the car drives I'm guessing is still >20 years out.
Yeah, that'd be the easy way out. Linux is built by people who'd rather take the steep mountain pass with blizzards and danger of rock slides than pay a buck to drive the toll road, sometimes because they don't have a buck but more often on principle against "restricted roads". Whether it's rational is highly debatable, but eventually what was a WTF route becomes an easy road.
That unsupported device/application/service there, do you?:
a) Buy the supported platform
b) Buy a different product that does support Linux
c) Say "Oh no you don't" and hack up a reverse engineered driver, WINE or some other kind of free software reimplementation/replacement/workaround
The people who belong in the c) category are the reason Linux couldn't be killed by nuking it from orbit. I myself have spent silly amounts of time tweaking WINE and dealing with all sorts of bugs and incompatibilities compared to just using Windows, just for the heck of not running it. Not that there's anything wrong with native games, but if I'd have to sit around waiting for AAA titles to come I'd be waiting forever. Granted now I'm back on Win7 (It was Vista that drove me away) and the "easy" life and will let someone else carry the torch, but it's that kind of stubborn refusal that drives it forward.
You beat me to it. I can type in code pretty damned fast - Fast enough that people frequently ask me how often I go through keyboards - Fast enough that I've actually had people in the room with me ask if I had just typed something meaningful or merely mashed keys for the hell of it - And, while coding, I tend to spend far, far more time thinking than coding. Someone watching me program for an hour would see 3-5 minutes at a time of complete inactivity, followed by assaulting the keyboard for a 30 second burst, rinse wash repeat.
I think I can have considerably longer buffer/burst cycles, the challenge is keeping the big picture in your head while doing the little parts, and there I feel the duration of the bursts matter. If I've figured that to solve a business problem I need to change code sections A2, B4, C3 and D1 I'll start working on A2 and if it's quick and easy I won't forget the rest while if I struggle and need to churn out a lot of boilerplate by the time I'm done I might not remember what those other changes were. Either you then have to take notes or pseudocode the whole solution first or recreate it from memory, in those cases faster input would help keep me "in the flow", even though the input itself is only a small fraction of the wall time.
It's bad enough to hear people yelling at their phones in the cubes around. Now one can expect to hear someone yelling at the computer...
You don't already? Granted it's about 80% cursing with sprinkles of frustration, rage, resignation and prayer so it's not exactly voice recognition I need. I've never felt the need to yell though, by then the urge is usually stronger to throw it out the window.
I hear people say that, but my first SSD I used as a scratch disk for everything since it was so fast, it burned through the 10k writes/cell in 1.5 years. My current SSD (WD SiliconEdge Blue 128GB) has been treated far more nicely and has been operational for 1 year 10 months, SSDLife indicates it'll die in about 2 years for a total of 3 years 10 months. Granted it's been running almost 24x7 but apart from downloads running to a HDD it's been idle most of that time, unlike a HDD where the bearings wear out that shouldn't have much to say for SSD life time only bytes written. I'd not buy any consumer disk unless you consider it "expendable" and will die in <5 years, personally I'll be looking at an enterprise disk next time around.
One of the great open questions about the future of humanity is which will happen first: A) we figure out how our minds are able to understand the world and solve the problems involved in surviving and reproducing. B) we figure out how to build machines that are better than humans at understanding the world and solving the problems involved in surviving and reproducing. (...) The whole field of AI is built around the assumption that we can solve B without solving A. They may be right.
Of course you can, if all we care about is survival and reproduction you don't need human intelligence as cockroaches or for that matter bacteria survive and reproduce just fine. Actual replicating machines that don't just virtually exist in computer memory is more in the field of nanotechnology and nanobots than AI. It'd certainly have to work in a completely different way than our current hardware factories.
I have used high speed rail in Europe, including Germany. It's nice but usually slower than planes.
No doubt the plane is much faster with about 500 mph, but who arrives first highly depends on the distance. If you're going city center to city center and need to take the train to the airport, check in, board, fly, collect luggage and take another train to the other city center then any train that takes less than three hours is probably faster. For a napkin calculation you can probably keep a 100 mph average with a 150-200 mph train, so around 300 miles starts being the threshold where you'd rather fly than go by train. New York - Washington DC and LA to San Francisco seem like reasonable HSR distances, obviously if you're going from coast to coast then it's way, way faster by airplane.
An eskimo would have the same problem, does that mean he cannot understand people ?
In this case he wouldn't understand, but because he lacks knowledge not intelligence. Show him an alligator and a 100 meter hurdles race and he'll be able to answer but the AI will still draw a blank. Ignorance can be cured but we still haven't found a cure for stupid, despite all efforts from education systems worldwide. No wonder we're doing no better with computers.
Look, if you've picked a field where there's too few positions or you're haven't performed well enough that anyone wants to hire you or you're just getting screwed over by the job market then tough luck. If you can get a job in some other field then I don't care if you hate it, I don't care if you're not particularly good at it as long as you're doing well enough to be employable that's what you should do rather than go on unemployment benefits and get society's money for free. Doesn't matter if you have a PhD and have to flip burgers or drive a taxi for a living, getting benefits should be the absolutely last resort when there's no job to be had. If they're really trying that hard to beat a square peg into a round hole, find a job suited for a square peg. If not, well you'd better learn to be malleable. They're not asking for excellence, they're asking for adequacy.
By the time you know you've got Alzheimers, it's too late to consider suicide.
No. Highly recommended to get perspective on things.
Remember, you're not putting down $650 blind. If it doesn't reach the goal, you're out nothing.
Yes, but assuming they'd reach their $32 million they'd take your money now and you might get a product that is roughly what they promised and on time or just one or neither. Chances are there's no canceling, no return, no refund so anything they slap an "Ubuntu Edge" sticker on you're stuck with, at best a class action where you get a silly coupon. There's a huge difference in risk between that and a finished product on the shelf.
Except people might care a little more if they planned to live that long. We're going to run out of oil in 100 years? In 100 years we'll fry from global warming? Almost everybody alive today will be dead and buried by then, so nobody cares much. Sure a few nice speeches about what we leave our children and grandchildren but if people realistically could live 200 years they'd care a lot more.