Nvidia drivers are a royal pain on Linux compared to AMD, which play nicely with OS updates. Everybody seems to know this except you.
Meh, most people installed Ubuntu, hit system -> administration -> hardware drivers, installed the blessed version and it worked. It still worked across distro upgrades too, that was my experience 10 years ago and I doubt it's gotten worse since. I know it was a giant pain for people compiling their own kernel or trying any other kind of match-up or used many other distros that didn't pull off the "uninstalled blessed version, upgrade, reinstall new blessed version" well but unlike AMD it actually worked to run shit too, you either had terrible buggy, unstable closed source Catalyst drivers or open source Radeon drivers that were still in their infancy. I got no idea how it is today though, but I guess I'll have to find out when Win7 expires...
On a larger scale, enormous amounts of knowledge and art has been lost due to fires and wars affecting libraries and museums. Last famous occurrence was probably all the stuff destroyed wilfully in Cambodia and in Iraq.
Art, yes. An original statue, temple, painting or artifact can never be truly replaced by photographs and descriptions. But knowledge of any real significance? We're increasingly preserving every bit of trivia about the world and digitizing historical records to the point that you can go swimming in an ocean of history. Go to project Gutenberg and you'll find many works I very much doubt saw any contemporary popularity, but as long as one copy survives conservationists will add it to the historical record. Same with artists, you can find much more obscure bands on Spotify than I ever saw in a retail store. And from the 21st century they'll have YouTube, recording a zillion minutes of unimportant people doing unimportant things.
Yes, it takes a bit of effort but most people "outsource" that to Facebook, Instagram, iCloud and whatever. Before, if people had a fire they typically did lose everything. Now it's like you lose memorabilia and stuff but most people have the photos stored in the cloud. And a lot of people have private off-site backups too, of course. And that's private individuals, if this is your business and it's just documents and things that fit on a thumbnail... I don't know that we've ever like completely lost a big chunk of our past.
You have no idea of the underlying technologies and you just blather gut-level bullshit.
Meh, this isn't really about technology at all. Give the FCC the authority to fine $1 per spam call and customers something to dial to report the last call. Issue the fine to the phone company, tell them you can either pass the buck or pay up. Very soon afterwards they'll know what contact point it came from and update their agreements to forward the charges. Eventually that'll trickle down to the end customer who'll probably see this as a $1 start charge that's refunded in say 24 hours unless the caller complains. Throw in an appeals process for callers who make a lot of legal "unwanted" calls like collection agencies to have the fine refunded and the number whitelisted with heavy penalties (perjury?) for abusing it. That would kill phone spam dead.
While I don't agree with your description it's true that immigration challenges the social democratic model. When it really took hold in the 1950s and 1960s there was very low immigration/emigration and a strong sense of unity as a people. "We" had kids to raise, kids to put through college, elderly to take care of, some of "us" were sick or unemployed or mentally challenged and so on. Basically a notion that we'd take care of each other as a big family and that over a lifetime we'd need many of those services ourselves in different phases of life or for limited periods. And if you weren't sick or unemployed or handicapped you should just be happy life smiled at you.
For some this still isn't a problem, once you're here you're "adopted" and even though immigrants are a net loss - we have statistics to prove refugees and people seeking asylum generally cost us more in social services than they ever manage to pay back in taxes - it's an economic burden we decided to take on. For others immigration itself is polarizing for cultural reasons and then social democracy becomes a transfer of wealth from "us" to "them". That instead of being a safety net to catch a few that fall we fill it up with people who don't know the language with poor education and work skills who quite frankly often find the net quite comfortable and hope that some of them will get up and out of it.
Lots of immigrants are hard working, nice people who just wanted to get out of the shit they were in. Unfortunately some of them also want to drag the shit with them, apart from being a war torn hellhole they like their burqa clad women and Sharia law. Many are grateful, some are acting like they found suckers to leech from and sometimes with a side of racism too. Many enjoy our freedoms, some think we're decadent, sinful and morally corrupt and don't want to get tainted by our society. It still baffles my mind how some people can look at what they can have here and decide to go off to fight for IS in Syria. And now they want us to go collect the wives and kids they left behind...
The other thing people would spend UBI on is freedom. Remember, you're not free so long as somebody controls your access to food, shelter, medicine and education. Until you secure those things you're one paycheck away from doing anything the people in charge tell you.
The people willing to listen to that argument will probably be the first to point out that now you're completely dependent on the government. The US mindset is built around the idea that you create value, so you get paid and you pay for the services you want/need. And that this holds true whether you're the village smith or a software developer working for Apple / Google / Microsoft / Amazon / Facebook. The rest of the world figured out long ago that against a large corporation the deck is heavily stacked against you. Sure a few unique skills and competencies are compensated very well, but most workers most of the time are met with a slightly low ball offer and a shrug that this is the going rate. And if the whole team gets uppity well maybe they can be outsourced, even if it costs time and money and quality suffers they can afford to do it to show everybody is expendable.
Despite all the proof that companies would power play and exploit the workers to way below minimum wage if they could, those who want freedom want to play that game. They don't want food stamps, subsidized housing, public healthcare, public higher education, minimum wage laws or anything else that prevent corporations from extracting the maximum amount of work for the least amount of compensation. Because they believe your true worth is what somebody is willing to offer you, rather than a tactical game of finding the person most desperate to get a paycheck. Particularly in a market downturn it's easy to wait you out until you're that person, again unless you're the one of the select few they'd like to hire in any market. But we can't all be those people.
While it's not UBI many European countries have something like a "last resort" social security. That is to say we're capable of sustaining a population without anyone starving, freezing etc. but it doesn't imply we want more of them.
Everything is a meritocracy. It's just the criteria may be hidden from you. For example, perhaps the promotion went to not the best programmer or team leader, but the best at kissing arse. Still a Meritocracy.
It's not a meritocracy unless the person doing the promotion thinks ass kissing is an important qualification for the job. Otherwise "being my nephew" could be a criteria, which it can be in reality but then we call that nepotism. It doesn't necessarily mean the technically best qualified person, but it means picking the overall best fit for the job. It's like the fit in "survival of the fittest", it's not really an implication that it means the strongest/fastest/smartest.
It never ceases to amaze me at the amount of fantasy physics that occur in science.
Well sometimes you look at what you have and try to see what you can accomplish. Other times you look at what you want and try to fill in the blanks. I want to live forever. Right now its a bleeding fantasy, we're all dying and there's nothing that indicates reversing aging, copying my brain to a computer or anything else is feasible in the 42 years statistics say a male of my age have left. I still want us to explore concepts that could make us live to be a thousand years old, not just a year or two more in the nursing home.
Not that it's an either-or, I don't mean we should stop making incremental improvements. I support SpaceX building the rockets we can today, maybe even make it to Mars even though as far as space travel goes it's barely a milk run. But yes, I want some people to think up fission/fusion/anti-matter/wormhole concepts so maybe we can go Star Trekking around the universe. Even if it seems unfeasible, but you can never completely prove a negative, maybe somebody just haven't looked at it the right way before.
It not a right or left wing issue. It is a authoritarian vs libertarian issue. Politics is not a one dimensional slide with conservatives on one side and liberals on the other it is more a n-dimensional space with lots on nuanced positions. trying to over simplify that into a binary lib v con paradigm is what makes American politics the devise social hellscape we have had for the last decade and a half.
But still a majority decides so even here in Europe with multiple parties like in my country we have 7 larger parties (>4%) three are left-aligned and four are right-aligned so while the internal votes will decide the flavor the overall choice is just one or the other. It absolutely happens that people don't want to vote with the party they like the most because of the company they keep. It's still millions of individual positions flattened into 2-3 dimensions then flattened to majority decisions.
Only one startup has succeeded at it in the US since Chrysler in 1925, and that's Tesla. Many have tried. All but one have failed.
You mean dozens have been murdered, from Tucker to Kaiser.
And there's been plenty assassination attempts on Tesla and there will be on Rivian too, if they make it that far. Remember that Tesla started with the Roadster in 2008, the Model 3 is their 4th generation car with 10 years of experience. A newcomer now will have to get a lot of things right on the first try to not flop.
It's not that Europe does not understand that the US is a sucky ally (and unusually so at the moment), it's that they understand that being the ally of Russia and China is way worse.
We'd never align with them, the question is how badly the US is needed. The Soviet Union dissolved 28 years ago, Russia is the 10th biggest economy in the world behind Italy and their sphere of influence is now pretty much Belarus with the Baltic countries and Ukraine turning towards the west. Despite their meddling in Crimea and East Ukraine they've never been in less of a position to launch a major offensive against Europe. In fact we've built down our military to de-escalate with Russia despite the EU having 3.5x the population and 9x the GDP.
With Trump's NATO funding rally we'll be returning to a more natural strength military - apart from the nukes, considerably stronger than Russia. For Europe this is becoming less and less about our domestic security, it's all about US vs China. That's a country in East Asia, thousands of miles from any border in Europe. Yes, we have the NATO pact as a last resort if WW3 breaks loose but that's also it. And in this world war maybe the US will need us as much as we will need them.
You don't have to speculate a lot, fingerprint/iris etc. is point identification where the person wants to identify. With facial recognition you can people over time from camera to camera. If you got them positively identified at one point you can track both forwards and backwards. If you got a superzoom you can do it from a great distance. If you're the Chinese they can probably cross reference with cell phone towers, electronic payments etc. to narrow down the number of likely people from 1.4 billion to a few thousands. Like Facebook they'll probably build shadow profiles on all the unknown people, only better.
Welcome to the silicon wall. It took Nvidia 36 months and roughly 50% more transistors to get that 15% of performance. The days of doubling your performance every couple of years is done.
Then crippled it with 2/3rds the memory bandwidth of the 1660 Ti, so it's actually capable of considerably more. As for long term, the human brain does everything it does in 15-20W. Maybe we can't do it with die shrinks but something tells me there's still a ton of potential in low-power computing.
When the computer partially or completely hands over control it's often an instrument problem like a faulty sensor not a core logic problem, it's reached some kind of absurd/impossible state. Commercial airlines often fly in the dark, across oceans, through storms and under other conditions where it's impossible or at least extremely hard to navigate visually, so you got little choice but to try to make sense of it. Very often the problem is that you end up ignoring or fighting what you think is faulty when something else is the problem.
For example one case I read about it was the altitude/airspeed/angle having a glitch, in any case the crew ended up convinced the plane was diving. So they pulled up, got stall warnings, ignored them and the plane trying to cancel the stall and pulled up more until the plane stopped giving alerts because the angle of attack was so off it considered it faulty. When they still lost altitude they tried to level out the plane a bit, which brought the angle back into a sane range and the warnings began again so they pulled up. Then stalled all the way down until they crashed in the ocean.
Was is that they didn't know how to fly a plane as such? No, it's that they thought the stall warnings were false. They thought no warnings meant they'd regained control. Maybe it didn't really make sense, but a lot of these will be once-per-career situations. Not that it's the only time something will break but maybe the only time that thing will break in that way under those conditions. And you're supposed to figure it out on the first try. It's pretty easy for the crash investigators to sit there in their calm office sipping a cup of coffee to say what you could have done or should have done.
What about Windows 8, that's what I have. It's still got plenty of time left for support. This is maybe Microsoft's way of saying "maybe we could support you, but we won't because we hate you."
Just business, Win10 is 55%, Win7 34%, Win8+8.1 9% and 2.5% still run XP/Vista. Still I wonder why the heck Microsoft would bother in their final year of support, it's either a trap to make it buggy and force people to Win10 or they're having cold feet and is considering a "Windows Classic" version? I mean 34% still prefer your ten year old OS and you even tried to give them a "free" upgrade? It's pretty clear the market thinks Win7 works just fine...
It's one of those horrible things where no one wants it, but everyone seems to be forced to do it anyway. So, how to avoid it in the long-term?
We probably can't. But it's a very far leap from an autonomous drone or turret to an autonomous war machine. Guns need bullets, machines need fuel, until a Terminator-like AI takes control over the whole supply chain down to factories and refineries a rouge robot army would fizzle. As for humans thinking war would be winnable again, we still have ICBMs with nukes as the ultimate "fuck you too" with much better bang for the buck.
The best thing we could do is build the peace, no matter what the guys with the doomsday clock say I don't feel like we're anywhere near 1939-45 or 1962. Ethnic/racial tension isn't anywhere near the same in US or Europe or Japan as 50 years ago. Even Africa is fairly peaceful compared to the past, the Middle East is once more a cluster fuck but overall it's pretty quiet. From Washingon to Beijing it seems cash is king and capitalism doesn't care what your skin color is or where your parents come from or what's between your legs and how you use it.
Which is not to say it's your friend, but it's an equal opportunity exploiter. Mega-corporations don't need war, it's bad for business unless you're one of the few whose business is war. Sure, you'll probably have some more civil wars where shitty countries tear themselves apart. I think straight up invasions is going to be very rare though, unless it's some strategic grab like Crimea. Not that it's not a big deal but compared to the Soviet Union rolling in the tanks over half of Europe it's barely a nibble.
The reason I say it's inevitable is that this isn't a particular technology like ABC weapons. All the building blocks are generic and will be built even if they're not used to build kill bots at present it's not really a question of whether they'll be forced into service under duress. When your freedom is quite literally under fire, you're luck if they stick to the Geneva convention much less consider long term ramifications of militarizing this technology. If what you need to end the war is a nuke, you build nukes.
Cash will diminish, sure. But end? What about kids? Are they going to start getting debit cards? Or will they just not be allowed to buy anything in this brave new world?
Yes. That's already the solution here in Norway, they have "allowance" cards down to 8 year olds. It's linked to their parents who can see the balance and transactions, they can't get it withdrawn as cash, they need approval to send to other people and there's strict withdrawal limits and obviously no credit limit/overdraw possibility.
Lot's of people don't have bank accounts. What about them?
Pretty much the same as above, except for illegal immigrants no matter how much of a drug addict or whatever there's no reason why you shouldn't have a bank account. I know here in Norway we now have digital food stamps, before it was a requisition - because if you gave them cash it went straight to drugs and alcohol - now they "pay" with a card like other people, as long as you don't try to buy beer. Illegal labor is one of the reasons they want to get rid of cash so many would say this is a feature not a bug.
They are considering anonymous "charge cards" for tourists etc. with various limitations. One variation I heard is an expiry date before you have to cash it in and no anonymous -> anonymous transfers. That would make it quite painful to keep any major amount of money out of the system and knowing where it came from and where it's going is a pretty good trace.
Honestly, the main reason cash is still on the table is as an emergency backup. No power, no phones, no Internet, system down = no money to keep society going. You can run for a little while on IDs and IOUs, but not very long...
On the other hand, a RAT was found on her laptop. That and otherwise we would have to believe that she was sophisticated enough at computer security to manage all that hacking, but not enough to know she shouldn't do it on her own laptop connected to the school's LAN.
Just because she didn't do it on her own doesn't mean she's not guilty. Maybe she had an accomplice who offered to help her out if she'd let him use her computer and even though she had no clue what he was doing or the extend of control he took or the extent of the hacking she still got kickbacks like test answers and better grades. Now that shit hit the fan she's got the choice between "I got no idea how that happened, I must have been hacked" or "Yeah I engaged in a criminal conspiracy to hack school systems but he's the actual hacker, your honor". That's not a very tough choice, the latter is like being accusing of murder and pointing to your hit man saying he's the sharpshooter.
The alternatives are: a) Someone really hates your guts hacked and framed you. b) You're the smokescreen/scapegoat for one of the other hacks. c) A total stranger hacked your computer to help your grades. d) She did it all on her own, being both sophisticated and brain dead.
I don't think anyone truly believes b), c) or d). She's either covering for someone or she got framed good, like somebody wants to ruin her life bad.
You're arguing as if consumers were one homogeneous mass. Truth is that your optimal support curve is probably a peak, the totally helpless/obnoxious customers are gobbling up support costs and the expert/specialist users are running into narrow corner cases that don't justify fixing. What you want is to make the bulk of your customers happy most the time with moderate effort. The rest? Some say please them, some say appease them, some say get rid of them. Sometimes you have not so great customers that other customers look up to, those you might have to please. Other very vocal complainers maybe you have to appease so they don't create bad PR. But if they're a vegan at a steakhouse they won't ever be pleased, you can either try to make water not wet or have one token vegan dish and blow them off. And sometimes it's even worse, like if you got a really annoying cinema goer scaring other customers away. Doesn't matter if he paid for his seat, that's a customer you want to get rid off.
you'd have to have a REALLY, REALLY good reason to do that, not just "we asked people and they said they wanted it"
Unfortunately, nobody wanted your opinion on whose opinions should be heard. You think you'll get somebody smart in charge, what you get is someone on top of "Mt.Stupid" because they're the most confident everybody else is wrong.
You are making a lot of assumptions here, not the least of which is that they determined the punishment before levying the charge. Just for a second entertain the possibility the university staff aren't all idiots.
Actually I think that's a very small assumption, cheating on an exam is a big offense. Hacking school systems to cheat? Maybe you can get away with it at 14 but at 24 I'd say that's a pretty much automatic expulsion. It's more like "do we have enough evidence to prosecute" level of offense.
Or it's an effect of cost-cutting and automation demands. I work for an organization that's done a lot of manual vetting, fact-checking, reminders, warnings, follow-ups, massaging and approving of data. Basically some people expect us to screen everything for junk and what comes out in the other end should be as complete and correct as reasonably possible. This takes a lot of time and effort on our part and we're only supposed to do light QA but we did it anyway. There's now a big push for GIGO - garbage in, garbage out - instead of continuing to cuddle with and cover for them we want to it to go unaltered through non-stop to put it on display and push for consequences - legal, financial and in public relations.
They decided not to pursue the thruster landing because it would require a lot more effort to prove its safety. A parachute landing is based on well known technology. They may still do it at a later time.
They could, but it wouldn't really make any sense. NASA is their only customer and they're willing to pay the price to have it their way, if there's any savings SpaceX would probably have to give most of it to make them switch. And NASA might eventually turn it down in the end because of the potential political fallout of losing men to what fairly or unfairly will be considered gambling with the safety of astronauts to save a few bucks. If another customer shows up they'll have a NASA certified package ready to go for a ride or two, who'd start messing with that? It seems extremely unlikely they'd get enough business to justify rebooting the thruster project as a stop-gap before the BFR/BFS is ready.
Waymo seems to have the strongest story, and I think they're still 15-20 years away from a coast to coast drive without intervention.
Well a trip coast-to-coast is 2500-3000 miles and for last year Waymo reported one disengagement per 11017 miles driven. Granted, that might not be the same roads but considering that coast-to-coast highway trips have been done 95-99% autonomous by much simpler systems and done entirely by moderately advanced systems statistically my money would be on the Waymo getting there by itself way more often than not. Basically there's three situations:
Nobody really cares about 2), sure once every thousands of miles you might have to give it a nudge through a construction area or whatnot. It's 3) that's keeping engineers awake at night, what are all the exceptional things that could happen either outside the car or to the car's systems and how serious/deadly would the consequences be? There's a reason most industrial robots are in safety cages. A self-driving car is not. Heck sometimes I think it's crazy we let people drive a ton of metal at 50+ mph a feet or two away from others...
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Nvidia drivers are a royal pain on Linux compared to AMD, which play nicely with OS updates. Everybody seems to know this except you.
Meh, most people installed Ubuntu, hit system -> administration -> hardware drivers, installed the blessed version and it worked. It still worked across distro upgrades too, that was my experience 10 years ago and I doubt it's gotten worse since. I know it was a giant pain for people compiling their own kernel or trying any other kind of match-up or used many other distros that didn't pull off the "uninstalled blessed version, upgrade, reinstall new blessed version" well but unlike AMD it actually worked to run shit too, you either had terrible buggy, unstable closed source Catalyst drivers or open source Radeon drivers that were still in their infancy. I got no idea how it is today though, but I guess I'll have to find out when Win7 expires...
On a larger scale, enormous amounts of knowledge and art has been lost due to fires and wars affecting libraries and museums. Last famous occurrence was probably all the stuff destroyed wilfully in Cambodia and in Iraq.
Art, yes. An original statue, temple, painting or artifact can never be truly replaced by photographs and descriptions. But knowledge of any real significance? We're increasingly preserving every bit of trivia about the world and digitizing historical records to the point that you can go swimming in an ocean of history. Go to project Gutenberg and you'll find many works I very much doubt saw any contemporary popularity, but as long as one copy survives conservationists will add it to the historical record. Same with artists, you can find much more obscure bands on Spotify than I ever saw in a retail store. And from the 21st century they'll have YouTube, recording a zillion minutes of unimportant people doing unimportant things.
Yes, it takes a bit of effort but most people "outsource" that to Facebook, Instagram, iCloud and whatever. Before, if people had a fire they typically did lose everything. Now it's like you lose memorabilia and stuff but most people have the photos stored in the cloud. And a lot of people have private off-site backups too, of course. And that's private individuals, if this is your business and it's just documents and things that fit on a thumbnail... I don't know that we've ever like completely lost a big chunk of our past.
You have no idea of the underlying technologies and you just blather gut-level bullshit.
Meh, this isn't really about technology at all. Give the FCC the authority to fine $1 per spam call and customers something to dial to report the last call. Issue the fine to the phone company, tell them you can either pass the buck or pay up. Very soon afterwards they'll know what contact point it came from and update their agreements to forward the charges. Eventually that'll trickle down to the end customer who'll probably see this as a $1 start charge that's refunded in say 24 hours unless the caller complains. Throw in an appeals process for callers who make a lot of legal "unwanted" calls like collection agencies to have the fine refunded and the number whitelisted with heavy penalties (perjury?) for abusing it. That would kill phone spam dead.
While I don't agree with your description it's true that immigration challenges the social democratic model. When it really took hold in the 1950s and 1960s there was very low immigration/emigration and a strong sense of unity as a people. "We" had kids to raise, kids to put through college, elderly to take care of, some of "us" were sick or unemployed or mentally challenged and so on. Basically a notion that we'd take care of each other as a big family and that over a lifetime we'd need many of those services ourselves in different phases of life or for limited periods. And if you weren't sick or unemployed or handicapped you should just be happy life smiled at you.
For some this still isn't a problem, once you're here you're "adopted" and even though immigrants are a net loss - we have statistics to prove refugees and people seeking asylum generally cost us more in social services than they ever manage to pay back in taxes - it's an economic burden we decided to take on. For others immigration itself is polarizing for cultural reasons and then social democracy becomes a transfer of wealth from "us" to "them". That instead of being a safety net to catch a few that fall we fill it up with people who don't know the language with poor education and work skills who quite frankly often find the net quite comfortable and hope that some of them will get up and out of it.
Lots of immigrants are hard working, nice people who just wanted to get out of the shit they were in. Unfortunately some of them also want to drag the shit with them, apart from being a war torn hellhole they like their burqa clad women and Sharia law. Many are grateful, some are acting like they found suckers to leech from and sometimes with a side of racism too. Many enjoy our freedoms, some think we're decadent, sinful and morally corrupt and don't want to get tainted by our society. It still baffles my mind how some people can look at what they can have here and decide to go off to fight for IS in Syria. And now they want us to go collect the wives and kids they left behind...
The other thing people would spend UBI on is freedom. Remember, you're not free so long as somebody controls your access to food, shelter, medicine and education. Until you secure those things you're one paycheck away from doing anything the people in charge tell you.
The people willing to listen to that argument will probably be the first to point out that now you're completely dependent on the government. The US mindset is built around the idea that you create value, so you get paid and you pay for the services you want/need. And that this holds true whether you're the village smith or a software developer working for Apple / Google / Microsoft / Amazon / Facebook. The rest of the world figured out long ago that against a large corporation the deck is heavily stacked against you. Sure a few unique skills and competencies are compensated very well, but most workers most of the time are met with a slightly low ball offer and a shrug that this is the going rate. And if the whole team gets uppity well maybe they can be outsourced, even if it costs time and money and quality suffers they can afford to do it to show everybody is expendable.
Despite all the proof that companies would power play and exploit the workers to way below minimum wage if they could, those who want freedom want to play that game. They don't want food stamps, subsidized housing, public healthcare, public higher education, minimum wage laws or anything else that prevent corporations from extracting the maximum amount of work for the least amount of compensation. Because they believe your true worth is what somebody is willing to offer you, rather than a tactical game of finding the person most desperate to get a paycheck. Particularly in a market downturn it's easy to wait you out until you're that person, again unless you're the one of the select few they'd like to hire in any market. But we can't all be those people.
While it's not UBI many European countries have something like a "last resort" social security. That is to say we're capable of sustaining a population without anyone starving, freezing etc. but it doesn't imply we want more of them.
Everything is a meritocracy. It's just the criteria may be hidden from you. For example, perhaps the promotion went to not the best programmer or team leader, but the best at kissing arse. Still a Meritocracy.
It's not a meritocracy unless the person doing the promotion thinks ass kissing is an important qualification for the job. Otherwise "being my nephew" could be a criteria, which it can be in reality but then we call that nepotism. It doesn't necessarily mean the technically best qualified person, but it means picking the overall best fit for the job. It's like the fit in "survival of the fittest", it's not really an implication that it means the strongest/fastest/smartest.
It never ceases to amaze me at the amount of fantasy physics that occur in science.
Well sometimes you look at what you have and try to see what you can accomplish. Other times you look at what you want and try to fill in the blanks. I want to live forever. Right now its a bleeding fantasy, we're all dying and there's nothing that indicates reversing aging, copying my brain to a computer or anything else is feasible in the 42 years statistics say a male of my age have left. I still want us to explore concepts that could make us live to be a thousand years old, not just a year or two more in the nursing home.
Not that it's an either-or, I don't mean we should stop making incremental improvements. I support SpaceX building the rockets we can today, maybe even make it to Mars even though as far as space travel goes it's barely a milk run. But yes, I want some people to think up fission/fusion/anti-matter/wormhole concepts so maybe we can go Star Trekking around the universe. Even if it seems unfeasible, but you can never completely prove a negative, maybe somebody just haven't looked at it the right way before.
It not a right or left wing issue. It is a authoritarian vs libertarian issue. Politics is not a one dimensional slide with conservatives on one side and liberals on the other it is more a n-dimensional space with lots on nuanced positions. trying to over simplify that into a binary lib v con paradigm is what makes American politics the devise social hellscape we have had for the last decade and a half.
But still a majority decides so even here in Europe with multiple parties like in my country we have 7 larger parties (>4%) three are left-aligned and four are right-aligned so while the internal votes will decide the flavor the overall choice is just one or the other. It absolutely happens that people don't want to vote with the party they like the most because of the company they keep. It's still millions of individual positions flattened into 2-3 dimensions then flattened to majority decisions.
Only one startup has succeeded at it in the US since Chrysler in 1925, and that's Tesla. Many have tried. All but one have failed.
You mean dozens have been murdered, from Tucker to Kaiser.
And there's been plenty assassination attempts on Tesla and there will be on Rivian too, if they make it that far. Remember that Tesla started with the Roadster in 2008, the Model 3 is their 4th generation car with 10 years of experience. A newcomer now will have to get a lot of things right on the first try to not flop.
It's not that Europe does not understand that the US is a sucky ally (and unusually so at the moment), it's that they understand that being the ally of Russia and China is way worse.
We'd never align with them, the question is how badly the US is needed. The Soviet Union dissolved 28 years ago, Russia is the 10th biggest economy in the world behind Italy and their sphere of influence is now pretty much Belarus with the Baltic countries and Ukraine turning towards the west. Despite their meddling in Crimea and East Ukraine they've never been in less of a position to launch a major offensive against Europe. In fact we've built down our military to de-escalate with Russia despite the EU having 3.5x the population and 9x the GDP.
With Trump's NATO funding rally we'll be returning to a more natural strength military - apart from the nukes, considerably stronger than Russia. For Europe this is becoming less and less about our domestic security, it's all about US vs China. That's a country in East Asia, thousands of miles from any border in Europe. Yes, we have the NATO pact as a last resort if WW3 breaks loose but that's also it. And in this world war maybe the US will need us as much as we will need them.
You don't have to speculate a lot, fingerprint/iris etc. is point identification where the person wants to identify. With facial recognition you can people over time from camera to camera. If you got them positively identified at one point you can track both forwards and backwards. If you got a superzoom you can do it from a great distance. If you're the Chinese they can probably cross reference with cell phone towers, electronic payments etc. to narrow down the number of likely people from 1.4 billion to a few thousands. Like Facebook they'll probably build shadow profiles on all the unknown people, only better.
Welcome to the silicon wall. It took Nvidia 36 months and roughly 50% more transistors to get that 15% of performance. The days of doubling your performance every couple of years is done.
Then crippled it with 2/3rds the memory bandwidth of the 1660 Ti, so it's actually capable of considerably more. As for long term, the human brain does everything it does in 15-20W. Maybe we can't do it with die shrinks but something tells me there's still a ton of potential in low-power computing.
When the computer partially or completely hands over control it's often an instrument problem like a faulty sensor not a core logic problem, it's reached some kind of absurd/impossible state. Commercial airlines often fly in the dark, across oceans, through storms and under other conditions where it's impossible or at least extremely hard to navigate visually, so you got little choice but to try to make sense of it. Very often the problem is that you end up ignoring or fighting what you think is faulty when something else is the problem.
For example one case I read about it was the altitude/airspeed/angle having a glitch, in any case the crew ended up convinced the plane was diving. So they pulled up, got stall warnings, ignored them and the plane trying to cancel the stall and pulled up more until the plane stopped giving alerts because the angle of attack was so off it considered it faulty. When they still lost altitude they tried to level out the plane a bit, which brought the angle back into a sane range and the warnings began again so they pulled up. Then stalled all the way down until they crashed in the ocean.
Was is that they didn't know how to fly a plane as such? No, it's that they thought the stall warnings were false. They thought no warnings meant they'd regained control. Maybe it didn't really make sense, but a lot of these will be once-per-career situations. Not that it's the only time something will break but maybe the only time that thing will break in that way under those conditions. And you're supposed to figure it out on the first try. It's pretty easy for the crash investigators to sit there in their calm office sipping a cup of coffee to say what you could have done or should have done.
What about Windows 8, that's what I have. It's still got plenty of time left for support. This is maybe Microsoft's way of saying "maybe we could support you, but we won't because we hate you."
Just business, Win10 is 55%, Win7 34%, Win8+8.1 9% and 2.5% still run XP/Vista. Still I wonder why the heck Microsoft would bother in their final year of support, it's either a trap to make it buggy and force people to Win10 or they're having cold feet and is considering a "Windows Classic" version? I mean 34% still prefer your ten year old OS and you even tried to give them a "free" upgrade? It's pretty clear the market thinks Win7 works just fine...
It's one of those horrible things where no one wants it, but everyone seems to be forced to do it anyway. So, how to avoid it in the long-term?
We probably can't. But it's a very far leap from an autonomous drone or turret to an autonomous war machine. Guns need bullets, machines need fuel, until a Terminator-like AI takes control over the whole supply chain down to factories and refineries a rouge robot army would fizzle. As for humans thinking war would be winnable again, we still have ICBMs with nukes as the ultimate "fuck you too" with much better bang for the buck.
The best thing we could do is build the peace, no matter what the guys with the doomsday clock say I don't feel like we're anywhere near 1939-45 or 1962. Ethnic/racial tension isn't anywhere near the same in US or Europe or Japan as 50 years ago. Even Africa is fairly peaceful compared to the past, the Middle East is once more a cluster fuck but overall it's pretty quiet. From Washingon to Beijing it seems cash is king and capitalism doesn't care what your skin color is or where your parents come from or what's between your legs and how you use it.
Which is not to say it's your friend, but it's an equal opportunity exploiter. Mega-corporations don't need war, it's bad for business unless you're one of the few whose business is war. Sure, you'll probably have some more civil wars where shitty countries tear themselves apart. I think straight up invasions is going to be very rare though, unless it's some strategic grab like Crimea. Not that it's not a big deal but compared to the Soviet Union rolling in the tanks over half of Europe it's barely a nibble.
The reason I say it's inevitable is that this isn't a particular technology like ABC weapons. All the building blocks are generic and will be built even if they're not used to build kill bots at present it's not really a question of whether they'll be forced into service under duress. When your freedom is quite literally under fire, you're luck if they stick to the Geneva convention much less consider long term ramifications of militarizing this technology. If what you need to end the war is a nuke, you build nukes.
Cash will diminish, sure. But end? What about kids? Are they going to start getting debit cards? Or will they just not be allowed to buy anything in this brave new world?
Yes. That's already the solution here in Norway, they have "allowance" cards down to 8 year olds. It's linked to their parents who can see the balance and transactions, they can't get it withdrawn as cash, they need approval to send to other people and there's strict withdrawal limits and obviously no credit limit/overdraw possibility.
Lot's of people don't have bank accounts. What about them?
Pretty much the same as above, except for illegal immigrants no matter how much of a drug addict or whatever there's no reason why you shouldn't have a bank account. I know here in Norway we now have digital food stamps, before it was a requisition - because if you gave them cash it went straight to drugs and alcohol - now they "pay" with a card like other people, as long as you don't try to buy beer. Illegal labor is one of the reasons they want to get rid of cash so many would say this is a feature not a bug.
They are considering anonymous "charge cards" for tourists etc. with various limitations. One variation I heard is an expiry date before you have to cash it in and no anonymous -> anonymous transfers. That would make it quite painful to keep any major amount of money out of the system and knowing where it came from and where it's going is a pretty good trace.
Honestly, the main reason cash is still on the table is as an emergency backup. No power, no phones, no Internet, system down = no money to keep society going. You can run for a little while on IDs and IOUs, but not very long...
On the other hand, a RAT was found on her laptop. That and otherwise we would have to believe that she was sophisticated enough at computer security to manage all that hacking, but not enough to know she shouldn't do it on her own laptop connected to the school's LAN.
Just because she didn't do it on her own doesn't mean she's not guilty. Maybe she had an accomplice who offered to help her out if she'd let him use her computer and even though she had no clue what he was doing or the extend of control he took or the extent of the hacking she still got kickbacks like test answers and better grades. Now that shit hit the fan she's got the choice between "I got no idea how that happened, I must have been hacked" or "Yeah I engaged in a criminal conspiracy to hack school systems but he's the actual hacker, your honor". That's not a very tough choice, the latter is like being accusing of murder and pointing to your hit man saying he's the sharpshooter.
The alternatives are:
a) Someone really hates your guts hacked and framed you.
b) You're the smokescreen/scapegoat for one of the other hacks.
c) A total stranger hacked your computer to help your grades.
d) She did it all on her own, being both sophisticated and brain dead.
I don't think anyone truly believes b), c) or d). She's either covering for someone or she got framed good, like somebody wants to ruin her life bad.
You're arguing as if consumers were one homogeneous mass. Truth is that your optimal support curve is probably a peak, the totally helpless/obnoxious customers are gobbling up support costs and the expert/specialist users are running into narrow corner cases that don't justify fixing. What you want is to make the bulk of your customers happy most the time with moderate effort. The rest? Some say please them, some say appease them, some say get rid of them. Sometimes you have not so great customers that other customers look up to, those you might have to please. Other very vocal complainers maybe you have to appease so they don't create bad PR. But if they're a vegan at a steakhouse they won't ever be pleased, you can either try to make water not wet or have one token vegan dish and blow them off. And sometimes it's even worse, like if you got a really annoying cinema goer scaring other customers away. Doesn't matter if he paid for his seat, that's a customer you want to get rid off.
you'd have to have a REALLY, REALLY good reason to do that, not just "we asked people and they said they wanted it"
Unfortunately, nobody wanted your opinion on whose opinions should be heard. You think you'll get somebody smart in charge, what you get is someone on top of "Mt.Stupid" because they're the most confident everybody else is wrong.
Real people in the real world don't have documentation putting them elsewhere most of the time because they don't expect to need it.
Meh, if you have the Facebook app they probably know more about where you've been than you do.
You are making a lot of assumptions here, not the least of which is that they determined the punishment before levying the charge. Just for a second entertain the possibility the university staff aren't all idiots.
Actually I think that's a very small assumption, cheating on an exam is a big offense. Hacking school systems to cheat? Maybe you can get away with it at 14 but at 24 I'd say that's a pretty much automatic expulsion. It's more like "do we have enough evidence to prosecute" level of offense.
Or it's an effect of cost-cutting and automation demands. I work for an organization that's done a lot of manual vetting, fact-checking, reminders, warnings, follow-ups, massaging and approving of data. Basically some people expect us to screen everything for junk and what comes out in the other end should be as complete and correct as reasonably possible. This takes a lot of time and effort on our part and we're only supposed to do light QA but we did it anyway. There's now a big push for GIGO - garbage in, garbage out - instead of continuing to cuddle with and cover for them we want to it to go unaltered through non-stop to put it on display and push for consequences - legal, financial and in public relations.
They decided not to pursue the thruster landing because it would require a lot more effort to prove its safety. A parachute landing is based on well known technology. They may still do it at a later time.
They could, but it wouldn't really make any sense. NASA is their only customer and they're willing to pay the price to have it their way, if there's any savings SpaceX would probably have to give most of it to make them switch. And NASA might eventually turn it down in the end because of the potential political fallout of losing men to what fairly or unfairly will be considered gambling with the safety of astronauts to save a few bucks. If another customer shows up they'll have a NASA certified package ready to go for a ride or two, who'd start messing with that? It seems extremely unlikely they'd get enough business to justify rebooting the thruster project as a stop-gap before the BFR/BFS is ready.
Waymo seems to have the strongest story, and I think they're still 15-20 years away from a coast to coast drive without intervention.
Well a trip coast-to-coast is 2500-3000 miles and for last year Waymo reported one disengagement per 11017 miles driven. Granted, that might not be the same roads but considering that coast-to-coast highway trips have been done 95-99% autonomous by much simpler systems and done entirely by moderately advanced systems statistically my money would be on the Waymo getting there by itself way more often than not. Basically there's three situations:
1) It's driving okay
2) It's confused and knows it's confused
3) It's oblivious and/or utterly wrong
Nobody really cares about 2), sure once every thousands of miles you might have to give it a nudge through a construction area or whatnot. It's 3) that's keeping engineers awake at night, what are all the exceptional things that could happen either outside the car or to the car's systems and how serious/deadly would the consequences be? There's a reason most industrial robots are in safety cages. A self-driving car is not. Heck sometimes I think it's crazy we let people drive a ton of metal at 50+ mph a feet or two away from others...