Surely there is a way to harness the radiation as an energy source that doesn't involve using the waste heat.
It's hard to see how because the energy involved is just so high it would rip any static structure apart. It's not like one fission reaction interacts with one water molecule, it's bouncing around spreading the energy to a whole bunch of them. And it's not just radiation it's all the smaller nuclei created by splitting the atom. Heck, we don't even need power generation if you found a way to stop them dead you'd get a Nobel prize. It's an even bigger problem for fusion, it's a problem for space travel with cosmic rays, it's just too much energy in a very very small package. Like trying to make getting shot with bullets into an energy source.
The next time you drive in the city consider how many of your decisions are predicated on understanding subtleties (some might occasion "stupidities") of human nature
Well, I can't say for certain how many accidents I've avoided through the human perspective. But if I'm tallying the accidents I and those I know have had driving they're almost exclusively caused by glitches in how we drive, like things you almost always pay attention to but then for some reason we had a lapse of concentration or was tired or got distracted or was emotionally on tilt. If not massive errors in judgement passing other cars that almost lead to head on collisions. In fact, I can't really say I remember a single "pat myself on the back" incident where my above-and-beyond response saved the day.
Usually what you're talking about is a means to drive more aggressively, like if I can tell they're not crossing the street I can drive by faster. But if I didn't I'd just drive by slower so I could stop if they crossed the street, it maximizes my goal to get to where I'm going as fast as possible but it's probably not avoiding accidents. I don't think self-driving cars will be perfect, but I think they'll be a lot more consistent and always keep reasonable safety margins. Combined with always paying attention it won't get into much of the trouble we humans use our brains to get out of. Unless it's made by Uber...
Even in Rouge One, I didn't really notice the CGI characters until my second viewing
I still wonder how many saw it without knowing they're CGI characters, how many only saw it when they knew and how many are just agreeing with the crowd. Like if you asked a trick question about a non-CGI character how many would claim they saw it too.
However we are in a process now of going up on the uncanny valley. Where CGI characters use to seem like animated corpses, now they seem like people with Novocain injected in their faces.
Yep. Something tells me this can all be solved with modelling all the way down to the cranial structure, the muscles, the layers of skin (epidermis, dermis, hypodermis) with real physics simulation plus a good behavioral model. Actually I think they got that part done already, if you look at some of the more recent humanoid animated movies I think they got all the emotions pretty realistically simulated. The happy people look happy, the sad people look sad, all the frowns and grins and smiles and winks are there just not with a photo-realistic face.
Now this may seem like a lot of work just to replace a few actors but I'm also thinking it's a one time development cost. People will look pretty much like people 10, 20, 50 years from now so once you nail it to the point people can't tell in an AB comparison you're done and you can use it forever. And the feedback loop is pretty damn easy so IMHO it's more a matter of how fast we get there than if we get there. It helps that it's all software and pixels on a screen though, a Westworld style robot I think is ages away.
Yeah, but you also have to remember that every time a rule is introduced someone lost the opportunity to make some profit, had to pay for some safety gear, was forced to fit a filter, had to internalize a cost. That regulation injured someone's wallet. It was enacted to reduce someone's bottom line.
Unless they just let shit flow downhill, do you think it's SUV manufacturers or SUV owners who get to bear the bulk of the cost? Of course you could say that's the right place to internalize it as it's the users who create the demand for the gas guzzlers but there's also a whole lot more of those than car company stock holders and they got the right to vote. And the math on this is seriously wonky, say VW cheated on their emissions test and didn't internalize the cost. Can we get an itemized bill showing what expenses society suffered as a result? I doubt it. I understand that reducing emissions is good for the environment and that has some kind of value, but it's more an ideology than a business ledger...
another might navigate a vehicle; (...) but none will do ALL those things for a very long time.
You think a self-driving car is one AI? I'm guessing it's at a minimum two, one image-recognition AI translating sensor data to objects and one driving AI working out the route. I think both because of resource limitations and to upgrade components we will have sub-AIs that deal with their little specialty, not so different from human brain centers and how when you learn to ride a bike it's stored somewhere, you don't figure it out from scratch. Like a chef AI would have a small "fillet a fish" sub-AI and the sum is more of a collection than a unified intelligence. When that's the task at hand though you don't need "big AI", you need an expert at filleting. It's not a downside for an AI to be a one trick pony because it's software and you can fit a ton of ponies in one device.
Which proves java is a shit technology. The whole point is write once run everywhere, when everywhere does not even include a later JVM version it's pretty broken. Java leaks to much of the abstraction. It should not be possible for the monkeys to cause themselves these problems.
In theory the monkeys shouldn't cause problems at all. In practice any non-trivial software has shipped with buggy, flawed or broken functionality including the JVM itself. I've witnessed myself how security patches to Java broke functionality. The solution? Install the exact version it was released with and leave it there. Sure, the support agreement says patches are supported. In practice, you get to be the beta tester.
More like two people arguing whether Kiss or AC/DC is better with Trump coming in as the crazy friend high on LSD asking if he should bash the other guy's skull in. And then it's like "Uh no we're good, they're both good bands... we're friends, see" because I don't think this happened on its own. I think they realized that Trump might actually set off a new Korean war, regardless if that'd fuck both North and South Korea hard. So when push comes to shove they'd rather come to terms, at least while the crazy guy is in the room...
I think 4K had a lot more going for it though because cinemas use DCI 4K so ~4K masters exist. Also they threw in Rec. 2020, 10 bit color and HDR into the 4K BluRay standard all of which improve the image considerably. It's hard to see anything else they got left to throw in for 8K except maybe finally standardizing the HDR encoding. And if it's good enough for the whole wall at the cinema, I sorta don't see home users crying for 8K. In fact I did some tests by down-scaling and up-scaling images on my 4K monitor and based on my eyes - which are not perfect - and my couch distance I found that I'd see just a tiny bit of improvement on my 60" 1080p TV if it were 4K.
Cheapest HDD I can buy here in Norway at the moment: 4TB for 799 NOK = ~$20/TB before VAT, cheapest SSD is 1911 NOK for 960 GB = ~$200/TB before VAT so still 10x and it's been that way for a while. The Samsung EVO 960 price was almost flat for its entire lifetime, same if I look at the Crucial MX300 which has also been around a good while. Sure better warranty, endurance, performance and consistency is nice but the data still has to fit. I miss the old days when computers got twice as good for half the price every 18 months or whatever the latest bastardization of Moore's law was. RAM prices have tripled from the bottom in 2016. GPUs have gone nuts on the crypto craze. You actually got a better computer for the same money a few years ago than you do today, except maybe the CPU where Ryzen has made some ways.
The sub-$1000 laptop market? Windows, Windows, Windows... and 2% Chromebook/Linux. They got 98% of Steam users. Probably 98% of the corporate market too, since Apple doesn't give a shit about anything like AD. Two more years and Windows 7 is out of support, then what? YotLD now that's a good laugh, it's exactly where it was 10 years ago. Unless Apple or Google makes a real move for the mainstream desktop soon it'll be the One Microsoft Way. I'll go Linux but I have no illusions the masses will follow.
The desktop is mostly dead for things like simple web browsing,
Goes to StatCounter to check... yep, 44% market share is mostly dead. Granted, mobile is bigger with 52% and tablets make up the last 4% but the hyperbole is strong.
Just to add to this, you can refer to the period from 1900 - 1999 as "the 1900's" if you want to group them like that, just like 1990 - 1999 is referred to as "the 90's." However, the grouping of "1901 - 2000" is referred to as "the 20th Century."
I think it works if you're talking about less than a century, like the Christmas tree became popular in Europe in the early 1800s sounds just as good to me as early 19th century and for all practical purposes means the same. It sounds really odd to me if you say Macro Polo was a 1200s explorer instead of 13th century explorer though. So for consistency I'd rather count centuries one way and decades the other rather than flip-flop at some point, it's the 21st century and we're in the 2010's. I imagine i'll be dead by the next off-by-one error anyway...
Meh, to me it looks like a lot of exaggerated drama. Tesla got >3 billion on hand and can burn money at their current rate for well over a year. Meanwhile they've had a massive facility ramp-up. Bloomberg estimates they now produce 2733 Model 3s a week, if they can hit their 5k/week end of quarter goal all those shorting will be crying. Either way I think this more for investors and how good ROI they're getting, not that Tesla is going anywhere...
- Openbook will run out of money (yes, it costs money to run servers for hundreds of millions of users)
Well this is a crucial question, how much money to stay afloat and could you get that through some other means assuming this is driven by an idealistic non-profit organization. For example if you could manage to create some kind of "meta-social media" system with plug-and-play providers where you don't actually have to re-invent and host all of Facebook. So if you like want to chat with someone it's like "Chat on Skype" "Chat on Discord" "Chat on Facebook Messenger" etc. based on compatible systems and preferences. Somebody shared a photo with you on Instagram or a video via Vimeo. And make you able to switch hosting providers including self-hosting so it'd be more like web-hotels and the client more like an advanced RSS-style feed than one website to rule them all.
I think it's possible without becoming a huge money pit, it wouldn't be free but maybe cheap enough to get by on Wikipedia-style begging rounds.
Publicly owned infrastructure is and has, to varying degrees, always been (necessary) part of functional capitalist nations. In communism the idea was to make the whole industry publicly owned.
Publicly owned and operated, like the employees had no stake in the outcome. There's a very important distinction between what's offered as a public service and how it's delivered. For example when I was kid, trash collection was a public service delivered by public employees. while these days it's all through bids and tenders. Now that does have all the bad sides of a for-profit company like cutting corners and trying to take advantage of workers, but on the positive side it means that people are always really looking for how to do it cheaper and more efficient. It's a problem when you don't have qualified contract management, good metrics for quality or poor laws to protect workers but I've seen how hard it is to change systems that don't really have to change because they have a monopoly. It's quite different in the private industry where you either beat the competition or lose the market and lose your jobs.
In Belgium (...) many of the businesses that are not cash-only will only accept cards that work on the local Bancontact network
Yes, this is the situation in most of Europe today, there's a national system and they let VISA/MasterCard/AmEx etc. deal with foreigners either by forcing you to visit an ATM, just eating the cost because it's a so small part of their business it's not worth bothering with or it's a tourist place with tourist prices where they just factor it into the overhead. Clearly if they wanted to go cashless there would have to be a better way to for foreign visitors to get into the national "eCash" system. Which wouldn't be that hard, just set up a way to issue such cards on international hubs and border crossings that'd be kinda like Visa Electron, online-only debit cards. The government would probably tie them to foreign passports to curb them from being used as anonymous domestic quasi-cash by passing them around, but even if they didn't they'd keep a much better track of the money flow than today.
Yes, I know many smaller businesses would like cash to pocket a bit of money on the side but I think the big chains, large consumer products and high end market would jump on it. Maybe the burger store on the corner but if you want a burger from McD or Burger King would love cashless, less risk of theft or embezzlement. Same thing with Wal-Mart. Those selling TVs and washing machines probably too, they don't want to sit on the cash from big ticket expenses. I think this would quickly become a snowballing practice, a few stores/shops start encouraging/pressuring consumers to get electronic and then a few more stores and a few more consumers until that is suddenly the norm.
Where I live, the practice is that if the restaurant has a sign by the door that they accept only credit/debit cards and you still enter and order, then that counts as a "preexisting agreement" that you are supposed to pay with card. That's legal wrangling for you but does not work with human behaviour. People miss those signs all the time.
As long as they courts are willing to play along, who cares? If they've first established that you're in the wrong, they can act like letting you pay in cash is an act of kindness. Or adds a cash processing fee. If it goes to court they'll just say the agreement was accepted, we made a reasonable attempt at settlement so please slap this person wasting the court's time. It's usually a bad idea to play hardball if you're going to lose...
Cash costs money but credit cards take a lot more depending on the size of the purchase.
Indeed, because they add a lot of services into that "credit" side of it like for example travel insurance and kickbacks where customers appear to be "saving" money. In Europe there's actually a lot of alternative debit card systems run by the banks, like here in Norway there's "BankAxept". In Germany they have "Girocard". Without all the bells and whistles here in Norway at least they pay roughly $0.02/transaction, which is way below the cost of actually handling cash. So honestly, the only reason businesses accept cash here is because they must. The moment the law changes and they're not required to I imagine very many businesses will go cashless. So if you're thinking cashless won't happen because companies won't accept it, well you're wrong. Really the only compelling argument is that in a real emergency society would collapse if people couldn't pay for basic necessities, so everyone should have a cash reserve. But it's like fire insurance on your house, hopefully you'll never ever need it.
You know, it takes courage to stay nerdy and not trendy.
Funny, since so much of nerd culture revolves around tech futurism like when do we colonize Mars and get flyi^H^H^H^H self-driving cars and what happens after robots take all our jobs and rouge AIs take over the world. Discussing next-generation gizmos and gadgets seems right up our alley, even if smartphones also are somewhat about the bling and this blog is just wild speculation like the rest of us. Personally I continue to be amazed at how much technology we can fit in a pocket. And while Apple isn't exactly the prime example for many people a cheap smartphone is the first computer they'll ever have. All that said, it's not that revolutionary changes from year to year anymore.
Everyone is looking to move up to do the best for their family. Indians to America. Syrians to Europe. Americas to Canada. Americans to Europe. The people first to move are the well educated with the capital to make such a move.
Meh, that's a load of bullshit. They're extremely disproportionally young males allegedly under 18, the expendables of the family and not really educated for anything. Their mission is to anchor themselves as "children", get some menial work to send money back to their family and apply for family reunification. They might be doing it for the family's good but they're almost all a huge money sink on the receiving nation. Only those truly blinded by ideology manage to think otherwise.
So now rather than just being able to transfer the money online, I have to go to one of their branches and deal with a bank teller. I really miss being able to use my iPhone to transfer money, for example, to pay back a friend when they pay for a meal with their credit card. BoA just keeps creating more work for their tellers.
And they let you do that without fees? That's how they killed real world banking here in Norway, if you want to pay a bill in cash expect to be charged >$10 in fees for each. About $8 if you've got an account. By mail $0.25. Online, nothing. So 91% of all age 16-79 pay their bills online. Another overview I found suggests 97% by volume. Bank offices are closing left and right or they're going "cashless" with ATMs/deposit/exchange machines and just financial advisers, the people don't touch the money. Traditional tellers are almost extinct here.
Libertarian && Rich = I got mine so screw you. It's amazing how many people think a "fair" world is one where they're better off, it's like 90% think they're above average drivers.
UI and capabilities can be as different as users want them to be, but there is no need to force internal and external developers to do duplicate work. Few of iOS games are ported to OSX, the difference should only be in control scheme (and iOS/Apple TVs should trivially support paired Bluetooth input devices). The only reason to not do this now is if engineering effort is too high.
Well and what's fun wasting a bit of time riding the bus is different from a marathon session in Civilization. I hope they implement it like a flip switch, here's your mobile/touch-focused UI and here's your desktop/keyboard+mouse-focused UI not mangle them to oblivion.
Here in Norway 85% of the PSTN/ISDN customers are gone since the peak in the early 2000s. Fiber is now biggest and growing, cable is second and holding steady through upgrades so replacing the last mile is not necessary while xDSL is third and dropping. Pretty much all new installations are now fiber, no matter who does it. Our main telecom operator already suggested this once before, I think mostly to see how much resistance they'd get and get the ball rolling. The problem are those where it's not cost effective to put fiber in the ground, but it was probably not cost effective to put copper in the ground either. I think that eventually we'll convert the requirement that you must deliver phone access (wireless service okay) into must deliver Internet access of a certain bandwidth/cap/quality. We still got at least 2-3 years of massive commercial roll-out before that though, let's see where we're at then.
This post brought to you by Post-Truth! Working to put uninformed gut feelings on par with history, science, and math since 2016!
Meh, the post-truth movement is as old as time itself. Heck even an octopus has figured out that if a clear view of the situation is not to your advantage blot it out with ink. For every situation there's someone willing to believe it's a false flag operation or that the real news are fake. There was no massacre, they're all hired actors. Nobody got assassinated, it's a conspiracy to accuse us. Heck, there's still people who think Holocaust didn't happen despite so many tons of evidence and testimony across millions of stories. But the people who want to believe differently probably think there's a secret Jew camp ghostwriting stories, photoshopping pictures, falsifying records and built the concentration camps as props. There will always be more and less sane people that refuse facts as fiction.
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Surely there is a way to harness the radiation as an energy source that doesn't involve using the waste heat.
It's hard to see how because the energy involved is just so high it would rip any static structure apart. It's not like one fission reaction interacts with one water molecule, it's bouncing around spreading the energy to a whole bunch of them. And it's not just radiation it's all the smaller nuclei created by splitting the atom. Heck, we don't even need power generation if you found a way to stop them dead you'd get a Nobel prize. It's an even bigger problem for fusion, it's a problem for space travel with cosmic rays, it's just too much energy in a very very small package. Like trying to make getting shot with bullets into an energy source.
The next time you drive in the city consider how many of your decisions are predicated on understanding subtleties (some might occasion "stupidities") of human nature
Well, I can't say for certain how many accidents I've avoided through the human perspective. But if I'm tallying the accidents I and those I know have had driving they're almost exclusively caused by glitches in how we drive, like things you almost always pay attention to but then for some reason we had a lapse of concentration or was tired or got distracted or was emotionally on tilt. If not massive errors in judgement passing other cars that almost lead to head on collisions. In fact, I can't really say I remember a single "pat myself on the back" incident where my above-and-beyond response saved the day.
Usually what you're talking about is a means to drive more aggressively, like if I can tell they're not crossing the street I can drive by faster. But if I didn't I'd just drive by slower so I could stop if they crossed the street, it maximizes my goal to get to where I'm going as fast as possible but it's probably not avoiding accidents. I don't think self-driving cars will be perfect, but I think they'll be a lot more consistent and always keep reasonable safety margins. Combined with always paying attention it won't get into much of the trouble we humans use our brains to get out of. Unless it's made by Uber...
Even in Rouge One, I didn't really notice the CGI characters until my second viewing
I still wonder how many saw it without knowing they're CGI characters, how many only saw it when they knew and how many are just agreeing with the crowd. Like if you asked a trick question about a non-CGI character how many would claim they saw it too.
However we are in a process now of going up on the uncanny valley. Where CGI characters use to seem like animated corpses, now they seem like people with Novocain injected in their faces.
Yep. Something tells me this can all be solved with modelling all the way down to the cranial structure, the muscles, the layers of skin (epidermis, dermis, hypodermis) with real physics simulation plus a good behavioral model. Actually I think they got that part done already, if you look at some of the more recent humanoid animated movies I think they got all the emotions pretty realistically simulated. The happy people look happy, the sad people look sad, all the frowns and grins and smiles and winks are there just not with a photo-realistic face.
Now this may seem like a lot of work just to replace a few actors but I'm also thinking it's a one time development cost. People will look pretty much like people 10, 20, 50 years from now so once you nail it to the point people can't tell in an AB comparison you're done and you can use it forever. And the feedback loop is pretty damn easy so IMHO it's more a matter of how fast we get there than if we get there. It helps that it's all software and pixels on a screen though, a Westworld style robot I think is ages away.
Yeah, but you also have to remember that every time a rule is introduced someone lost the opportunity to make some profit, had to pay for some safety gear, was forced to fit a filter, had to internalize a cost. That regulation injured someone's wallet. It was enacted to reduce someone's bottom line.
Unless they just let shit flow downhill, do you think it's SUV manufacturers or SUV owners who get to bear the bulk of the cost? Of course you could say that's the right place to internalize it as it's the users who create the demand for the gas guzzlers but there's also a whole lot more of those than car company stock holders and they got the right to vote. And the math on this is seriously wonky, say VW cheated on their emissions test and didn't internalize the cost. Can we get an itemized bill showing what expenses society suffered as a result? I doubt it. I understand that reducing emissions is good for the environment and that has some kind of value, but it's more an ideology than a business ledger...
another might navigate a vehicle; (...) but none will do ALL those things for a very long time.
You think a self-driving car is one AI? I'm guessing it's at a minimum two, one image-recognition AI translating sensor data to objects and one driving AI working out the route. I think both because of resource limitations and to upgrade components we will have sub-AIs that deal with their little specialty, not so different from human brain centers and how when you learn to ride a bike it's stored somewhere, you don't figure it out from scratch. Like a chef AI would have a small "fillet a fish" sub-AI and the sum is more of a collection than a unified intelligence. When that's the task at hand though you don't need "big AI", you need an expert at filleting. It's not a downside for an AI to be a one trick pony because it's software and you can fit a ton of ponies in one device.
Which proves java is a shit technology. The whole point is write once run everywhere, when everywhere does not even include a later JVM version it's pretty broken. Java leaks to much of the abstraction. It should not be possible for the monkeys to cause themselves these problems.
In theory the monkeys shouldn't cause problems at all. In practice any non-trivial software has shipped with buggy, flawed or broken functionality including the JVM itself. I've witnessed myself how security patches to Java broke functionality. The solution? Install the exact version it was released with and leave it there. Sure, the support agreement says patches are supported. In practice, you get to be the beta tester.
More like two people arguing whether Kiss or AC/DC is better with Trump coming in as the crazy friend high on LSD asking if he should bash the other guy's skull in. And then it's like "Uh no we're good, they're both good bands... we're friends, see" because I don't think this happened on its own. I think they realized that Trump might actually set off a new Korean war, regardless if that'd fuck both North and South Korea hard. So when push comes to shove they'd rather come to terms, at least while the crazy guy is in the room...
I think 4K had a lot more going for it though because cinemas use DCI 4K so ~4K masters exist. Also they threw in Rec. 2020, 10 bit color and HDR into the 4K BluRay standard all of which improve the image considerably. It's hard to see anything else they got left to throw in for 8K except maybe finally standardizing the HDR encoding. And if it's good enough for the whole wall at the cinema, I sorta don't see home users crying for 8K. In fact I did some tests by down-scaling and up-scaling images on my 4K monitor and based on my eyes - which are not perfect - and my couch distance I found that I'd see just a tiny bit of improvement on my 60" 1080p TV if it were 4K.
Cheapest HDD I can buy here in Norway at the moment: 4TB for 799 NOK = ~$20/TB before VAT, cheapest SSD is 1911 NOK for 960 GB = ~$200/TB before VAT so still 10x and it's been that way for a while. The Samsung EVO 960 price was almost flat for its entire lifetime, same if I look at the Crucial MX300 which has also been around a good while. Sure better warranty, endurance, performance and consistency is nice but the data still has to fit. I miss the old days when computers got twice as good for half the price every 18 months or whatever the latest bastardization of Moore's law was. RAM prices have tripled from the bottom in 2016. GPUs have gone nuts on the crypto craze. You actually got a better computer for the same money a few years ago than you do today, except maybe the CPU where Ryzen has made some ways.
I azure you, Microsoft is not going anywhere.
MacBook: $1300/1600
MacBook Air: $1000/1200
MacBook Pro: $1300/1500/1800
The sub-$1000 laptop market? Windows, Windows, Windows... and 2% Chromebook/Linux. They got 98% of Steam users. Probably 98% of the corporate market too, since Apple doesn't give a shit about anything like AD. Two more years and Windows 7 is out of support, then what? YotLD now that's a good laugh, it's exactly where it was 10 years ago. Unless Apple or Google makes a real move for the mainstream desktop soon it'll be the One Microsoft Way. I'll go Linux but I have no illusions the masses will follow.
The desktop is mostly dead for things like simple web browsing,
Goes to StatCounter to check... yep, 44% market share is mostly dead. Granted, mobile is bigger with 52% and tablets make up the last 4% but the hyperbole is strong.
Just to add to this, you can refer to the period from 1900 - 1999 as "the 1900's" if you want to group them like that, just like 1990 - 1999 is referred to as "the 90's." However, the grouping of "1901 - 2000" is referred to as "the 20th Century."
I think it works if you're talking about less than a century, like the Christmas tree became popular in Europe in the early 1800s sounds just as good to me as early 19th century and for all practical purposes means the same. It sounds really odd to me if you say Macro Polo was a 1200s explorer instead of 13th century explorer though. So for consistency I'd rather count centuries one way and decades the other rather than flip-flop at some point, it's the 21st century and we're in the 2010's. I imagine i'll be dead by the next off-by-one error anyway...
Meh, to me it looks like a lot of exaggerated drama. Tesla got >3 billion on hand and can burn money at their current rate for well over a year. Meanwhile they've had a massive facility ramp-up. Bloomberg estimates they now produce 2733 Model 3s a week, if they can hit their 5k/week end of quarter goal all those shorting will be crying. Either way I think this more for investors and how good ROI they're getting, not that Tesla is going anywhere...
- Openbook will run out of money (yes, it costs money to run servers for hundreds of millions of users)
Well this is a crucial question, how much money to stay afloat and could you get that through some other means assuming this is driven by an idealistic non-profit organization. For example if you could manage to create some kind of "meta-social media" system with plug-and-play providers where you don't actually have to re-invent and host all of Facebook. So if you like want to chat with someone it's like "Chat on Skype" "Chat on Discord" "Chat on Facebook Messenger" etc. based on compatible systems and preferences. Somebody shared a photo with you on Instagram or a video via Vimeo. And make you able to switch hosting providers including self-hosting so it'd be more like web-hotels and the client more like an advanced RSS-style feed than one website to rule them all.
I think it's possible without becoming a huge money pit, it wouldn't be free but maybe cheap enough to get by on Wikipedia-style begging rounds.
Publicly owned infrastructure is and has, to varying degrees, always been (necessary) part of functional capitalist nations. In communism the idea was to make the whole industry publicly owned.
Publicly owned and operated, like the employees had no stake in the outcome. There's a very important distinction between what's offered as a public service and how it's delivered. For example when I was kid, trash collection was a public service delivered by public employees. while these days it's all through bids and tenders. Now that does have all the bad sides of a for-profit company like cutting corners and trying to take advantage of workers, but on the positive side it means that people are always really looking for how to do it cheaper and more efficient. It's a problem when you don't have qualified contract management, good metrics for quality or poor laws to protect workers but I've seen how hard it is to change systems that don't really have to change because they have a monopoly. It's quite different in the private industry where you either beat the competition or lose the market and lose your jobs.
In Belgium (...) many of the businesses that are not cash-only will only accept cards that work on the local Bancontact network
Yes, this is the situation in most of Europe today, there's a national system and they let VISA/MasterCard/AmEx etc. deal with foreigners either by forcing you to visit an ATM, just eating the cost because it's a so small part of their business it's not worth bothering with or it's a tourist place with tourist prices where they just factor it into the overhead. Clearly if they wanted to go cashless there would have to be a better way to for foreign visitors to get into the national "eCash" system. Which wouldn't be that hard, just set up a way to issue such cards on international hubs and border crossings that'd be kinda like Visa Electron, online-only debit cards. The government would probably tie them to foreign passports to curb them from being used as anonymous domestic quasi-cash by passing them around, but even if they didn't they'd keep a much better track of the money flow than today.
Yes, I know many smaller businesses would like cash to pocket a bit of money on the side but I think the big chains, large consumer products and high end market would jump on it. Maybe the burger store on the corner but if you want a burger from McD or Burger King would love cashless, less risk of theft or embezzlement. Same thing with Wal-Mart. Those selling TVs and washing machines probably too, they don't want to sit on the cash from big ticket expenses. I think this would quickly become a snowballing practice, a few stores/shops start encouraging/pressuring consumers to get electronic and then a few more stores and a few more consumers until that is suddenly the norm.
Where I live, the practice is that if the restaurant has a sign by the door that they accept only credit/debit cards and you still enter and order, then that counts as a "preexisting agreement" that you are supposed to pay with card. That's legal wrangling for you but does not work with human behaviour. People miss those signs all the time.
As long as they courts are willing to play along, who cares? If they've first established that you're in the wrong, they can act like letting you pay in cash is an act of kindness. Or adds a cash processing fee. If it goes to court they'll just say the agreement was accepted, we made a reasonable attempt at settlement so please slap this person wasting the court's time. It's usually a bad idea to play hardball if you're going to lose...
Cash costs money but credit cards take a lot more depending on the size of the purchase.
Indeed, because they add a lot of services into that "credit" side of it like for example travel insurance and kickbacks where customers appear to be "saving" money. In Europe there's actually a lot of alternative debit card systems run by the banks, like here in Norway there's "BankAxept". In Germany they have "Girocard". Without all the bells and whistles here in Norway at least they pay roughly $0.02/transaction, which is way below the cost of actually handling cash. So honestly, the only reason businesses accept cash here is because they must. The moment the law changes and they're not required to I imagine very many businesses will go cashless. So if you're thinking cashless won't happen because companies won't accept it, well you're wrong. Really the only compelling argument is that in a real emergency society would collapse if people couldn't pay for basic necessities, so everyone should have a cash reserve. But it's like fire insurance on your house, hopefully you'll never ever need it.
You know, it takes courage to stay nerdy and not trendy.
Funny, since so much of nerd culture revolves around tech futurism like when do we colonize Mars and get flyi^H^H^H^H self-driving cars and what happens after robots take all our jobs and rouge AIs take over the world. Discussing next-generation gizmos and gadgets seems right up our alley, even if smartphones also are somewhat about the bling and this blog is just wild speculation like the rest of us. Personally I continue to be amazed at how much technology we can fit in a pocket. And while Apple isn't exactly the prime example for many people a cheap smartphone is the first computer they'll ever have. All that said, it's not that revolutionary changes from year to year anymore.
Everyone is looking to move up to do the best for their family. Indians to America. Syrians to Europe. Americas to Canada. Americans to Europe. The people first to move are the well educated with the capital to make such a move.
Meh, that's a load of bullshit. They're extremely disproportionally young males allegedly under 18, the expendables of the family and not really educated for anything. Their mission is to anchor themselves as "children", get some menial work to send money back to their family and apply for family reunification. They might be doing it for the family's good but they're almost all a huge money sink on the receiving nation. Only those truly blinded by ideology manage to think otherwise.
So now rather than just being able to transfer the money online, I have to go to one of their branches and deal with a bank teller. I really miss being able to use my iPhone to transfer money, for example, to pay back a friend when they pay for a meal with their credit card. BoA just keeps creating more work for their tellers.
And they let you do that without fees? That's how they killed real world banking here in Norway, if you want to pay a bill in cash expect to be charged >$10 in fees for each. About $8 if you've got an account. By mail $0.25. Online, nothing. So 91% of all age 16-79 pay their bills online. Another overview I found suggests 97% by volume. Bank offices are closing left and right or they're going "cashless" with ATMs/deposit/exchange machines and just financial advisers, the people don't touch the money. Traditional tellers are almost extinct here.
Libertarian && Rich = I got mine so screw you. It's amazing how many people think a "fair" world is one where they're better off, it's like 90% think they're above average drivers.
UI and capabilities can be as different as users want them to be, but there is no need to force internal and external developers to do duplicate work. Few of iOS games are ported to OSX, the difference should only be in control scheme (and iOS/Apple TVs should trivially support paired Bluetooth input devices). The only reason to not do this now is if engineering effort is too high.
Well and what's fun wasting a bit of time riding the bus is different from a marathon session in Civilization. I hope they implement it like a flip switch, here's your mobile/touch-focused UI and here's your desktop/keyboard+mouse-focused UI not mangle them to oblivion.
Here in Norway 85% of the PSTN/ISDN customers are gone since the peak in the early 2000s. Fiber is now biggest and growing, cable is second and holding steady through upgrades so replacing the last mile is not necessary while xDSL is third and dropping. Pretty much all new installations are now fiber, no matter who does it. Our main telecom operator already suggested this once before, I think mostly to see how much resistance they'd get and get the ball rolling. The problem are those where it's not cost effective to put fiber in the ground, but it was probably not cost effective to put copper in the ground either. I think that eventually we'll convert the requirement that you must deliver phone access (wireless service okay) into must deliver Internet access of a certain bandwidth/cap/quality. We still got at least 2-3 years of massive commercial roll-out before that though, let's see where we're at then.
This post brought to you by Post-Truth! Working to put uninformed gut feelings on par with history, science, and math since 2016!
Meh, the post-truth movement is as old as time itself. Heck even an octopus has figured out that if a clear view of the situation is not to your advantage blot it out with ink. For every situation there's someone willing to believe it's a false flag operation or that the real news are fake. There was no massacre, they're all hired actors. Nobody got assassinated, it's a conspiracy to accuse us. Heck, there's still people who think Holocaust didn't happen despite so many tons of evidence and testimony across millions of stories. But the people who want to believe differently probably think there's a secret Jew camp ghostwriting stories, photoshopping pictures, falsifying records and built the concentration camps as props. There will always be more and less sane people that refuse facts as fiction.