Numbers are almost irrelevant when we're the species that can eliminate all other large species. Who cares if there's a kazillion bacteria when we've eliminated anything bigger than a cockroach? To be an advanced species you need a considerable brain. Which requires a considerable body. Which we won't let you. It's really quite simple....
A timeline to switch over before the first successful prototypes been demonstrated...
Norway is a tiny speck on the world map made rich by oil with vast delusions of grandeur. In particular I'd there's three areas where the elite thinks Norway makes a global impact:
The first one leads to things like the Oslo Accords where Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton ended the Middle East conflict - that's pretty much what was promised anyhow. Strangely enough they also got the Nobel Peace Prize which Norway awards. The second is another chest-thumper as one of very few countries give 1% of our GDP in foreign aid, difference is of course we can afford to. In the global economy we're still a fly spec with 0.5% of the world's GDP, even if we bat harder than average with just 0.07% of the population. And the third is environmentalism, renewable energy and green tech, if you read the domestic press it's almost like Tesla exists because of Norwegian tax breaks. They've promised to *end* the sale of fossil fuel cars in 7 years, this is perfectly in line with that.
I could go on but suffice to say that the Norwegian economy is running a massive deficit made up for by oil fund yields. Over the next couple decades we'll see a massive economic downturn as the oil income dries up and the post-WWII generation retires where we'll see a very rude wake-up call to economic realities we haven't really had to deal with in decades. And that's when I expect this near unbounded idealism will end, we'll stop trying to save the world and start getting busy with saving ourselves. Though I'm pretty sure we've been spoiled rotten and instead of making the hard and unpopular changes we will end up burning through our savings to crash in a Greek inferno. But we have enough money for some decades so hopefully I'll be dead by then.
To put it another way, it's the difference between giving someone a drug dealer's number and actually dealing drugs.
You seem to assume the former is innocent and the case law is settled, that's far from the truth. If I send some drugs in a package from Mexico to the US in the mail, what's the difference between the mailman and a drug mule? One is considered an "innocent" intermediary like the phone company, your VCR, your ISP, YouTube and so on. The other is considered a "guilty" intermediary like Napster and The Pirate Bay. There's rules for flea markets and pawn shops and Craigslist and so on, you can't just run a thinly veiled prostitution section and get away with it.
Look up some of the marketplaces that have been convicted of selling drugs on the dark net, you don't have to be actually dealing drugs as long as your skimming part of the profit through advertisements or fees. Or in the case of child porn sites you don't even have to make a profit, as long as the court find you've been the one running forums facilitating other people swapping kiddie porn. You can probably feign ignorance for many things, like he bought that gun for self defense not robbery or murder. But if you tell someone where to buy cocaine they could probably charge you with something.
Greed can not be cured. It can be controlled however, but for that you'd need a functioning democracy. Democracy isn't functioning...
Well it's a little bit more complicated than that. Universal single player systems work well for conditions that have an easy diagnosis and a known treatment. For things that are experimental and where there's no guarantee of result the public system has a real problem differentiating between those who really give it an effort and those who just slack.
We have one of these guys at work, IMHO he's a notorious work dodger. He's the kind of guy who at the slightest road bump says "I don't know how do that", "Where can I find that?", "What does this mean?", "That didn't work" or "Nobody has taught me how to do that", "I'm new at this", "The documentation is lacking", "I have too many competing responsibilities/tasks" etc. without the slightest bit of effort to figure out things on his own. And at status meetings he reports back things that I think is like "Wow, that must have taken 15 minutes out of your work week... what did you do with the rest?"
And if you give him any exploratory tasks like "looking into X" he always exploring some kind of promising opportunity that somehow universally fails to materialize 100% of the time. I'm so fucking tired of it, it's the kind of tasks where I too have maybe a 30-70% success rate depending on how experimental it is but you ought to recognize a flat 0%. But then I've never seen our project managers ever be tough about anything but deadlines where we share blame.
Commercial companies, for better or for worse, care about real results. If you don't have a drug to sell, you don't make money. Which means the entire system, top-to-bottom is geared towards making money. My colleague, well he'd maybe get a slight raise if he did better but it's not like he gets royalties for anything. Neither do I. He's probably the one playing the game better with >80% my salary (my guess) delivering <20% of the results (my estimate).
I hope Google does do some pull requests, so this goes into Debian, and perhaps filters to Ubuntu. Done right, their changes can have a major positive effect on the entire Linux ecosystem.
My impression on this from the Linux kernel split, wakelocks etc. is that Google doesn't keep any of this to themselves. But they're also not going to fight upstream if upstream disagrees with what they're doing or how they're doing it. I mean the reason most people want something upstreamed is so they don't have to maintain it themselves, Google is essentially saying we're big enough to maintain this ourselves so if you don't want it.... whatever, not really our problem.
There's a lot of things we could do on Mars that'd be experimental, but for the initial trip it will be tested technology and methods which we're fairly sure will work.
Growing food on Mars? Experiment. Canned food? Will work. Gathering water from ice on Mars? Experiment. Bringing water? Will work. Producing fuel on Mars? Experiment. Bring fuel? Will work. Mining on Mars? Experiment. Bring a self-contained RTG? Will work.
Of course, by the time NASA gets their ass to Mars, we'll already have fusion reactors.
I'd flip that around, by the time we have fusion reactors we'll already have a Mars colony... if there's any overhyped coming-real-soon-now technology it's fusion reactors, I remember reading about those as a kid.
I don't think it is a matter of appearing "too wise". I have known several people with IQs from 140 to 160, and while they were not Rainman, they all had some significant personality disorders. I think it is those socialization problems that keep many high IQers from being good leaders rather than just being "too smart".
Well, I wonder if that's the cause or effect. I was at a math contest and most of us were like 18-19yo, there was a 13yo supergenius there who ran circles around almost all of us. In some ways he could hold intellectual conversions on level with a college grad student, in other ways he was still a little kid. But he'd be a real oddball either way, even though he didn't have any disorder that I could tell. But it would be stranger if that kind of childhood didn't leave any odd social quirks than if it did.
Only 147 MB for a glorified IRC client! Get yours now!
So what kind of peanuts do you work for if that's an issue? I don't recall how many GB the work computer uses but it has Windows, Visual Studio, SQL Server so it's at least 50 GB+. And if it was 50.2 GB... nobody would give a shit. The computer could have IRC, ICQ, AIM, Skype, Discord, Lync, Slack, Jabber and a dozen more "collaboration" apps running just fine. But I'd like just one that works really well, the resources it takes are negligible. As long as the bloat doesn't translate to being slow...
This. When I ask for delivery I mean for someone else to bring it to my door. I don't want to leave the house. In other words, I don't want to get dressed, put on shoes and walk out to the curb.
I'm sure they'll find a market without you. Like back when I didn't own a car or when I've had a few beers. For me it's more the "fit for socializing" aspect, like if I haven't showered, haven't shaved, hung over, dirty/sweaty clothes and just want to chow down a pizza in front of the TV or PC. Personally I'd rather get my slob ass down to the curb with zero social interaction than greet the pizza delivery guy like that, in fact I might just opt for a frozen pizza instead. A small physical discomfort because it's freezing/raining is not a big deal to me, particularly not if I know there's a warm tasty pizza at the end of it.
So wouldn't making the recyclers more efficient reduce their costs as well?
And how do you propose to do that? Recycling means you get a mixed bag of everything people gave you and you never know what they were thinking. As an analogy, around here at Christmas time there's a donation box for gifts for the poor and because of the personal touch it encourages more and bigger contributions than paying donations. They wrap it up nice and pretty like it's ready to go from secret Santa to straight under the Christmas tree, on the card you're supposed to write the target age/sex.
Do you know what happens to all those presents? They're unwrapped, unpacked, inspected, reviewed for age/sex appropriateness, repacked and re-wrapped. And not just because some people have a bit strange ideas about what's really fit for a Christmas present or useful for a kid. But because there's always some ass hat with mental problems who'll wrap up a broken PlayStation or sex toy or dog poop and a note that says here's a little shit for a little shit. The system only works because they got volunteers willing to perpetuate a fantasy while shielding the recipients from what would actually happen.
You just can't get away from that individual checking of everything. It's the same thing that's killed much of the repair business, if your toaster is broken go buy a new one. Even if it's just a tiny fix the repair guy has exhausted the budget almost before he can get the lid off while a thousand rolled off the assembly line in China. And if the market doesn't care the manufacturer doesn't care about making manuals, parts and equipment etc. available either. Huge, controlled environments with identical items have economics of scale. Small, uncontrolled environments with mixed items don't.
... the third world would spiral further into poverty and desolation thanks to rich western doogooders taking away their only competitive advantage: cheap labour.
I think you're confusing cause and effect. American wages were steadily increasing until the liberalization of international trade, it's American wages being depressed to stay in competitive range of cheap labor from China, India and so on. If they demanded better pay and treatment US workers would increase their rates too while the 1% would make less profit. I mean seriously look at that red bar, "Real median weekly earnings of full time workers". The median is more representative of the typical American than the mean (called average in graph). Full time workers exclude changes in demographics, the fact that more women work, most of the boom-bust cycles etc. and basically looks at what does an ordinary job pay. And it's been stagnant for close to 50 years. If you want to find Trump's pissed core voters, there they are.
Let's see how the economy defines "progress" when employing a human is the target of obsolescence.
There is a lot of work where we didn't make the employees more efficient, we replaced them entirely. And replacing all work... I do automate things at work. And every time there's a new demand/wish for us to deliver more in like ten different directions. Once upon a time we got the data on floppy discs and people were happy to get a tally. Then they wanted reports. Then they wanted cubes they could slice and dice. Then they wanted correlations and projections and metrics. Then they wanted big data and data mining. And I'm not sure what they'll want next but I'm sure they'll want something.
And robots beats sweatshops. I mean as long as you got people employing people you need some of them to be poor to have cheap labor. I don't want a bunch of kids with sewing machines making my clothes - at least I'm lucky enough to not be those kids - I want them to do something more productive. But who's left holding the bag if we don't have robots? Without tractors we need people to get back in the fields with shovels. If we're short on work, just admit that what they'd be doing is busywork. But so far I have pretty long list of real work they could pick up...
The BFR (assuming it works as planned) is going to be the first fully reusable rocket they build. And, if we believe the cost projections* (...) And that's the plan for the 2020's-2030's.
It's not, that's Musk's fantasy about what Mars travel might cost eventually with mass production, 1000 times reusability and whatnot. That's like 50 years at last year's launch cadence of 20 using a single rocket. So far even Falcon 9's ten time reusability which he's been talking about since the first rocket landed is pure projection, no rocket has flown more than twice. They've said they'll maybe do a third time this year. And he's already backtracked once on his ITS/BFR concept from 2016 to 2017, it's not something you'd do if it was far into development. It's pretty much concept art at this stage...
50 years ago they told us in the 3rd millennium we would have robot servants, not that we would become a robot's servant.
You think occasionally helping the stuck robot lawn mower is to be a servant compared to mowing the lawn yourself? I don't build robots but I do build software and occasionally it fails and needs help. But you never count all the time your electronics work. All the times I didn't have to take the stairs because the elevator worked. All the meals my microwave cooked without breaking down. We're pampered by electronics all the time and barely notice except when they're not working. Okay so maybe it's not the Star Trek future but we're a few centuries short of that anyway. Go back 50 years, show the Apollo program a Falcon 9 landing on your iPhone and see if they're impressed or not - by the phone and the rocket.
2) The price is dropping fast. My household income is only a few hundred thousand a year and I think I'll be able to take a family trip to space at some point before I die.
My guess is that this is extremely optimistic at least for an orbital flight. The Dragon is supposed to have a crew of 7 when it's operational. Musk has said the fuel cost alone is $200k, so just gas money is almost $30k/seat. The second stage which still has no technical or economically proven recovery is about 30% of the cost which would be $60M*0.3 = $18M = $2M+/seat. And that assumes the first stage and capsule are free with infinite reuse. Note that NASA is expected to pay around $150M for an ISS flight or $20M+/seat, so I've already assumed a 90% drop from the current rate. Maybe it gets cheaper carrying passengers by the busload and construction costs will drop with further scale, but I still think you're well into fantasy land doing it on a salary of a few hundred grand.
Maybe a suborbital joyride with Blue Horizon just peeking across the 100km limit, but that's going to be a much shorter ride straight up, peek out the windows hey there's space then back down again. The Lynx will give you 4-5 minutes of weightlessness on an hour's flight. Is that worth >$100k? It's a fancier vomit comet where you get your astronaut wings, but my guess is that once you have joyriders doing that in bulk we'll move the goal post to "proper" space flights. Same reason Yuri Gagarin is way, way more known than Alan Shepard. Reaching orbit is a completely different beast with a completely different price tag, SpaceX is great but physics dictates there's some miracles I think even they can't pull off. It's never going to become a mass market thing.
The hub-and-spoke model still has plenty advantages but I think you also need to factor in that going through the biggest hubs with multiple terminals and many hundreds of gates is something of a pain in itself. Transfers at moderately sized hubs (<100 gates) where you never leave the security zone and your luggage is checked through to your final destination are quite nice. Basically if you've got so many flights and runways that airspace is a problem maybe it's time to create sub-hubs. I've traveled quite a few times to meet some people I know and there's no direct flight but there's three different hubs I can go through. Price and timing of flights is of course an issue but those things being roughly equal I pick the smaller hub every time.
And I don't do that just because of the airport itself, it seems like all the margins are slimmer like if your flight lost their time slot, well it's fucked. If there's weather problems, some kind of service disruption or gate problem or delay everything goes to shit for the whole day while smaller airports have gaps and slack that let them catch up better. Heck, if you're travelling with the same company and have a late incoming flight connecting to an outbound spoke they might hold the gate for you a few minutes. On approach I've been told the connecting gate, walked straight to it and boarded as the last passenger, grabbed a seat and a few minutes later we're in the air. That doesn't happen at a major hub, if you're late you missed it.
That greatly depends on the overall strategy for the war.
1. To drain the opposition of support or 2. To crush the opposition by force
The former is what most Americans in living history now know, like the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the Gulf war etc. and in that case it's true. You don't have rouge elements, you don't have soldiers on a power trip that rape, pillage and murder. You don't have soldiers who fear for their own lives and who'd rather cause incidental or accidental damage to civilians than risk getting shot and killed themselves. There's no more caskets of American servicemen being flown home and no more public outcry, all you have to do to play world police is pay for replacements.
That's not how you occupy a country. That's not how Nazi Germany crushed France. That's not how the Allies crushed Nazi Germany. That's not how the US made the Japanese surrender. It's basically saying we're going to pound you into the ground and keep pounding until you beg for mercy. If there's attacks or sabotage on our forces we'll retaliate ten times harder or just round up a bunch of civilians and shoot them. And if we want to do a little genocide or ethnic/religious cleansing that's what we'll do.
In that situations robots are the perfect psychopaths. They have no guilt or remorse, they don't feel the hate and anger, they don't care if they're despised and attacked, they don't desert or refuse to follow orders. They don't care if the targets are civilian or military, young or old, women and children. And you can say it's the same as a gun today, bullets don't care. The difference is that the guy pulling the trigger is 10000 miles away playing Counterstrike or maybe just playing a real world game of Civilization. City in riot? Send in the troops.
It would be nice fantasy if the atrocities of war happened because of the atrocities of war. But those manning the gas chambers of the Holocaust weren't hungry, tired, revengeful or full of PTSD. Neither have most invading generals throughout history been, they command and other people suffer and preferably the other side. Just because we take away the "burden" of fighting on the front lines doesn't mean those people will stop shuffling pieces on a chess board to win. In fact, they'd probably just find it easier if the pawns stop complaining.
This is not an edge case. The rules of English, if properly followed by both writer and reader, render the object of Mary's desire unambiguous, and if this is the sort of thing Doug Lenat is focused on, it's no wonder he's falling behind.
That sentence is fairly unambiguous but the construct is not. "Mary remembered all the long trips in the back seat of daddy's car, she and her brother playing games and singing along to Elvis on the radio. She missed it." What did she miss, the long trips? The back seat? Daddy's car? Playing games? Singing along to the radio? Listening to Elvis? Childhood? Family? All of the above, individually? All of the above, simultaneously? The use of "in" doesn't even mean it's the object of desire, like "Mary caught sight of a mannequin dressed in the most beautiful wedding gown, full of lace and fine detail. She wanted it." and I think 99.9% would assume it meant the gown, not the mannequin.
Before quick, always-on Internet connections were available most software had to live locally, so even though it was closed source you had the entire blob. Today, more and more of the client functionality is going open source - but the essential bits have all gone online as web applications, SaaS, multiplayer/matchmaking services and so on. Google is giving away Android and Chromium (with proprietary codecs = Chrome) so you'll use Google's services. Microsoft is open sourcing things so you'll use Azure. Amazon is open sourcing things so you'll use AWS and so on. Companies that were just giving it away without some sort of plan to monetize it like Sun went under.
And in this competition with "free" services, open source is struggling in many areas. Like for example LibreOffice vs Google Docs, Google got like 3 million paying G Suite businesses, 70 million educational users and lord knows how many others, I couldn't find a statistic. They're taking on the battle of Office/Exchange open source has worked on for decades and not really gotten anywhere. Services like Alexa and Siri you couldn't really do as a local application anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if the Microsoft market falls and the desktop goes "open source" like Android. But it's not really like how RMS envisioned it...
Say I was legally carrying a gun at that 7-11, and the clerk said "help this robber is going to shoot me!". If he was actually holding a gun on the clerk at that point and I shot him, I wouldn't get charged. If I summarily executed him without bothering to even look and it turned out he was not in fact holding a gun on anyone, I'd be locked up for decades. That's more along the lines of what happened here.
What if it was a replica gun that couldn't actually shoot anyone? What if he was wearing a ski mask and pointing something at the clerk but your view was obstructed? What if you by some strange mistake you had wandered into a film recording or training exercise? The threat doesn't have to be real, if:
1. It would seem real to a reasonable person 2. You acted in good faith to save the clerk's life 3. The response appeared necessary both in terms of force and urgency
then I'd acquit you no matter what the real truth was. It's that last part that is most in question here, even if the cop that shot thought that he was hiding something that might have been a gun, was that a necessary response? If it had been a dark back alley one-on-one probably. A guy in the open on his front porch, spotlight in face, facing a small army in full battle gear? It's excessive.
We had a court case here in Norway not that long ago, brief summary is guy catches prep raping his drunk girlfriend, beats him up, drags him out onto the street and continues to beat the shit out of him. The court held that the first part was valid self defense, but after the assailant was outside and incapacitated the remaining beating he took was vigilante justice not self defense.
We don't have UBI here in Norway, but we do have a welfare program which is like a "last resort" where the only qualifications is that you're a legal resident, you don't have any other income or savings and you don't qualify for any of the more specific benefits like disability, unemployment and so on. It's not grand but you don't go homeless and you don't need to beg in the streets, I don't think we're the only social democracy in Europe with a program like that. I just checked the statistics and a little under 1% of the population live primarily on those funds, about 0.25% stay on the program for >12 months, it costs 0.5% of the national budget and about 0.2% of the GDP. Many of these are basically unemployable anyway, they just don't qualify for disability. So the theory at everyone would just quit their job if they got a tiny bit of money for doing nothing is provably false.
For everyone else with income it'd basically just be a formality, pay extra tax for UBI, get UBI for roughly zero net difference. The one big difference would be that people with savings could take a break and live on UBI + their own money. But to have the savings to do that you need a well paying job meaning you need an education and a career and a few sabbaticals and early retirements more wouldn't shake the system at its foundations. I think a realistic UBI would be around 1/3rd my current income, say I think 5/6ths of my current income would be an okay standard of living. Today I could work five months putting aside 1/6th and taking a month unpaid leave spending those 5/6ths. With UBI I could work three months putting aside 1/6th and take a month off with 2/6th UBI, 3/6th savings. Still working and paying taxes 75% of the time instead of 83% of the time though. The numbers only go nuts if you assume people want to live on a UBI standard.
North Korea's arsenal is not large enough yet to cause the collapse of American society, or even to kill the majority of people in a city like Honolulu. So maybe we should be dusting off those old civil defense films.
Hiroshima was ~350k people and 90-146k people were killed by a 16kt nuke. Wikipedia says Honolulu itself has 377k inhabitants and North Korea's latest test was probably around 250kt, so unless Honolulu is vastly more spread out I'd say it only takes one. Maybe it wouldn't take out the majority of the million or so living in the metro area but you'd probably be more than halfway to the total WW2 losses. And the greatest loss of civilians since the Civil War.
That said, Honolulu is probably mostly a psychological threat and money sink for the US to create an anti-missile system that'll never be used and create opposition to a war with North Korea. Their biggest hostage is Seoul which is a dense city with 10-25 million people (city/metro) right across the border. They can throw a barrage of artillery and small short range missiles at it, if one has a nuke and that gets through millions will die. And if that happens the war will never be a success, even if it's a military victory.
Slashdot Mirror
Numbers are almost irrelevant when we're the species that can eliminate all other large species. Who cares if there's a kazillion bacteria when we've eliminated anything bigger than a cockroach? To be an advanced species you need a considerable brain. Which requires a considerable body. Which we won't let you. It's really quite simple....
Norway has been a good example of a stable and peaceful nation. But let's not over-estimate their accomplishments.
"Norway is a tiny speck (...) with vast delusions of grandeur. (...) that's pretty much what was promised anyhow."
Did I really need an /s on that?
A timeline to switch over before the first successful prototypes been demonstrated...
Norway is a tiny speck on the world map made rich by oil with vast delusions of grandeur. In particular I'd there's three areas where the elite thinks Norway makes a global impact:
1. Peace talks
2. Eliminating poverty
3. Environmentalism
The first one leads to things like the Oslo Accords where Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton ended the Middle East conflict - that's pretty much what was promised anyhow. Strangely enough they also got the Nobel Peace Prize which Norway awards. The second is another chest-thumper as one of very few countries give 1% of our GDP in foreign aid, difference is of course we can afford to. In the global economy we're still a fly spec with 0.5% of the world's GDP, even if we bat harder than average with just 0.07% of the population. And the third is environmentalism, renewable energy and green tech, if you read the domestic press it's almost like Tesla exists because of Norwegian tax breaks. They've promised to *end* the sale of fossil fuel cars in 7 years, this is perfectly in line with that.
I could go on but suffice to say that the Norwegian economy is running a massive deficit made up for by oil fund yields. Over the next couple decades we'll see a massive economic downturn as the oil income dries up and the post-WWII generation retires where we'll see a very rude wake-up call to economic realities we haven't really had to deal with in decades. And that's when I expect this near unbounded idealism will end, we'll stop trying to save the world and start getting busy with saving ourselves. Though I'm pretty sure we've been spoiled rotten and instead of making the hard and unpopular changes we will end up burning through our savings to crash in a Greek inferno. But we have enough money for some decades so hopefully I'll be dead by then.
To put it another way, it's the difference between giving someone a drug dealer's number and actually dealing drugs.
You seem to assume the former is innocent and the case law is settled, that's far from the truth. If I send some drugs in a package from Mexico to the US in the mail, what's the difference between the mailman and a drug mule? One is considered an "innocent" intermediary like the phone company, your VCR, your ISP, YouTube and so on. The other is considered a "guilty" intermediary like Napster and The Pirate Bay. There's rules for flea markets and pawn shops and Craigslist and so on, you can't just run a thinly veiled prostitution section and get away with it.
Look up some of the marketplaces that have been convicted of selling drugs on the dark net, you don't have to be actually dealing drugs as long as your skimming part of the profit through advertisements or fees. Or in the case of child porn sites you don't even have to make a profit, as long as the court find you've been the one running forums facilitating other people swapping kiddie porn. You can probably feign ignorance for many things, like he bought that gun for self defense not robbery or murder. But if you tell someone where to buy cocaine they could probably charge you with something.
Greed can not be cured. It can be controlled however, but for that you'd need a functioning democracy. Democracy isn't functioning...
Well it's a little bit more complicated than that. Universal single player systems work well for conditions that have an easy diagnosis and a known treatment. For things that are experimental and where there's no guarantee of result the public system has a real problem differentiating between those who really give it an effort and those who just slack.
We have one of these guys at work, IMHO he's a notorious work dodger. He's the kind of guy who at the slightest road bump says "I don't know how do that", "Where can I find that?", "What does this mean?", "That didn't work" or "Nobody has taught me how to do that", "I'm new at this", "The documentation is lacking", "I have too many competing responsibilities/tasks" etc. without the slightest bit of effort to figure out things on his own. And at status meetings he reports back things that I think is like "Wow, that must have taken 15 minutes out of your work week... what did you do with the rest?"
And if you give him any exploratory tasks like "looking into X" he always exploring some kind of promising opportunity that somehow universally fails to materialize 100% of the time. I'm so fucking tired of it, it's the kind of tasks where I too have maybe a 30-70% success rate depending on how experimental it is but you ought to recognize a flat 0%. But then I've never seen our project managers ever be tough about anything but deadlines where we share blame.
Commercial companies, for better or for worse, care about real results. If you don't have a drug to sell, you don't make money. Which means the entire system, top-to-bottom is geared towards making money. My colleague, well he'd maybe get a slight raise if he did better but it's not like he gets royalties for anything. Neither do I. He's probably the one playing the game better with >80% my salary (my guess) delivering <20% of the results (my estimate).
Never anthropomorphize smart cars. They hate it when you do that!
Too late.
...or it'd run him over in self-defense.
I hope Google does do some pull requests, so this goes into Debian, and perhaps filters to Ubuntu. Done right, their changes can have a major positive effect on the entire Linux ecosystem.
My impression on this from the Linux kernel split, wakelocks etc. is that Google doesn't keep any of this to themselves. But they're also not going to fight upstream if upstream disagrees with what they're doing or how they're doing it. I mean the reason most people want something upstreamed is so they don't have to maintain it themselves, Google is essentially saying we're big enough to maintain this ourselves so if you don't want it.... whatever, not really our problem.
There's a lot of things we could do on Mars that'd be experimental, but for the initial trip it will be tested technology and methods which we're fairly sure will work.
Growing food on Mars? Experiment. Canned food? Will work.
Gathering water from ice on Mars? Experiment. Bringing water? Will work.
Producing fuel on Mars? Experiment. Bring fuel? Will work.
Mining on Mars? Experiment. Bring a self-contained RTG? Will work.
Of course, by the time NASA gets their ass to Mars, we'll already have fusion reactors.
I'd flip that around, by the time we have fusion reactors we'll already have a Mars colony... if there's any overhyped coming-real-soon-now technology it's fusion reactors, I remember reading about those as a kid.
I don't think it is a matter of appearing "too wise". I have known several people with IQs from 140 to 160, and while they were not Rainman, they all had some significant personality disorders. I think it is those socialization problems that keep many high IQers from being good leaders rather than just being "too smart".
Well, I wonder if that's the cause or effect. I was at a math contest and most of us were like 18-19yo, there was a 13yo supergenius there who ran circles around almost all of us. In some ways he could hold intellectual conversions on level with a college grad student, in other ways he was still a little kid. But he'd be a real oddball either way, even though he didn't have any disorder that I could tell. But it would be stranger if that kind of childhood didn't leave any odd social quirks than if it did.
Only 147 MB for a glorified IRC client! Get yours now!
So what kind of peanuts do you work for if that's an issue? I don't recall how many GB the work computer uses but it has Windows, Visual Studio, SQL Server so it's at least 50 GB+. And if it was 50.2 GB... nobody would give a shit. The computer could have IRC, ICQ, AIM, Skype, Discord, Lync, Slack, Jabber and a dozen more "collaboration" apps running just fine. But I'd like just one that works really well, the resources it takes are negligible. As long as the bloat doesn't translate to being slow...
This. When I ask for delivery I mean for someone else to bring it to my door. I don't want to leave the house. In other words, I don't want to get dressed, put on shoes and walk out to the curb.
I'm sure they'll find a market without you. Like back when I didn't own a car or when I've had a few beers. For me it's more the "fit for socializing" aspect, like if I haven't showered, haven't shaved, hung over, dirty/sweaty clothes and just want to chow down a pizza in front of the TV or PC. Personally I'd rather get my slob ass down to the curb with zero social interaction than greet the pizza delivery guy like that, in fact I might just opt for a frozen pizza instead. A small physical discomfort because it's freezing/raining is not a big deal to me, particularly not if I know there's a warm tasty pizza at the end of it.
So wouldn't making the recyclers more efficient reduce their costs as well?
And how do you propose to do that? Recycling means you get a mixed bag of everything people gave you and you never know what they were thinking. As an analogy, around here at Christmas time there's a donation box for gifts for the poor and because of the personal touch it encourages more and bigger contributions than paying donations. They wrap it up nice and pretty like it's ready to go from secret Santa to straight under the Christmas tree, on the card you're supposed to write the target age/sex.
Do you know what happens to all those presents? They're unwrapped, unpacked, inspected, reviewed for age/sex appropriateness, repacked and re-wrapped. And not just because some people have a bit strange ideas about what's really fit for a Christmas present or useful for a kid. But because there's always some ass hat with mental problems who'll wrap up a broken PlayStation or sex toy or dog poop and a note that says here's a little shit for a little shit. The system only works because they got volunteers willing to perpetuate a fantasy while shielding the recipients from what would actually happen.
You just can't get away from that individual checking of everything. It's the same thing that's killed much of the repair business, if your toaster is broken go buy a new one. Even if it's just a tiny fix the repair guy has exhausted the budget almost before he can get the lid off while a thousand rolled off the assembly line in China. And if the market doesn't care the manufacturer doesn't care about making manuals, parts and equipment etc. available either. Huge, controlled environments with identical items have economics of scale. Small, uncontrolled environments with mixed items don't.
... the third world would spiral further into poverty and desolation thanks to rich western doogooders taking away their only competitive advantage: cheap labour.
I think you're confusing cause and effect. American wages were steadily increasing until the liberalization of international trade, it's American wages being depressed to stay in competitive range of cheap labor from China, India and so on. If they demanded better pay and treatment US workers would increase their rates too while the 1% would make less profit. I mean seriously look at that red bar, "Real median weekly earnings of full time workers". The median is more representative of the typical American than the mean (called average in graph). Full time workers exclude changes in demographics, the fact that more women work, most of the boom-bust cycles etc. and basically looks at what does an ordinary job pay. And it's been stagnant for close to 50 years. If you want to find Trump's pissed core voters, there they are.
Let's see how the economy defines "progress" when employing a human is the target of obsolescence.
There is a lot of work where we didn't make the employees more efficient, we replaced them entirely. And replacing all work... I do automate things at work. And every time there's a new demand/wish for us to deliver more in like ten different directions. Once upon a time we got the data on floppy discs and people were happy to get a tally. Then they wanted reports. Then they wanted cubes they could slice and dice. Then they wanted correlations and projections and metrics. Then they wanted big data and data mining. And I'm not sure what they'll want next but I'm sure they'll want something.
And robots beats sweatshops. I mean as long as you got people employing people you need some of them to be poor to have cheap labor. I don't want a bunch of kids with sewing machines making my clothes - at least I'm lucky enough to not be those kids - I want them to do something more productive. But who's left holding the bag if we don't have robots? Without tractors we need people to get back in the fields with shovels. If we're short on work, just admit that what they'd be doing is busywork. But so far I have pretty long list of real work they could pick up...
The BFR (assuming it works as planned) is going to be the first fully reusable rocket they build. And, if we believe the cost projections* (...) And that's the plan for the 2020's-2030's.
It's not, that's Musk's fantasy about what Mars travel might cost eventually with mass production, 1000 times reusability and whatnot. That's like 50 years at last year's launch cadence of 20 using a single rocket. So far even Falcon 9's ten time reusability which he's been talking about since the first rocket landed is pure projection, no rocket has flown more than twice. They've said they'll maybe do a third time this year. And he's already backtracked once on his ITS/BFR concept from 2016 to 2017, it's not something you'd do if it was far into development. It's pretty much concept art at this stage...
50 years ago they told us in the 3rd millennium we would have robot servants, not that we would become a robot's servant.
You think occasionally helping the stuck robot lawn mower is to be a servant compared to mowing the lawn yourself? I don't build robots but I do build software and occasionally it fails and needs help. But you never count all the time your electronics work. All the times I didn't have to take the stairs because the elevator worked. All the meals my microwave cooked without breaking down. We're pampered by electronics all the time and barely notice except when they're not working. Okay so maybe it's not the Star Trek future but we're a few centuries short of that anyway. Go back 50 years, show the Apollo program a Falcon 9 landing on your iPhone and see if they're impressed or not - by the phone and the rocket.
2) The price is dropping fast. My household income is only a few hundred thousand a year and I think I'll be able to take a family trip to space at some point before I die.
My guess is that this is extremely optimistic at least for an orbital flight. The Dragon is supposed to have a crew of 7 when it's operational. Musk has said the fuel cost alone is $200k, so just gas money is almost $30k/seat. The second stage which still has no technical or economically proven recovery is about 30% of the cost which would be $60M*0.3 = $18M = $2M+/seat. And that assumes the first stage and capsule are free with infinite reuse. Note that NASA is expected to pay around $150M for an ISS flight or $20M+/seat, so I've already assumed a 90% drop from the current rate. Maybe it gets cheaper carrying passengers by the busload and construction costs will drop with further scale, but I still think you're well into fantasy land doing it on a salary of a few hundred grand.
Maybe a suborbital joyride with Blue Horizon just peeking across the 100km limit, but that's going to be a much shorter ride straight up, peek out the windows hey there's space then back down again. The Lynx will give you 4-5 minutes of weightlessness on an hour's flight. Is that worth >$100k? It's a fancier vomit comet where you get your astronaut wings, but my guess is that once you have joyriders doing that in bulk we'll move the goal post to "proper" space flights. Same reason Yuri Gagarin is way, way more known than Alan Shepard. Reaching orbit is a completely different beast with a completely different price tag, SpaceX is great but physics dictates there's some miracles I think even they can't pull off. It's never going to become a mass market thing.
The hub-and-spoke model still has plenty advantages but I think you also need to factor in that going through the biggest hubs with multiple terminals and many hundreds of gates is something of a pain in itself. Transfers at moderately sized hubs (<100 gates) where you never leave the security zone and your luggage is checked through to your final destination are quite nice. Basically if you've got so many flights and runways that airspace is a problem maybe it's time to create sub-hubs. I've traveled quite a few times to meet some people I know and there's no direct flight but there's three different hubs I can go through. Price and timing of flights is of course an issue but those things being roughly equal I pick the smaller hub every time.
And I don't do that just because of the airport itself, it seems like all the margins are slimmer like if your flight lost their time slot, well it's fucked. If there's weather problems, some kind of service disruption or gate problem or delay everything goes to shit for the whole day while smaller airports have gaps and slack that let them catch up better. Heck, if you're travelling with the same company and have a late incoming flight connecting to an outbound spoke they might hold the gate for you a few minutes. On approach I've been told the connecting gate, walked straight to it and boarded as the last passenger, grabbed a seat and a few minutes later we're in the air. That doesn't happen at a major hub, if you're late you missed it.
That greatly depends on the overall strategy for the war.
1. To drain the opposition of support
or
2. To crush the opposition by force
The former is what most Americans in living history now know, like the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the Gulf war etc. and in that case it's true. You don't have rouge elements, you don't have soldiers on a power trip that rape, pillage and murder. You don't have soldiers who fear for their own lives and who'd rather cause incidental or accidental damage to civilians than risk getting shot and killed themselves. There's no more caskets of American servicemen being flown home and no more public outcry, all you have to do to play world police is pay for replacements.
That's not how you occupy a country. That's not how Nazi Germany crushed France. That's not how the Allies crushed Nazi Germany. That's not how the US made the Japanese surrender. It's basically saying we're going to pound you into the ground and keep pounding until you beg for mercy. If there's attacks or sabotage on our forces we'll retaliate ten times harder or just round up a bunch of civilians and shoot them. And if we want to do a little genocide or ethnic/religious cleansing that's what we'll do.
In that situations robots are the perfect psychopaths. They have no guilt or remorse, they don't feel the hate and anger, they don't care if they're despised and attacked, they don't desert or refuse to follow orders. They don't care if the targets are civilian or military, young or old, women and children. And you can say it's the same as a gun today, bullets don't care. The difference is that the guy pulling the trigger is 10000 miles away playing Counterstrike or maybe just playing a real world game of Civilization. City in riot? Send in the troops.
It would be nice fantasy if the atrocities of war happened because of the atrocities of war. But those manning the gas chambers of the Holocaust weren't hungry, tired, revengeful or full of PTSD. Neither have most invading generals throughout history been, they command and other people suffer and preferably the other side. Just because we take away the "burden" of fighting on the front lines doesn't mean those people will stop shuffling pieces on a chess board to win. In fact, they'd probably just find it easier if the pawns stop complaining.
This is not an edge case. The rules of English, if properly followed by both writer and reader, render the object of Mary's desire unambiguous, and if this is the sort of thing Doug Lenat is focused on, it's no wonder he's falling behind.
That sentence is fairly unambiguous but the construct is not. "Mary remembered all the long trips in the back seat of daddy's car, she and her brother playing games and singing along to Elvis on the radio. She missed it." What did she miss, the long trips? The back seat? Daddy's car? Playing games? Singing along to the radio? Listening to Elvis? Childhood? Family? All of the above, individually? All of the above, simultaneously? The use of "in" doesn't even mean it's the object of desire, like "Mary caught sight of a mannequin dressed in the most beautiful wedding gown, full of lace and fine detail. She wanted it." and I think 99.9% would assume it meant the gown, not the mannequin.
Before quick, always-on Internet connections were available most software had to live locally, so even though it was closed source you had the entire blob. Today, more and more of the client functionality is going open source - but the essential bits have all gone online as web applications, SaaS, multiplayer/matchmaking services and so on. Google is giving away Android and Chromium (with proprietary codecs = Chrome) so you'll use Google's services. Microsoft is open sourcing things so you'll use Azure. Amazon is open sourcing things so you'll use AWS and so on. Companies that were just giving it away without some sort of plan to monetize it like Sun went under.
And in this competition with "free" services, open source is struggling in many areas. Like for example LibreOffice vs Google Docs, Google got like 3 million paying G Suite businesses, 70 million educational users and lord knows how many others, I couldn't find a statistic. They're taking on the battle of Office/Exchange open source has worked on for decades and not really gotten anywhere. Services like Alexa and Siri you couldn't really do as a local application anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if the Microsoft market falls and the desktop goes "open source" like Android. But it's not really like how RMS envisioned it...
Say I was legally carrying a gun at that 7-11, and the clerk said "help this robber is going to shoot me!". If he was actually holding a gun on the clerk at that point and I shot him, I wouldn't get charged. If I summarily executed him without bothering to even look and it turned out he was not in fact holding a gun on anyone, I'd be locked up for decades. That's more along the lines of what happened here.
What if it was a replica gun that couldn't actually shoot anyone? What if he was wearing a ski mask and pointing something at the clerk but your view was obstructed? What if you by some strange mistake you had wandered into a film recording or training exercise? The threat doesn't have to be real, if:
1. It would seem real to a reasonable person
2. You acted in good faith to save the clerk's life
3. The response appeared necessary both in terms of force and urgency
then I'd acquit you no matter what the real truth was. It's that last part that is most in question here, even if the cop that shot thought that he was hiding something that might have been a gun, was that a necessary response? If it had been a dark back alley one-on-one probably. A guy in the open on his front porch, spotlight in face, facing a small army in full battle gear? It's excessive.
We had a court case here in Norway not that long ago, brief summary is guy catches prep raping his drunk girlfriend, beats him up, drags him out onto the street and continues to beat the shit out of him. The court held that the first part was valid self defense, but after the assailant was outside and incapacitated the remaining beating he took was vigilante justice not self defense.
We don't have UBI here in Norway, but we do have a welfare program which is like a "last resort" where the only qualifications is that you're a legal resident, you don't have any other income or savings and you don't qualify for any of the more specific benefits like disability, unemployment and so on. It's not grand but you don't go homeless and you don't need to beg in the streets, I don't think we're the only social democracy in Europe with a program like that. I just checked the statistics and a little under 1% of the population live primarily on those funds, about 0.25% stay on the program for >12 months, it costs 0.5% of the national budget and about 0.2% of the GDP. Many of these are basically unemployable anyway, they just don't qualify for disability. So the theory at everyone would just quit their job if they got a tiny bit of money for doing nothing is provably false.
For everyone else with income it'd basically just be a formality, pay extra tax for UBI, get UBI for roughly zero net difference. The one big difference would be that people with savings could take a break and live on UBI + their own money. But to have the savings to do that you need a well paying job meaning you need an education and a career and a few sabbaticals and early retirements more wouldn't shake the system at its foundations. I think a realistic UBI would be around 1/3rd my current income, say I think 5/6ths of my current income would be an okay standard of living. Today I could work five months putting aside 1/6th and taking a month unpaid leave spending those 5/6ths. With UBI I could work three months putting aside 1/6th and take a month off with 2/6th UBI, 3/6th savings. Still working and paying taxes 75% of the time instead of 83% of the time though. The numbers only go nuts if you assume people want to live on a UBI standard.
North Korea's arsenal is not large enough yet to cause the collapse of American society, or even to kill the majority of people in a city like Honolulu. So maybe we should be dusting off those old civil defense films.
Hiroshima was ~350k people and 90-146k people were killed by a 16kt nuke. Wikipedia says Honolulu itself has 377k inhabitants and North Korea's latest test was probably around 250kt, so unless Honolulu is vastly more spread out I'd say it only takes one. Maybe it wouldn't take out the majority of the million or so living in the metro area but you'd probably be more than halfway to the total WW2 losses. And the greatest loss of civilians since the Civil War.
That said, Honolulu is probably mostly a psychological threat and money sink for the US to create an anti-missile system that'll never be used and create opposition to a war with North Korea. Their biggest hostage is Seoul which is a dense city with 10-25 million people (city/metro) right across the border. They can throw a barrage of artillery and small short range missiles at it, if one has a nuke and that gets through millions will die. And if that happens the war will never be a success, even if it's a military victory.