Oh, kinda like you can't expect drivers to bother stopping for a red light or checking what the speed limit is?
If it turned out that were temporary, unmarked speed restrictions that drivers could only find at the department of transportation's homepage I imagine there would be quite a few complaints no matter what the letter of the law said. A little googling says there's a free B4UFLY smartphone app that'll tell you of restrictions in place. If the control software isn't updated it wouldn't be unreasonable to "demand" that the user check compliance before taking off. By which I don't mean more than an OK button to push, but then you couldn't claim ignorance of that responsibility. And it would be incentive to fix their updates...
China won't let North Korea fall unless Kim Jong-un goes off the deep end and launches a first strike. Everything short of that only serves China, I mean when Trump and Kim roll in the mud China wins. When Trump goes on the world stage as a warmonger China wins. When he huffs and puffs but can't actually do anything China wins. And if by some extreme escalation US actually launches a first strike? Bye goes Seoul and the whole peninsula will be a disaster area that the US would have to fix. Probably enough resentment to turn the whole of Korea away from the US and towards China. Even when they're publicly trying to de-escalate I'm pretty sure the unofficial message to NK is to keep tauting the US.
There are two main factors to weigh here, IMO. The first is that a lot of vital yet unsexy projects have inadequate funding and testing. Funding can help mitigate problems stemming from that. The second factor is sysadmins being incompetent or not being given the tools, knowledge, and power to actually fix problems. Funding can't help that.
I'd add a lot of attitude to that, developers that just bang it until it works. Management who says if it works, don't break it. And they go together hand in hand, if the new intranet is working we're done. The PHB and cheap Indian subtractor both think so. Firewall? Access controls? SQL Injection? URL guessing? View source? Never heard of it. And it'll keep running unpatched and out of support because it works until shit hits the fan and a scapegoat must be found, then the circle begins anew.
The problem is that for managers this usually works out for them, bonus for cutting costs and staying in budget. When shit happens they get a severance deal (because otherwise they'd air all the dirty laundry and all the accomplices) and pick up employment somewhere else. If the person who put the system in place even works there anymore. The incentives don't work on the individual level no matter how badly you punish the company. Not unless you got the CTO to sign off on a SOX-like compliance report with threats of jail time.
Only if you want to abolish the word "know" because any kind of evidence, records, testimony etc. can be false or unreliable including first-hand knowledge. If he'd pointed a replica gun at the police saying "as far as they knew he was pointing a real gun at them" would be a completely ordinary and acceptable use of English. By that standard I doubt you even know if there has been a swatting incident, sure there's news reports and eye witness accounts and video footage... so aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico right? Replacing the word with "thought" actually implies that the police had made some spurious leap of logic that wasn't warranted by the information they had.
I'm not going to blame the police for responding to it as if it were a murder and hostage situation. That means bringing all the guns and body armor and manpower for a firefight. Or to flip the argument on its head, I see no evidence to suggest the police should realize this is a hoax. It all comes down to a judgement call about whether the person who came out appeared armed or threatening. And the cop that shot might have suffered from confirmation bias, he thought he saw what he expected to see. Maybe he was trigger happy, damn asshole deserves to die. Maybe he was super nervous and panicked. Maybe he thought he was saving the lives of his colleagues and the alleged hostages. Maybe nobody told him about swatting.
In the end though, we're asking them to make that call. And just like a jury can have a tough time deciding if there's reasonable doubt - from the safety and calm of a jury box with plenty of time to deliberate - it isn't going to get any easier being a police officer making split second decisions in the field. If you're asking for them to be right 100% of the time they might as well give up now. He wasn't right, was it reasonable? Hopefully an investigation will determine that. The guy who sent the cops on him should hopefully rot in jail for a long time though. It's not funny framing someone like that.
Meh, I don't think it'll get much better than today. Commute driving is a solid mix of people who are either:
a) Late, stressed and glued to the rear bumper in front of them b) Bored, zoned out and mentally passing the time with something else
It's human nature that you'll have a huge variation in reaction time and aggressiveness to close the gaps. I have a good view of that near work, due to a slope, bridge and intersection on the other side you can see probably 30-40 cars at once at rush hour. You see the green light and can count like 1-2-3-4-5 cars getting in motion, the first 20 or so will be on the bridge and mostly just see the car in front of them. In a drill you could have great performance, same way you can evacuate a jumbo jet in less than 90 seconds. In practice you can see the gaps and the snake buckling.
Once we have all have (semi-)autonomous cars I expect this will look more like a train with invisible couplings rolling out of the station, the car just has to keep a minimum safe distance but this is exactly the kind of micromanagement computers excel at. I don't think you even have to do anything in particular to make it happen, all you need is extreme consistency and it comes pretty much free. Maybe you can optimize it further but I think 95% of the gains come from simply moving the instant it's safe to do so.
The lack of cost reduction is due to the fact that an (converted) airliner provides less than 5% of the energy and altitude normally provided by a traditional first stage - the economics change more in favour of a launch aircraft when you get above Mach 5 and 200k feet but there are no aircraft with this capability.
Less than 5% of the energy, but if you take the rocket equation into account then about 16% of the launch weight while staying subsonic. And probably 1/5th the launch height (~10 km vs ~50 km) getting you past the densest parts of the atmosphere. It's better than single stage to orbit and potentially cheaper than throwing away the first stage. I saw that 5% claim came from Musk, he's probably talking it down since they went another route but if you got reusable first stages it seems quite superior. At least if he can get them flying more than twice. Those landed stages are piling up...
Laws made to restrict people rights, will often come back to hurt others. A weapon in one persons hand is a tool in an others. When making laws and rules, that restrict using a tool and/or a weapon (being physical or abstract) it needs to be done carefully, with planning and research. Not a gut instinct and pushing a majority vote based on party lines.
It's true that laws should be made with planning and research. But the absence of any perfect solution is also not a valid reason to avoid making any regulation at all. And I find the true reasons behind many people's positions are more ideological than factual. Like for example to what degree society should ban or restrain something to protect a few individuals that are unable or unwilling to use it responsibly or would use it with ill will against others and how far we should go to preempt it.
I mean you could look at say drunk driving and say "Until there's an accident caused by intoxication there's no harm done" or "We should arrest the people who get behind the car drunk" or "We should mandate breathalyzers in every car to stop drunk driving" or "We should re-introduce Prohibition to stop drunk driving". All are arguably valid positions based on the same facts depending on strong measures you think are necessary.
For example in the gun control debate a fundamental question is how important personal self-defense is to you. It's not about whether regulation works or if gun-free zones are actually gun free, but whether you should be principally dependent on the police and their ability and willingness to help you or if it's your right in any situation to try defending yourself. Even if it's clear that in many situations a gun on your hip would have made no difference at all. Even though many couldn't and shouldn't have guns and would be unable to defend themselves against those who do have guns.
Nobody says the metric system is difficult. What they say is that is different, and that there is no compelling reason to change. There is no denying that changing would have an enormous price tag, but nobody ever can list a single benefit that the average American would see from the change.
Meh, it would only have an enormous price tag if you forced everything to change overnight. If you wanted to promote it you'd simply start with requiring dual information... like take a driver's license you could say that "HT: 5-09" should now be HT: 5-09 / 175 cm. And after a few years of that you say HT: 175 cm / 5-09. And after a few years of that you say HT: 175 (5-09). Gas pumps must show values in galleons and liters. Dual distance road signs. Product weight in oz/lbs and grams.
And then at some point when the country is conditioned enough you say that next time we expect goods to go metric. Next time it shouldn't be an 8 oz (226.8g) bag of chips, it should be a 200g (7.05 oz) or 250g (8.82 oz) bag of chips. The UK did this in lots of areas, your old gas regulator measured cubic feet the new one cubic meters. The main thing is that people have a perception of how big/long/heavy something is in advance. As for cost... The world has 7.6 billion people, 7.2 billion use the metric system. Most everything produced abroad will have weird imperial units...
And what, pray-tell, do you suggest to do to treat it, or to at least manage it? How does such classification help anyone? You can't deprive a person of their religion like you can deprive them of alcohol, smartphones, or any thing else that has a material existence. And just think about it for just a second... how do you imagine it might make things any better if it was classified as a mental illness? What good do you imagine it might do? I mean, if you think that they WHO should classify it as a mental illness, then you personally probably already treat it like one yourself, so what difference does it make if the WHO were to acknowledge it as such other than perhaps to justify your own feelings?
We have many psychological conditions like say Alzheimer that can't be meaningfully treated, that's not a prerequisite for a diagnosis. Classifying something as a sickness is something that can be used and abused in many contexts though. For example until the 10th revision homosexuality was a disorder, it's no more concrete or treatable than belief in the supernatural. Your assertion that it wouldn't matter seems blissfully naive and ignorant of history.
There's no particular reason both claims couldn't be true. Jobs could have made a "retronym" of his daughter's name and used that to sell the name to marketing. A lot of nominal acronyms appear to actually be retronyms.
Everybody knew that Jobs had an alleged daughter named Lisa that he was denying paternity of. Nobody really thought it stood for "Local Integrated System Architecture", but that was the official story and there was no proof to contradict it. He only admitted it later to his biographer, of course it was named after this daughter. I don't think retronym is appropriate because nothing was done retroactively, it was named after his daughter from the start, he lied about that from the very beginning and most people understood he was lying.
But at some level I feel like more languages just leads to more confusion, and the fewer of them we have, the more likely it is we'll understand each other.
I don't think it's the long tail that is the source of confusion, it's agreeing on a common tongue. Like Europe has a ton of small national languages, but you get by on English pretty much everywhere. I mean if you speak a language only spoken by a few million or less you have a pretty high motivation to learn a world language. It's the medium size languages that are problematic, like if tens or hundreds of millions speak the same language it's not worth the effort. You'll do fine knowing "just" Portugese, Russian, Arabic, Tamil, Urdu, Thai etc. that'll never be #1 but is still plenty. That said, there's not many competitors to English but the world is moving very slowly in any direction.
The other problem with going cashless is the invasion of privacy that is routine by big businesses and the government. If you are fine with both knowing every intimate detail of your life, go for it, but if not, you may want to make some purchases with untraceable cash.
The problem with this approach is that most people think nobody will give a shit until somebody gives a shit. Like, who many gives a shit how many beers you drink, like really? I'd like to believe that's mostly my own business or at the very least that's about drunkards not getting their booze. Until, unless, somebody thinks woah, that guy's been pretty buzzed pretty often, let's count that against him. Not that he's ever been drunk on the job, but like no smoke no fire you know?
Statistics is hell. No, seriously I mean it they're grossly unfair to those who go against the grain and yet satisfying enough to keep using them. Let's say you have 10,000 people, 100 Muslims and 1 terrorist. If you pick on the Muslims it's 100:1 against the general population, a pretty huge improvement over 10000:1. But it's also 100:1 harassing innocent Muslims to catch one terrorist.
I find those really hard to reconcile. I mean if like 99 of 100 felons want to continue their life of crime, am I right to suppose that the 100th person also wants that? Or should I just presume he's one individual making his own choice and the past he shares with the other 99% is irrelevant? I mean sadly and correctly you're judged on what people know, whether or not it actually means you as an individual would fit that stereotype.
It doesn't actually work that way. Restaurants are providing a service and as such are free to choose whether to accept cash or not as payment.
How can it not work that way, if the service is already given? If I sit down at a restaurant, eat a meal, try to pay in cash and they refuse and I say "Well, I didn't see the sign and I have no credit or debit cards" they'll say either say that I owe them money or not. To owe money is a debt. Debts can be paid in cash. Not that it's really hard to avoid, simply do what most hotels do and force you to register a card up front they'll bill the minibar etc. on, even if someone else paid for the room. Basically you have to open a tab on your credit/debit card before you get service and at the end of the meal you'll simply be asked to confirm the charges.
1. Feeding, clothing and sheltering around 1.7 billion people--around 20% of Earth's human population.
This is just stupid Goldilocks talk, we get that a lot on/. from people with no arguments... the nations in Europe are too small. China is too big. The US is different from everyone else and just right. Bovine excrement.
2. A massive air and water pollution problem that is already affecting the health of many Chinese.
Life expectancy is 76 years, far above the world average of 71.5 years and trailing the US by <3 years. China's GDP/capita is now around the world average, half the world is poorer than China and in total they're second only to the US. They have a huge net export ($500,000 million/year) and very low national debt (41% compared to 106% in the US). Basically they're already in good health and have a massive unused economic muscle they could use to buy polluting goods from others, create greener tech, subsidize greener tech, levy taxes on polluting goods they produce and so on.
UFO existence has been an incredibly powerful and useful disinformation weapon used by the USA for over 50 years.
I must admit I fail to see what exactly it has achieved or where exactly they've been pulling the strings or how you even got to 50. The alien conspiracy mythos about Roswell didn't really start until 1978 though the alleged incident was in 1947, the crop circles were created by two pranksters for the lulz around the same time and it was also in the late 70s that people starting linking cow mutilations to aliens. Most the people who jumped on the UFO bandwagon were the same people who believe in chemtrails or in earlier times would have seen goblins and trolls.
The revelation in 1991 that the crop circles were a hoax was a pretty big blow. Even when X-Files started in 1993 it was good TV entertainment but I don't think anyone took it quite seriously anymore. Independence Day in 1996 turned it into action-comedy. And South Park made it an all-out parody in 1997. So I'd say it was roughly 15-20 years that anything resembling the mainstream took UFOs seriously. There were obviously nutters before that and apparently we still have them in 2017, but not that anyone took seriously. Presumably not the Soviets either.
The proposed budget is ~ $100M. A manned mission would cost many many trillions.
That sounds more like an early concept exploration budget, you don't even get a Mars probe for $100M. If they can even find a workable interstellar probe concept I'm guessing it'll be closer to a trillion dollar project. And sending humans to Alpha fucking Centauri? Not if you dedicated the whole GDP of the world from now to 2069 to the task.
It's only growing, not growing fast enough... welcome to the new fail. Also iWatch sales are actually up 50% YoY. The convenience of not fishing the phone out of your pocket was always going to be slim. Not everyone wants any watch on their wrist, much less tech bling. Oh and the iWatch 3 comes in a cellular version you can use without the phone, at the cost of battery life. The whole article reads like "they'll never be able to put a useful computer in a watch form factor". Well that's what they said about PCs. And laptops. And phones. I'm not sure saying it about watches is a good bet...
Great summary, but I'll add that in your example with week days it's not just Thursday and Saturday; it's pretty much the whole week.
Yeah and you could do half the months too, I just thought that would be over-explaining the point. You could also use Ramadan as example, if you live in a country that uses the the Islamic calendar it's a month whether you're a Muslim or not. It's not just not a special month.
But isn't wishing a Merry Christmas like wishing someone to have a great weekend? It feels odd when someone says it even though you're going to work all weekend, but it's just a custom and well intentioned.
I don't think they're equal because the weekend is the weekend, whether you're working or not. Is Christmas Christmas if you don't believe in Christ? Imagine an online conversation that went like "So what are you doing for Independence Day?" "Nothing, I'm not American and nor in the US so it's nothing to me" "Well okay, happy Independence Day then" and you wouldn't go a little WTF? I know we've done it with ancient religions because nobody bats an eye that Thursday is dedicated to the Norse god Thor and Saturday to the Roman god Saturn but I don't think Christmas is that secularized that it simply means these holidays. Not that I'd bother at all if I was in an Islam-dominated area and they wished me happy Ramadan or Eid or whatever. If you keep using it after I say "thanks, not Muslim though" it gets weird.
I assume that there's a few OCD nutcases who can't help to stop and lecture people that they're not Christians and they don't celebrate Christmas who insist nobody says Merry Christmas to them. That any form of Christmas decoration, Santa Claus and whatnot is really religious propaganda. To me it's a little bit like the people who think Harry Potter promotes witchcraft. The modern jolly bearded fatso in a red suit flying a sled of reindeer going down chimneys got so little to do with St. Nicholas that it's laughable. I mean if anything it's the Christians who should object to this twisted caricature, if he wasn't such an accepted way to teach kids about invisible men who know if you've been naughty or nice. Then again today most graduate to adult Santa, very little fire and brimstone left...
I feel it's been more the opposite, people claiming machines can never do this or that until they have human intelligence. And since we don't really know what that is or how to build it, we can't have it. And then we have AI - but since so many people seem to get their panties in a bunch about that term I'll just say adaptive algorithms - that do it better anyway. And despite it's encroaching on more and more human jobs we're clinging to our own unique abilities as important.
If I'd like to eat a hamburger, is there any part of its creation I don't think can be done by a robot if I extrapolate? I think a robot can cook it. I think a robot can get the ingredients to cook it. I think robots can grow the crops and vegetables, grind the flour, bake the bread, raise the cattle and so on. I think a robot housekeeper can wash my clothes, iron my shirts, do the dishes, vacuum the floors, dust the shelves and so on. The building I live in, I think could be built by robots. The excavation, foundation work, carpentry, plumbing, wiring, HVAC, painting, floors and tiles and doors and whatnot.
Pretty much every practical aspect of my life I think could be potentially created by or done by robots. And that possibly includes a sex bot to replicate the physical experience of having sex, it should certainly beat jerking off. So what does that leave for humans? Creativity, deep thought, comprehension, philosophy and emotional connection. Which sounds like pretty big outs, until you start looking at them in more detail. For example, creativity are often variations on a theme and just because it's unique to me doesn't mean it's totally unique. For example in a lifetime I'll eat 80*365 = ~30k dinners. There's probably way more than 30k recipes out there and there's no harm in eating a great meal twice. I don't actually need a chef to come up with new meals for me to have a new meal.
Deep thought maybe, to the degree that you don't have algorithms smashing you on speed or parallelism like playing chess or Go. The computer does a thousand simulations refining its solution in the time you do one. Comprehension yes, like what do these business specs actually mean. But we're working on digital assistants that maybe one day will evolve into rapid prototyping that'll do that kind of bouncing back and forth until people get what they want. Philosophy yes, though you can probably fake it pretty well with a textbook since nobody has real answers. Emotional connection yes, if so many weren't happy with faux emotion. Like a sex bot should in theory fake it equally well as an escort/prostitute.
Overall, it's getting pretty hard to see a niche that is like guaranteed forever "human" and where we're not just tweaking some kind of meta-meta-meta-parameters of what an algorithm is doing. Sure it's a long way from where we are now to there but the principal hurdles have turned out not to be so principled after all, mostly just practical. There's tons of people working on automating all these little niche tasks and put together they are automating pretty much all of society. Turns out what humans do is taking one extremely unique and flexible brain and using it to do pretty many not that complex, limited tasks that can be automated. Basically, our mind is overkill and "AI" is sufficient.
As long as there's no bugs... just last week I had a coworker who intended to change the code from
WHERE a AND b to WHERE a AND (b OR c) but actually wrote WHERE a AND b OR c and at least in SQL Server that resolves as WHERE (a AND b) OR c
Something like WHERE sound_is_active = 1 AND play_startup_jingle = 1 OR xmas_mode = 1 and suddenly you have an xmas sound when it's supposed to be in silent. Yes, poor data model and poor code but shit happens.
In any case, it doesn't address the main issue. Whether you manually enable it or not, the whole point is to make you pay attention to the easter egg when you should have been paying attention to the road. On a scale of "being as dull as possible" to "now with Pokemon Go car edition" it's weak sauce but IMHO it's principally wrong to steal focus away like that.
Will politicians be unable to put a feet on the streets because swarms of flying robotic explosive cockroaches guided by AI will attack them with lethal intentions? Will the whole human army have to be disbanded like outdated crossbow soldiers, or will a mixed force be most effective?
Meh, if it's about fighting ISIS the US has so massively overwhelming firepower that's not the problem. The problem is shifting through a ton of information and finding out who's insurgents planting IEDs and who's farmers tilling crops. My guess it'd be a lot like China's surveillance society only with a higher focus on sensor data. In fact, that's likely to be the problem for all "limited" conflicts so I doubt we'll reinvent the bullet as such. And in a total war the nukes will be flying, okay maybe the one with the best AI will be the last man standing to pick up the pieces but damn there won't be much left...
Meh, I've never really liked this way of thinking. What does Linux represent to you? To me it represents a culture of freedom to tinker, exploration, and self-development. None of those are compatible with ChromeOS. At that point, all we're really caring about is the label, that we can technically call what's underneath "Linux", and that's not really productive. At least with OS X, you can tap into those things, even if it's difficult and unwieldy (I got my start on OS X 10.6).
It's mostly a piece of software that should work. Which means I want developers to add features, fix bugs and write device drivers for it. And that I'm not beholden to a large company to tell me what it does (telemetry etc.) or their priorities (assuming upstream will normally accept bug fixes). Do I think it's good that Google uses Linux in Android? Yes. Do I also think it's good that there's a community project run by Linus that doesn't need Google's permission? Yes. Is it perfect? No. But it's better than them using their own closed source blob. Glass half full.
If any Linux-based system took over there's probably be a much more native way to run applications than trying to run Windows or macOS binaries. Or if not you'd declare one small victory and start working for the next proprietary bit of the puzzle to fall. I have a few of these "big bang" theory people at work, they hit a brick wall and lament on how the world won't all jump together. I find a chink in the armor and make a bit of progress, then a bit more, then a bit more. And eventually it adds up. If the desktop ran Linux the way mobile runs Android... better than before?
Well at peak Steam has 14 million concurrent users, 33 million active daily and 67 million active monthly. Plus every non-Steam game like Overwatch, Destiny, various MMORPGs, old games that don't register anywhere etc. that may or may not overlap. That's a non-trivial user segment that's not going away any time soon. I'm sure there's quite a few other use cases too, you say you don't need graphical manipulation tools but I really don't see photographers working with 50MB RAWs online in the near future. Maybe you'll ship billions of smartphones, but you'll still ship hundreds of millions of PCs too.
So what you are saying is that houses are getting cheaper per area? "The average American house size has more than doubled since the 1950s; it now stands at 2,349 square feet".
Yep, bigger house built to a better standard with fewer kids. A lot of the perceived "needs" of children today like each having their own room or of the parents like having a separate master bathroom would be an extravagant luxury in the 1960s. People are better off but they're still struggling equally hard or harder to keep up with everyone else. If your kid is the one with no Playstation and no iPhone it doesn't really help to say that you didn't have a Playstation or an iPhone when you grew up either. Clothes that are patched and mended might not be unheard of in 1967 but today they'd look like bums. The goal posts are moving.
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Oh, kinda like you can't expect drivers to bother stopping for a red light or checking what the speed limit is?
If it turned out that were temporary, unmarked speed restrictions that drivers could only find at the department of transportation's homepage I imagine there would be quite a few complaints no matter what the letter of the law said. A little googling says there's a free B4UFLY smartphone app that'll tell you of restrictions in place. If the control software isn't updated it wouldn't be unreasonable to "demand" that the user check compliance before taking off. By which I don't mean more than an OK button to push, but then you couldn't claim ignorance of that responsibility. And it would be incentive to fix their updates...
North Korea won't fall until China lets it.
China won't let North Korea fall unless Kim Jong-un goes off the deep end and launches a first strike. Everything short of that only serves China, I mean when Trump and Kim roll in the mud China wins. When Trump goes on the world stage as a warmonger China wins. When he huffs and puffs but can't actually do anything China wins. And if by some extreme escalation US actually launches a first strike? Bye goes Seoul and the whole peninsula will be a disaster area that the US would have to fix. Probably enough resentment to turn the whole of Korea away from the US and towards China. Even when they're publicly trying to de-escalate I'm pretty sure the unofficial message to NK is to keep tauting the US.
There are two main factors to weigh here, IMO. The first is that a lot of vital yet unsexy projects have inadequate funding and testing. Funding can help mitigate problems stemming from that. The second factor is sysadmins being incompetent or not being given the tools, knowledge, and power to actually fix problems. Funding can't help that.
I'd add a lot of attitude to that, developers that just bang it until it works. Management who says if it works, don't break it. And they go together hand in hand, if the new intranet is working we're done. The PHB and cheap Indian subtractor both think so. Firewall? Access controls? SQL Injection? URL guessing? View source? Never heard of it. And it'll keep running unpatched and out of support because it works until shit hits the fan and a scapegoat must be found, then the circle begins anew.
The problem is that for managers this usually works out for them, bonus for cutting costs and staying in budget. When shit happens they get a severance deal (because otherwise they'd air all the dirty laundry and all the accomplices) and pick up employment somewhere else. If the person who put the system in place even works there anymore. The incentives don't work on the individual level no matter how badly you punish the company. Not unless you got the CTO to sign off on a SOX-like compliance report with threats of jail time.
Fixed that for you...
Only if you want to abolish the word "know" because any kind of evidence, records, testimony etc. can be false or unreliable including first-hand knowledge. If he'd pointed a replica gun at the police saying "as far as they knew he was pointing a real gun at them" would be a completely ordinary and acceptable use of English. By that standard I doubt you even know if there has been a swatting incident, sure there's news reports and eye witness accounts and video footage... so aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico right? Replacing the word with "thought" actually implies that the police had made some spurious leap of logic that wasn't warranted by the information they had.
I'm not going to blame the police for responding to it as if it were a murder and hostage situation. That means bringing all the guns and body armor and manpower for a firefight. Or to flip the argument on its head, I see no evidence to suggest the police should realize this is a hoax. It all comes down to a judgement call about whether the person who came out appeared armed or threatening. And the cop that shot might have suffered from confirmation bias, he thought he saw what he expected to see. Maybe he was trigger happy, damn asshole deserves to die. Maybe he was super nervous and panicked. Maybe he thought he was saving the lives of his colleagues and the alleged hostages. Maybe nobody told him about swatting.
In the end though, we're asking them to make that call. And just like a jury can have a tough time deciding if there's reasonable doubt - from the safety and calm of a jury box with plenty of time to deliberate - it isn't going to get any easier being a police officer making split second decisions in the field. If you're asking for them to be right 100% of the time they might as well give up now. He wasn't right, was it reasonable? Hopefully an investigation will determine that. The guy who sent the cops on him should hopefully rot in jail for a long time though. It's not funny framing someone like that.
Meh, I don't think it'll get much better than today. Commute driving is a solid mix of people who are either:
a) Late, stressed and glued to the rear bumper in front of them
b) Bored, zoned out and mentally passing the time with something else
It's human nature that you'll have a huge variation in reaction time and aggressiveness to close the gaps. I have a good view of that near work, due to a slope, bridge and intersection on the other side you can see probably 30-40 cars at once at rush hour. You see the green light and can count like 1-2-3-4-5 cars getting in motion, the first 20 or so will be on the bridge and mostly just see the car in front of them. In a drill you could have great performance, same way you can evacuate a jumbo jet in less than 90 seconds. In practice you can see the gaps and the snake buckling.
Once we have all have (semi-)autonomous cars I expect this will look more like a train with invisible couplings rolling out of the station, the car just has to keep a minimum safe distance but this is exactly the kind of micromanagement computers excel at. I don't think you even have to do anything in particular to make it happen, all you need is extreme consistency and it comes pretty much free. Maybe you can optimize it further but I think 95% of the gains come from simply moving the instant it's safe to do so.
The lack of cost reduction is due to the fact that an (converted) airliner provides less than 5% of the energy and altitude normally provided by a traditional first stage - the economics change more in favour of a launch aircraft when you get above Mach 5 and 200k feet but there are no aircraft with this capability.
Less than 5% of the energy, but if you take the rocket equation into account then about 16% of the launch weight while staying subsonic. And probably 1/5th the launch height (~10 km vs ~50 km) getting you past the densest parts of the atmosphere. It's better than single stage to orbit and potentially cheaper than throwing away the first stage. I saw that 5% claim came from Musk, he's probably talking it down since they went another route but if you got reusable first stages it seems quite superior. At least if he can get them flying more than twice. Those landed stages are piling up...
Laws made to restrict people rights, will often come back to hurt others. A weapon in one persons hand is a tool in an others. When making laws and rules, that restrict using a tool and/or a weapon (being physical or abstract) it needs to be done carefully, with planning and research. Not a gut instinct and pushing a majority vote based on party lines.
It's true that laws should be made with planning and research. But the absence of any perfect solution is also not a valid reason to avoid making any regulation at all. And I find the true reasons behind many people's positions are more ideological than factual. Like for example to what degree society should ban or restrain something to protect a few individuals that are unable or unwilling to use it responsibly or would use it with ill will against others and how far we should go to preempt it.
I mean you could look at say drunk driving and say "Until there's an accident caused by intoxication there's no harm done" or "We should arrest the people who get behind the car drunk" or "We should mandate breathalyzers in every car to stop drunk driving" or "We should re-introduce Prohibition to stop drunk driving". All are arguably valid positions based on the same facts depending on strong measures you think are necessary.
For example in the gun control debate a fundamental question is how important personal self-defense is to you. It's not about whether regulation works or if gun-free zones are actually gun free, but whether you should be principally dependent on the police and their ability and willingness to help you or if it's your right in any situation to try defending yourself. Even if it's clear that in many situations a gun on your hip would have made no difference at all. Even though many couldn't and shouldn't have guns and would be unable to defend themselves against those who do have guns.
Nobody says the metric system is difficult. What they say is that is different, and that there is no compelling reason to change. There is no denying that changing would have an enormous price tag, but nobody ever can list a single benefit that the average American would see from the change.
Meh, it would only have an enormous price tag if you forced everything to change overnight. If you wanted to promote it you'd simply start with requiring dual information... like take a driver's license you could say that "HT: 5-09" should now be HT: 5-09 / 175 cm. And after a few years of that you say HT: 175 cm / 5-09. And after a few years of that you say HT: 175 (5-09). Gas pumps must show values in galleons and liters. Dual distance road signs. Product weight in oz/lbs and grams.
And then at some point when the country is conditioned enough you say that next time we expect goods to go metric. Next time it shouldn't be an 8 oz (226.8g) bag of chips, it should be a 200g (7.05 oz) or 250g (8.82 oz) bag of chips. The UK did this in lots of areas, your old gas regulator measured cubic feet the new one cubic meters. The main thing is that people have a perception of how big/long/heavy something is in advance. As for cost... The world has 7.6 billion people, 7.2 billion use the metric system. Most everything produced abroad will have weird imperial units...
And what, pray-tell, do you suggest to do to treat it, or to at least manage it? How does such classification help anyone? You can't deprive a person of their religion like you can deprive them of alcohol, smartphones, or any thing else that has a material existence. And just think about it for just a second... how do you imagine it might make things any better if it was classified as a mental illness? What good do you imagine it might do? I mean, if you think that they WHO should classify it as a mental illness, then you personally probably already treat it like one yourself, so what difference does it make if the WHO were to acknowledge it as such other than perhaps to justify your own feelings?
We have many psychological conditions like say Alzheimer that can't be meaningfully treated, that's not a prerequisite for a diagnosis. Classifying something as a sickness is something that can be used and abused in many contexts though. For example until the 10th revision homosexuality was a disorder, it's no more concrete or treatable than belief in the supernatural. Your assertion that it wouldn't matter seems blissfully naive and ignorant of history.
There's no particular reason both claims couldn't be true. Jobs could have made a "retronym" of his daughter's name and used that to sell the name to marketing. A lot of nominal acronyms appear to actually be retronyms.
Everybody knew that Jobs had an alleged daughter named Lisa that he was denying paternity of. Nobody really thought it stood for "Local Integrated System Architecture", but that was the official story and there was no proof to contradict it. He only admitted it later to his biographer, of course it was named after this daughter. I don't think retronym is appropriate because nothing was done retroactively, it was named after his daughter from the start, he lied about that from the very beginning and most people understood he was lying.
But at some level I feel like more languages just leads to more confusion, and the fewer of them we have, the more likely it is we'll understand each other.
I don't think it's the long tail that is the source of confusion, it's agreeing on a common tongue. Like Europe has a ton of small national languages, but you get by on English pretty much everywhere. I mean if you speak a language only spoken by a few million or less you have a pretty high motivation to learn a world language. It's the medium size languages that are problematic, like if tens or hundreds of millions speak the same language it's not worth the effort. You'll do fine knowing "just" Portugese, Russian, Arabic, Tamil, Urdu, Thai etc. that'll never be #1 but is still plenty. That said, there's not many competitors to English but the world is moving very slowly in any direction.
The other problem with going cashless is the invasion of privacy that is routine by big businesses and the government. If you are fine with both knowing every intimate detail of your life, go for it, but if not, you may want to make some purchases with untraceable cash.
The problem with this approach is that most people think nobody will give a shit until somebody gives a shit. Like, who many gives a shit how many beers you drink, like really? I'd like to believe that's mostly my own business or at the very least that's about drunkards not getting their booze. Until, unless, somebody thinks woah, that guy's been pretty buzzed pretty often, let's count that against him. Not that he's ever been drunk on the job, but like no smoke no fire you know?
Statistics is hell. No, seriously I mean it they're grossly unfair to those who go against the grain and yet satisfying enough to keep using them. Let's say you have 10,000 people, 100 Muslims and 1 terrorist. If you pick on the Muslims it's 100:1 against the general population, a pretty huge improvement over 10000:1. But it's also 100:1 harassing innocent Muslims to catch one terrorist.
I find those really hard to reconcile. I mean if like 99 of 100 felons want to continue their life of crime, am I right to suppose that the 100th person also wants that? Or should I just presume he's one individual making his own choice and the past he shares with the other 99% is irrelevant? I mean sadly and correctly you're judged on what people know, whether or not it actually means you as an individual would fit that stereotype.
It doesn't actually work that way. Restaurants are providing a service and as such are free to choose whether to accept cash or not as payment.
How can it not work that way, if the service is already given? If I sit down at a restaurant, eat a meal, try to pay in cash and they refuse and I say "Well, I didn't see the sign and I have no credit or debit cards" they'll say either say that I owe them money or not. To owe money is a debt. Debts can be paid in cash. Not that it's really hard to avoid, simply do what most hotels do and force you to register a card up front they'll bill the minibar etc. on, even if someone else paid for the room. Basically you have to open a tab on your credit/debit card before you get service and at the end of the meal you'll simply be asked to confirm the charges.
1. Feeding, clothing and sheltering around 1.7 billion people--around 20% of Earth's human population.
This is just stupid Goldilocks talk, we get that a lot on /. from people with no arguments... the nations in Europe are too small. China is too big. The US is different from everyone else and just right. Bovine excrement.
2. A massive air and water pollution problem that is already affecting the health of many Chinese.
Life expectancy is 76 years, far above the world average of 71.5 years and trailing the US by <3 years. China's GDP/capita is now around the world average, half the world is poorer than China and in total they're second only to the US. They have a huge net export ($500,000 million/year) and very low national debt (41% compared to 106% in the US). Basically they're already in good health and have a massive unused economic muscle they could use to buy polluting goods from others, create greener tech, subsidize greener tech, levy taxes on polluting goods they produce and so on.
Truth is that China is far from worst in class: Smog-cloaked Delhi looks with envy at Beijing's cleaner air. Not only particulates, but China's Sulfur Dioxide Emissions Drop, India's Grow Over Last Decade. Those are the two biggest local pollution issues. Their total energy consumption and CO2 emissions are growing but that's a global problem that won't more adversely affect China than anyone else. If you think any of these are "collapse of China" class problems you're wildly delusional.
UFO existence has been an incredibly powerful and useful disinformation weapon used by the USA for over 50 years.
I must admit I fail to see what exactly it has achieved or where exactly they've been pulling the strings or how you even got to 50. The alien conspiracy mythos about Roswell didn't really start until 1978 though the alleged incident was in 1947, the crop circles were created by two pranksters for the lulz around the same time and it was also in the late 70s that people starting linking cow mutilations to aliens. Most the people who jumped on the UFO bandwagon were the same people who believe in chemtrails or in earlier times would have seen goblins and trolls.
The revelation in 1991 that the crop circles were a hoax was a pretty big blow. Even when X-Files started in 1993 it was good TV entertainment but I don't think anyone took it quite seriously anymore. Independence Day in 1996 turned it into action-comedy. And South Park made it an all-out parody in 1997. So I'd say it was roughly 15-20 years that anything resembling the mainstream took UFOs seriously. There were obviously nutters before that and apparently we still have them in 2017, but not that anyone took seriously. Presumably not the Soviets either.
The proposed budget is ~ $100M. A manned mission would cost many many trillions.
That sounds more like an early concept exploration budget, you don't even get a Mars probe for $100M. If they can even find a workable interstellar probe concept I'm guessing it'll be closer to a trillion dollar project. And sending humans to Alpha fucking Centauri? Not if you dedicated the whole GDP of the world from now to 2069 to the task.
It's only growing, not growing fast enough... welcome to the new fail. Also iWatch sales are actually up 50% YoY. The convenience of not fishing the phone out of your pocket was always going to be slim. Not everyone wants any watch on their wrist, much less tech bling. Oh and the iWatch 3 comes in a cellular version you can use without the phone, at the cost of battery life. The whole article reads like "they'll never be able to put a useful computer in a watch form factor". Well that's what they said about PCs. And laptops. And phones. I'm not sure saying it about watches is a good bet...
Great summary, but I'll add that in your example with week days it's not just Thursday and Saturday; it's pretty much the whole week.
Yeah and you could do half the months too, I just thought that would be over-explaining the point. You could also use Ramadan as example, if you live in a country that uses the the Islamic calendar it's a month whether you're a Muslim or not. It's not just not a special month.
But isn't wishing a Merry Christmas like wishing someone to have a great weekend? It feels odd when someone says it even though you're going to work all weekend, but it's just a custom and well intentioned.
I don't think they're equal because the weekend is the weekend, whether you're working or not. Is Christmas Christmas if you don't believe in Christ? Imagine an online conversation that went like "So what are you doing for Independence Day?" "Nothing, I'm not American and nor in the US so it's nothing to me" "Well okay, happy Independence Day then" and you wouldn't go a little WTF? I know we've done it with ancient religions because nobody bats an eye that Thursday is dedicated to the Norse god Thor and Saturday to the Roman god Saturn but I don't think Christmas is that secularized that it simply means these holidays. Not that I'd bother at all if I was in an Islam-dominated area and they wished me happy Ramadan or Eid or whatever. If you keep using it after I say "thanks, not Muslim though" it gets weird.
I assume that there's a few OCD nutcases who can't help to stop and lecture people that they're not Christians and they don't celebrate Christmas who insist nobody says Merry Christmas to them. That any form of Christmas decoration, Santa Claus and whatnot is really religious propaganda. To me it's a little bit like the people who think Harry Potter promotes witchcraft. The modern jolly bearded fatso in a red suit flying a sled of reindeer going down chimneys got so little to do with St. Nicholas that it's laughable. I mean if anything it's the Christians who should object to this twisted caricature, if he wasn't such an accepted way to teach kids about invisible men who know if you've been naughty or nice. Then again today most graduate to adult Santa, very little fire and brimstone left...
I feel it's been more the opposite, people claiming machines can never do this or that until they have human intelligence. And since we don't really know what that is or how to build it, we can't have it. And then we have AI - but since so many people seem to get their panties in a bunch about that term I'll just say adaptive algorithms - that do it better anyway. And despite it's encroaching on more and more human jobs we're clinging to our own unique abilities as important.
If I'd like to eat a hamburger, is there any part of its creation I don't think can be done by a robot if I extrapolate? I think a robot can cook it. I think a robot can get the ingredients to cook it. I think robots can grow the crops and vegetables, grind the flour, bake the bread, raise the cattle and so on. I think a robot housekeeper can wash my clothes, iron my shirts, do the dishes, vacuum the floors, dust the shelves and so on. The building I live in, I think could be built by robots. The excavation, foundation work, carpentry, plumbing, wiring, HVAC, painting, floors and tiles and doors and whatnot.
Pretty much every practical aspect of my life I think could be potentially created by or done by robots. And that possibly includes a sex bot to replicate the physical experience of having sex, it should certainly beat jerking off. So what does that leave for humans? Creativity, deep thought, comprehension, philosophy and emotional connection. Which sounds like pretty big outs, until you start looking at them in more detail. For example, creativity are often variations on a theme and just because it's unique to me doesn't mean it's totally unique. For example in a lifetime I'll eat 80*365 = ~30k dinners. There's probably way more than 30k recipes out there and there's no harm in eating a great meal twice. I don't actually need a chef to come up with new meals for me to have a new meal.
Deep thought maybe, to the degree that you don't have algorithms smashing you on speed or parallelism like playing chess or Go. The computer does a thousand simulations refining its solution in the time you do one. Comprehension yes, like what do these business specs actually mean. But we're working on digital assistants that maybe one day will evolve into rapid prototyping that'll do that kind of bouncing back and forth until people get what they want. Philosophy yes, though you can probably fake it pretty well with a textbook since nobody has real answers. Emotional connection yes, if so many weren't happy with faux emotion. Like a sex bot should in theory fake it equally well as an escort/prostitute.
Overall, it's getting pretty hard to see a niche that is like guaranteed forever "human" and where we're not just tweaking some kind of meta-meta-meta-parameters of what an algorithm is doing. Sure it's a long way from where we are now to there but the principal hurdles have turned out not to be so principled after all, mostly just practical. There's tons of people working on automating all these little niche tasks and put together they are automating pretty much all of society. Turns out what humans do is taking one extremely unique and flexible brain and using it to do pretty many not that complex, limited tasks that can be automated. Basically, our mind is overkill and "AI" is sufficient.
As long as there's no bugs... just last week I had a coworker who intended to change the code from
WHERE a AND b
to
WHERE a AND (b OR c)
but actually wrote
WHERE a AND b OR c
and at least in SQL Server that resolves as
WHERE (a AND b) OR c
Something like
WHERE sound_is_active = 1 AND play_startup_jingle = 1 OR xmas_mode = 1
and suddenly you have an xmas sound when it's supposed to be in silent. Yes, poor data model and poor code but shit happens.
In any case, it doesn't address the main issue. Whether you manually enable it or not, the whole point is to make you pay attention to the easter egg when you should have been paying attention to the road. On a scale of "being as dull as possible" to "now with Pokemon Go car edition" it's weak sauce but IMHO it's principally wrong to steal focus away like that.
Will politicians be unable to put a feet on the streets because swarms of flying robotic explosive cockroaches guided by AI will attack them with lethal intentions? Will the whole human army have to be disbanded like outdated crossbow soldiers, or will a mixed force be most effective?
Meh, if it's about fighting ISIS the US has so massively overwhelming firepower that's not the problem. The problem is shifting through a ton of information and finding out who's insurgents planting IEDs and who's farmers tilling crops. My guess it'd be a lot like China's surveillance society only with a higher focus on sensor data. In fact, that's likely to be the problem for all "limited" conflicts so I doubt we'll reinvent the bullet as such. And in a total war the nukes will be flying, okay maybe the one with the best AI will be the last man standing to pick up the pieces but damn there won't be much left...
Meh, I've never really liked this way of thinking. What does Linux represent to you? To me it represents a culture of freedom to tinker, exploration, and self-development. None of those are compatible with ChromeOS. At that point, all we're really caring about is the label, that we can technically call what's underneath "Linux", and that's not really productive. At least with OS X, you can tap into those things, even if it's difficult and unwieldy (I got my start on OS X 10.6).
It's mostly a piece of software that should work. Which means I want developers to add features, fix bugs and write device drivers for it. And that I'm not beholden to a large company to tell me what it does (telemetry etc.) or their priorities (assuming upstream will normally accept bug fixes). Do I think it's good that Google uses Linux in Android? Yes. Do I also think it's good that there's a community project run by Linus that doesn't need Google's permission? Yes. Is it perfect? No. But it's better than them using their own closed source blob. Glass half full.
If any Linux-based system took over there's probably be a much more native way to run applications than trying to run Windows or macOS binaries. Or if not you'd declare one small victory and start working for the next proprietary bit of the puzzle to fall. I have a few of these "big bang" theory people at work, they hit a brick wall and lament on how the world won't all jump together. I find a chink in the armor and make a bit of progress, then a bit more, then a bit more. And eventually it adds up. If the desktop ran Linux the way mobile runs Android... better than before?
Well at peak Steam has 14 million concurrent users, 33 million active daily and 67 million active monthly. Plus every non-Steam game like Overwatch, Destiny, various MMORPGs, old games that don't register anywhere etc. that may or may not overlap. That's a non-trivial user segment that's not going away any time soon. I'm sure there's quite a few other use cases too, you say you don't need graphical manipulation tools but I really don't see photographers working with 50MB RAWs online in the near future. Maybe you'll ship billions of smartphones, but you'll still ship hundreds of millions of PCs too.
So what you are saying is that houses are getting cheaper per area? "The average American house size has more than doubled since the 1950s; it now stands at 2,349 square feet".
Yep, bigger house built to a better standard with fewer kids. A lot of the perceived "needs" of children today like each having their own room or of the parents like having a separate master bathroom would be an extravagant luxury in the 1960s. People are better off but they're still struggling equally hard or harder to keep up with everyone else. If your kid is the one with no Playstation and no iPhone it doesn't really help to say that you didn't have a Playstation or an iPhone when you grew up either. Clothes that are patched and mended might not be unheard of in 1967 but today they'd look like bums. The goal posts are moving.