The professor that spent $70? Tough luck, almost like buying a winning lottery ticket and losing it. The guy who bought 20*300 = 6000 euro worth of bitcoins and couldn't be bothered to remember/store the password? Moron. Personally I'm kicking myself for not getting in on this early, because it sounded interesting to me but then I tried to step outside my nerd bubble and thought nah, this will just be some weird nerd thing that "normal people" won't ever get in on. You feel a bit like the guy who turned down the Beatles, like who'd ever want that? Quite a few, it turns out...
And as I keep saying, would it have happened to THAT human? If not, then we are all fools to trust the technology.
Would you toss a coin or play russian roulette for your life? The outcome is not given, but statistics matter. You can't take the guy who just blew his brains out and say "should have taken the coin toss" except as snark. Same way with a self-driving car, you pick the least risk but sometimes luck is against you. Unless you think it's because THAT human is actually better than average, but that's just moving the goal posts a little to say "better than sober, drug clean rested female age 40 with 20+ years experience" rather than "better than the average driver".
What Alphabet/Google/YouTube has learned in the past few years is that you can't please everyone at the same time and please anyone in the process.
Boy, they're failing hard. Alexa lists 21 sites in the category "Video Sharing". On the global list YouTube is #2 worldwide, next is Vimeo and DailyMotion at #132 and #133, both trending down from a year ago. The fourth place is held by vidmax.com, a site I've never heard of ranked #38,260. Is this another/.-ism where Microsoft and Intel are failing because Linux/ARM netbooks? I'm sure that at any time there are many creators, users and advertisers leaving YouTube because they got their panties in a bunch about something. But like so many other services it's converging on a small handful of winners, not a broad selection of niche sites. See Facebook, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram etc. if the top 50 sites fell off the net it'd be an Internet apocalypse for most people.
Depends on the iron. The earliest iron age weapon were inferior to bronze weapons, but were just much much cheaper as iron is significantly more abundant.
But meteoritic iron isn't exactly pig iron. It's mostly quite strong nickel alloys, stronger than iron or unhardened steel. Combined with its extreme rarity it would be the stuff of legends.
Exactly. And if he can keep the pork flowing through Congress, he might actually be right. It's not like SpaceX is the first company to create rockets, Boeing is fully capable of creating the Saturn V Mark II and for a ridiculous number of billions it would work for a Mars mission. It would become an Apollo class "been there, done that, let's not go back again for 50 years" kind of deal like with the moon. I don't think this is to bait Musk, he's pretty determined to go anyway and the means of bringing the costs down to make Mars manageable are the same as launching satellites cheaper, making rockets that can launch and land many times. And I'm sure he can find a way to make "bulk launching" satellites with the BFR work, doesn't help Boeing in any way really.
Don't be a retard. Don't look directly at the sun. Why do people do this?
Because more than 22/8.5 million (population of New York) are retards. Consider this, to be a Mensa member you must have a top 2% IQ. If you took all the Mensa members and took the top 2%, you'd have something like the best of the best (0.04%). If you took the top 2% of those again, you'd have freaking super-geniuses (0,0008%). In New York you'd have ~68 of them. Those equally far on the other end of the scale stare into the sun.
Having a bunch of motorized wheeled vehicles driving around on the sidewalks is a bad idea. Even if they don't hit anyone, they will create congestion and confusion. Confine them to the streets.
Any more than strollers, walkers, wheelchairs, bicycles, skateboards, rolling suitcases, beggars, street musicians and so on? I think this sounds like a really premature ban on something that might become a problem one day if they become popular and clog up the sidewalks during rush hour. I know our local hospital uses somewhat similar bots for internal medicine delivery, food delivery, laundry delivery etc. sharing corridors and elevators with patients and staff. It doesn't seem to be a problem for neither the deliveries nor everyone else. Granted it's a more controlled environment and you don't have people trapping or cow tipping them for shits and giggles, but maybe just see if that's an actual problem first?
So, nVidia sells you GPUs with part of the memory silently being "low-bandwidth" connected
No, the specs nVidia gave reviewers were plain wrong:
The error, as NVIDIA explains it, is that in creating the GTX 970 reviewer's guide, the technical marketing team was unaware of Maxwell's aforementioned and new "partial disable" capabilities when they filled out the GTX 970 specification table. They were aware that the GTX 970 would have the full 256-bit memory bus, and unaware of the ability to independently disable ROPs they assumed that all 64 ROPs and the full 2MB of L2 cache was similarly available and wrote the specification table accordingly. This error then made it into the final copy of the guide, not getting caught even after being shared around various groups at NVIDIA, with that information finally diffused by press such as ourselves.
Basically, they presented it to reviewers as if it had the full 4GB available at full speed because that's what technical marketing believed themselves, both before release and quite some time after. It's only after shit really hit the fan they talked to the engineers again realized that it didn't. So this seems to me like an honest mistake and not underhanded marketing unless you think all this is a cover story and nVidia intentionally gave out false information to commit fraud, which seems rather extreme. How they handled it, like how long it took to discover it, how they addressed it, how they dealt with customers who had based their purchasing decision on it etc. can probably be the topic of a long debate though.
I find this story a much worse case of blatant of blatant and underhanded marketing. They didn't accidentally downgrade these specs. They didn't accidentally introduce two different cards with the same model number. This is pretty clearly someone's conscious decision to sell lower spec cards using a name you'll find for example in reviewer's chart giving a certain performance and now won't, even if the stores are updated. It's bait and switch at its worst, it's worse than the simple rebranding they do to make old cards look like part of a new series. It's the kind of shit that makes me wish marketing would die in a fire.
The problem is: how does the AI know what the are rules of "life" it should be following. Is it what some creator like you told it the rules are e.x. "longest uninterrupted chemical reaction" or is it what the AI decides e.x. "kill all humans". Either case is filled with problems because neither will likely result in acceptable outcomes from a human's perspective.
I think you're confusing rules and goals. It's very unlikely that the computer will take a philosophy class, start pondering the meaning of its existence and set itself new goals. The problem is that our way of formulating the goal may not lead to the results we want, for example if we create a doctor bot and tell it the goal is no sick people it might decide that killing all humans is a valid way to achieve that. It's just not the solution we had in mind. As for the rules, they'd at the most basic level be the laws of nature. Like if I cut here, patient dies. I cut there, patient dies. I do this just right, patient is cured. We'd better have a pretty good simulator though, that's the thing about games. The rules defines the outcome, there's no flaw in the model because the rules are the model. If you want to create an AI surgeon, what it thinks is a success had better be a success in the real world too.
The problem is that plan economies don't have a good system to re-allocate resources when things don't go according to plan, like if you say this farm should deliver X amounts of grain but they have a bad harvest it doesn't exist and no meetings will wish it into existence. In a market economy the local prices would go way up, grain from other markets would be brought in to sell at a profit and the burden would get distributed out thinly. In a plan economy it's often been more of a cascade failure leading to empty bread bins somewhere.
If I were to run a "plan" economy country I'd steal a page from the market economy playbook and have them all do internal billing in Government Credits. You technically don't need private industry to have an internal market. And then you could watch prices and if steel got too expensive build more steelworks. That way they'd have to at least somewhat adapt to what's in demand, unlike one story I remember about a nuts company that got production targets in kilos. So they just produced tons of the biggest and heaviest nuts possible, even though there was no demand. But they met their target.
Huh? What? Even as far back as ancient Rome people went to the Colosseum to watch gladiator fights for no other tangible return than the spectacle. The world's "oldest profession" might involve the exchange of a few body fluids but that too ideally didn't result in any offspring. Any system that disregards non-tangible goods and services is smoking crack.
The only reason for UBI is to pay useless people enough money that they can afford enough drugs to get so stoned that the don't bother going out to commit crimes, because that's cheaper than a bigger police force.
I think your attitude is pretty representative of what people think of unemployed today, if you're not working there's something wrong with you. You have physical health problems, mental health problems, alcohol problems, drug problems, attitude problems or something that keeps you from holding a job. But the reality is that in a depression you don't have to be any of those, if you don't have a stellar resume or inside connections there's a thousand people trying get the same jobs and from society's point of view it's like a giant game of musical chairs, if there's a lot fewer jobs than workers somebody's going home empty-handed. Take something like Greece with >25% unemployment and >50% youth unemployment, you think one in two are just addicts looking to get stoned?
I'm not sure the automation doomsday scenarios are correct, we have an incredible creativity in creating new services. But that's roughly what they claim, that it'll be like a global, permanent depression for workers. Burger flipper? We have a burger flipping machine for that. Taxi driver? We have a self-driving car for that. There won't be enough chairs to go around and many will be like brain surgeons and rocket scientists, jobs that'll be totally out of reach for many people. So what do you do when you've looked everywhere, tried everything but nobody wants to hire you and you can't make rent? Live in the gutter? Let your kids live in the gutter? It's no wonder that even good people turn to crime and prostitution if they get really desperate.
I don't think living on just UBI would be pretty, unless you think playing WoW all day and eating Ramen noodles is what life is all about. Maybe for total slackers but they're probably the kind of employees every employer wants to get rid of anyway, it's more like a last resort so good people don't have to hit rock bottom. Who knows, maybe it'll help the hood rat problem too but that'd just be a bonus. I have seen some documentaries where it seems seems like a shitty life peddling drugs on a street corner or doing petty crime, but they don't really have any alternatives because they got shit education and shit work history and a criminal record and probably couldn't get a job at McDonald's if they tried. If they could simply stop, maybe some more actually would.
Meh, if you want cheap crap there's now a zillion channels on YouTube for free. A "full season" of something like GoT, Westworld, American Gods, Legion, Stranger Things, The Handmaid's Tale, Vikings etc. is usually around 10 hours of actual show, divide by production cost and it's going to be pretty expensive per minute. But to me it'd be a little bit like comparing a fine restaurant to meal prices at McDonald's, people have different tastes though. I think I'd still want some "premium" content, maybe even pay more for the best and less for the filler. Personally I'd have very little interest in the "Reality TV" tier full of cheap shows, which is what you get when you pay peanuts. YMMV - which is why it shouldn't be tied to your Internet connection.
The irony is that, while âoecutting the cordâ of cable television, we subscribe to service that uses the very same cable, except in a way for which it was not designed (unicast vs. broadcast) and is ill-suited.
In theory it is, in practice they've pulled fiber far enough that your local loop is more like a small token ring network than the mass broadcast system it used to be. It's just not worth digging up every driveway and switching all the boxes, it only takes 25 Mbit/s to download a UHD Netflix stream but DOCSIS 3.1 supports up to 10 Gbit/s. It's like saying you should help protect the power grid from brown-outs by brushing your teeth manually instead of using an electric toothbrush, while ignoring the Tesla charging in the driveway. I'm sure they'd love to go back to being a monopolist and that Netlix and YouTube would go away, but whether it's as broadcast or unicast IPTV w/CDNs is totally irrelevant. It's as irrelevant as whether the "broadband" connection is actually baseband.
I think the main difference is that in open source it'd take some extraordinary trick to create a backdoor or unofficial feature for any particular group or organization. Could you have Heartbleed-class bugs? Yes. But they're double edged swords, it could expose your enemies but unless you manage to roll out a massive, secret patch/firewall regime you'll be vulnerable too. How often does open source software secretly log data and send it off to a server in China? It just doesn't happen. Why is open-source DRM an oxymoron? Because you can't hide what it's doing. Which is not to say you can't have controversy about default software and settings, like Ubuntu's shopping lens but it's at a whole other level.
And it doesn't take all that much effort to make a version that modifies the behavior, quite probably there's already a fork or patch for you. Because even when or if I find out that Windows or macOS is doing something I don't really approve of it's very hard to do something about it, you can turn off settings which they turn back on, you can block it at the firewall and they change ports and servers, you can use third party hacks that may or may not work well but compared to open source it's a black box. And turning off those features could also be hardening the software, it might not prevent bugs but reduces your attack surface and information leaks.
It used to be very common for women to not enter the workforce, and families did OK (for the times... poor buggers didn't have Internet, home theatres, or microwave ovens!). (...) And what's happened since? Having one person stay home is now the exception rather than the rule, and it's generally considered a strain on the family finances if only one person in a couple is working.
So... a normal income is determined by how much a normal family works? I'm shocked, I tell you. If "everyone else" started working and you were a stay-at-home mom would you expect not to lag behind? That's basically saying that what women do at work is worthless. You could life off one income, you choose not to because everyone else has two and you want to have what they have. I think that if you were warped back 50 years to 1967 wages and prices and tried that gig you'd find that they didn't actually have a whole lot of money, they were just in similar company.
Bezos, Musk they're still leading and building their rapidly expanding company, no idea what Buffet is up to... Gates? Microsoft is an established giant and he's stepped down as chairman and diversified his portfolio, owning just 1.3% of Microsoft now.... he could probably cash out $10 billion tomorrow by just selling across the board.
Are you assuming there's a finite amount of things we aim to analyse and understand? I wouldn't worry.
In a particular field? Sure. When did we last add any element to the periodic table? Discover a genuinely new chemical reaction? Not that it hits a brick wall or anything, but without producing any significant new science funding will eventually try up. Same with manufacturing, I'm sure we'll always want something more. But not necessarily the product you make.
What would be much more interesting to see is if you could train a system to design deep learning networks that could choose good hyperparameters for a new task, in one go.
Well, couldn't that become another ML-layer? This neural net works for speech recognition, this one works for music identification, this works for static photos, this works for video, this works for facial recognition, this works for playing Go - maybe it can quite quickly figure out what this task is most similar to even from pretty mediocre results and interpolate/extrapolate good candidates. And then pile another ML layer on top to see what ML learns new things the fastest. It's not quite like humans learn but we're not the Borg and the brain is not one big lump. We have lots of brains and each brain has lots of brain centers. Once you try to create one AI to solve many different problems the "master AI" will have to call on "sub-AIs" that solve things differently. Not just creating better tools, but finding the right tool for the job.
As an old saying goes, there's no such thing as a free lunch. If a business is giving you something, it's as a hook to make money. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing but it's pretty obvious why AMD makes drivers primarily for AMD cards. Sometimes it's just auxiliary like they're giving you developer tools to build applications for their platform. Whether it's open source or closed source doesn't really change that. Is this a bad thing? Well, you should be aware that like everyone they have their motivations and their incentives may be contrary to yours.
Like most recently I was looking at an open source client-server solution, where their server is a central cloud service. The client had like really easy paint-by-numbers steps to build and run. The server had almost zero information, a dummy config file with no comments and gives nearly zero useful feedback. It doesn't even build out of the box due to checks and tests that depend on missing settings and keys. The curt replies from the company are basically "we don't have time to support other people trying to run the server". That might be true, but they don't have any incentive to make it easy either.
But I suppose that's mostly fair, it's no different than when individual open source developers don't want the changes I'd like to make. What is unfair is that they might come up with all sorts of excuses to avoid accepting your contribution, without disclosing their true reason for rejecting it. There's a lot of power in simply stonewalling you and saying we don't care if you want that even if you got a patch ready to go, make your own fork. Then again there's many people with bad ideas and bad code, refusing to accept it might totally be the right choice. The question is just whether you're doing it in good faith or not.
Temperatures are actually not that big a deal. In the same section you linked to is detailed climate data from the Gale crater. During the day average highs range from -23C to +4C over the year which is actually warmer than McMurdo. The difference is that because the atmosphere is so thin the temperature drops extremely quick at night all year long by around 70C. But for the same reason it doesn't actually chill much. Basically if you have any kind of heat reservoir you should be able to stay pretty close to the highs rather than the lows. Atmosphere and water sure, but we have managed to run the moon missions, Mir, ISS etc. in the vacuum of space. I think radiation is the wildcard here, can we find practical shielding to all those nasty cosmic rays.
Not really an apples-to-apples comparison, OS/2 flopped but only because a different brand of OS won the market while computer use itself exploded. For self-driving cars as a genre to flop it must either end up being unfeasible (cold fusion), unpractical (flying cars), too expensive for the mass market (private jets) or unwanted (3D TV) so that there is no winner just a dead end. Cars exists and are obviously all of the above. Self-driving cars would quite clearly practical and wanted. So it comes down to whether it can be done, at a cost people can pay.
While it's a bit presumptuous to assert the latter before we've solved the former it seems to me that the cost estimates for a sufficient sensor array and equipment are well within the economically feasible compared to a taxi driver, limo service, truck driver and the luxury market - whether it'll be cheap enough to become a standard feature and whether it'll work under all conditions is a topic of debate but not really necessary to address. If it'll work in downtown Phoenix, it works somewhere and it would be strange if they can't expand on that.
It doesn't mean that the first to market will be the winner in the long run though, before Google there was AltaVista and before Facebook there was MySpace. A self-driving car could be a huge game changer where "traditional" driving experience metrics don't matter because you're not driving, even taxis and such are heavily influenced by what they'd like to drive all day and it could be very disruptive for what we consider a "good car". But that's just competition, some might flop and implode like Nokia did in the cell phone market but that's because Apple and Google took over. Cell phones as such very much live on.
If you don't agree with the ethics of copyright in the first place, then just admit that you don't care about intellectual property in the first place instead of hiding behind the notion that you didn't have a choice in the matter, because it's plainly obvious that you do.
I think that's because it's blatantly obvious to everyone but IPR shills that it's not actual property. It's newspeak to create a fraudulent impression of a few abstract and temporary rights as granting permanent ownership and control. Even the people who think the authors of the books they read, artists they listen to, developers of the game they play and so on deserve compensation balk at the non-monetary demands and restrictions like arbitrary limitations on playback hardware and software, region locks, disabling fast-forward, activation servers, installing hidden rootkits, replacing sales with limited licenses and so on.
I think a lot of people feel that way, that they should make a reasonable effort to make sure the creator gets paid but if that's unreasonably difficult he's forfeited that right and that there's no other ethical objections. It's unfortunately not how copyright law works today, at least not in general. But I think it's a pretty far cry from the "information wants to be free" crowd. I actually didn't mind copyright when I went to the store and bought a book or CD and owned it, it's the current incarnation that in my mind is unethical.
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The professor that spent $70? Tough luck, almost like buying a winning lottery ticket and losing it. The guy who bought 20*300 = 6000 euro worth of bitcoins and couldn't be bothered to remember/store the password? Moron. Personally I'm kicking myself for not getting in on this early, because it sounded interesting to me but then I tried to step outside my nerd bubble and thought nah, this will just be some weird nerd thing that "normal people" won't ever get in on. You feel a bit like the guy who turned down the Beatles, like who'd ever want that? Quite a few, it turns out...
And as I keep saying, would it have happened to THAT human? If not, then we are all fools to trust the technology.
Would you toss a coin or play russian roulette for your life? The outcome is not given, but statistics matter. You can't take the guy who just blew his brains out and say "should have taken the coin toss" except as snark. Same way with a self-driving car, you pick the least risk but sometimes luck is against you. Unless you think it's because THAT human is actually better than average, but that's just moving the goal posts a little to say "better than sober, drug clean rested female age 40 with 20+ years experience" rather than "better than the average driver".
What Alphabet/Google/YouTube has learned in the past few years is that you can't please everyone at the same time and please anyone in the process.
Boy, they're failing hard. Alexa lists 21 sites in the category "Video Sharing". On the global list YouTube is #2 worldwide, next is Vimeo and DailyMotion at #132 and #133, both trending down from a year ago. The fourth place is held by vidmax.com, a site I've never heard of ranked #38,260. Is this another /.-ism where Microsoft and Intel are failing because Linux/ARM netbooks? I'm sure that at any time there are many creators, users and advertisers leaving YouTube because they got their panties in a bunch about something. But like so many other services it's converging on a small handful of winners, not a broad selection of niche sites. See Facebook, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram etc. if the top 50 sites fell off the net it'd be an Internet apocalypse for most people.
Lots of drivers are crap these days... Why? Which one of you can write C or C++ anymore?
Lots of people can. They're just busy doing more important things than writing drivers for consumer trinkets.
Depends on the iron. The earliest iron age weapon were inferior to bronze weapons, but were just much much cheaper as iron is significantly more abundant.
But meteoritic iron isn't exactly pig iron. It's mostly quite strong nickel alloys, stronger than iron or unhardened steel. Combined with its extreme rarity it would be the stuff of legends.
Exactly. And if he can keep the pork flowing through Congress, he might actually be right. It's not like SpaceX is the first company to create rockets, Boeing is fully capable of creating the Saturn V Mark II and for a ridiculous number of billions it would work for a Mars mission. It would become an Apollo class "been there, done that, let's not go back again for 50 years" kind of deal like with the moon. I don't think this is to bait Musk, he's pretty determined to go anyway and the means of bringing the costs down to make Mars manageable are the same as launching satellites cheaper, making rockets that can launch and land many times. And I'm sure he can find a way to make "bulk launching" satellites with the BFR work, doesn't help Boeing in any way really.
Don't be a retard. Don't look directly at the sun. Why do people do this?
Because more than 22/8.5 million (population of New York) are retards. Consider this, to be a Mensa member you must have a top 2% IQ. If you took all the Mensa members and took the top 2%, you'd have something like the best of the best (0.04%). If you took the top 2% of those again, you'd have freaking super-geniuses (0,0008%). In New York you'd have ~68 of them. Those equally far on the other end of the scale stare into the sun.
Having a bunch of motorized wheeled vehicles driving around on the sidewalks is a bad idea. Even if they don't hit anyone, they will create congestion and confusion. Confine them to the streets.
Any more than strollers, walkers, wheelchairs, bicycles, skateboards, rolling suitcases, beggars, street musicians and so on? I think this sounds like a really premature ban on something that might become a problem one day if they become popular and clog up the sidewalks during rush hour. I know our local hospital uses somewhat similar bots for internal medicine delivery, food delivery, laundry delivery etc. sharing corridors and elevators with patients and staff. It doesn't seem to be a problem for neither the deliveries nor everyone else. Granted it's a more controlled environment and you don't have people trapping or cow tipping them for shits and giggles, but maybe just see if that's an actual problem first?
So, nVidia sells you GPUs with part of the memory silently being "low-bandwidth" connected
No, the specs nVidia gave reviewers were plain wrong:
The error, as NVIDIA explains it, is that in creating the GTX 970 reviewer's guide, the technical marketing team was unaware of Maxwell's aforementioned and new "partial disable" capabilities when they filled out the GTX 970 specification table. They were aware that the GTX 970 would have the full 256-bit memory bus, and unaware of the ability to independently disable ROPs they assumed that all 64 ROPs and the full 2MB of L2 cache was similarly available and wrote the specification table accordingly. This error then made it into the final copy of the guide, not getting caught even after being shared around various groups at NVIDIA, with that information finally diffused by press such as ourselves.
Basically, they presented it to reviewers as if it had the full 4GB available at full speed because that's what technical marketing believed themselves, both before release and quite some time after. It's only after shit really hit the fan they talked to the engineers again realized that it didn't. So this seems to me like an honest mistake and not underhanded marketing unless you think all this is a cover story and nVidia intentionally gave out false information to commit fraud, which seems rather extreme. How they handled it, like how long it took to discover it, how they addressed it, how they dealt with customers who had based their purchasing decision on it etc. can probably be the topic of a long debate though.
I find this story a much worse case of blatant of blatant and underhanded marketing. They didn't accidentally downgrade these specs. They didn't accidentally introduce two different cards with the same model number. This is pretty clearly someone's conscious decision to sell lower spec cards using a name you'll find for example in reviewer's chart giving a certain performance and now won't, even if the stores are updated. It's bait and switch at its worst, it's worse than the simple rebranding they do to make old cards look like part of a new series. It's the kind of shit that makes me wish marketing would die in a fire.
The problem is: how does the AI know what the are rules of "life" it should be following. Is it what some creator like you told it the rules are e.x. "longest uninterrupted chemical reaction" or is it what the AI decides e.x. "kill all humans". Either case is filled with problems because neither will likely result in acceptable outcomes from a human's perspective.
I think you're confusing rules and goals. It's very unlikely that the computer will take a philosophy class, start pondering the meaning of its existence and set itself new goals. The problem is that our way of formulating the goal may not lead to the results we want, for example if we create a doctor bot and tell it the goal is no sick people it might decide that killing all humans is a valid way to achieve that. It's just not the solution we had in mind. As for the rules, they'd at the most basic level be the laws of nature. Like if I cut here, patient dies. I cut there, patient dies. I do this just right, patient is cured. We'd better have a pretty good simulator though, that's the thing about games. The rules defines the outcome, there's no flaw in the model because the rules are the model. If you want to create an AI surgeon, what it thinks is a success had better be a success in the real world too.
The problem is that plan economies don't have a good system to re-allocate resources when things don't go according to plan, like if you say this farm should deliver X amounts of grain but they have a bad harvest it doesn't exist and no meetings will wish it into existence. In a market economy the local prices would go way up, grain from other markets would be brought in to sell at a profit and the burden would get distributed out thinly. In a plan economy it's often been more of a cascade failure leading to empty bread bins somewhere.
If I were to run a "plan" economy country I'd steal a page from the market economy playbook and have them all do internal billing in Government Credits. You technically don't need private industry to have an internal market. And then you could watch prices and if steel got too expensive build more steelworks. That way they'd have to at least somewhat adapt to what's in demand, unlike one story I remember about a nuts company that got production targets in kilos. So they just produced tons of the biggest and heaviest nuts possible, even though there was no demand. But they met their target.
Huh? What? Even as far back as ancient Rome people went to the Colosseum to watch gladiator fights for no other tangible return than the spectacle. The world's "oldest profession" might involve the exchange of a few body fluids but that too ideally didn't result in any offspring. Any system that disregards non-tangible goods and services is smoking crack.
The only reason for UBI is to pay useless people enough money that they can afford enough drugs to get so stoned that the don't bother going out to commit crimes, because that's cheaper than a bigger police force.
I think your attitude is pretty representative of what people think of unemployed today, if you're not working there's something wrong with you. You have physical health problems, mental health problems, alcohol problems, drug problems, attitude problems or something that keeps you from holding a job. But the reality is that in a depression you don't have to be any of those, if you don't have a stellar resume or inside connections there's a thousand people trying get the same jobs and from society's point of view it's like a giant game of musical chairs, if there's a lot fewer jobs than workers somebody's going home empty-handed. Take something like Greece with >25% unemployment and >50% youth unemployment, you think one in two are just addicts looking to get stoned?
I'm not sure the automation doomsday scenarios are correct, we have an incredible creativity in creating new services. But that's roughly what they claim, that it'll be like a global, permanent depression for workers. Burger flipper? We have a burger flipping machine for that. Taxi driver? We have a self-driving car for that. There won't be enough chairs to go around and many will be like brain surgeons and rocket scientists, jobs that'll be totally out of reach for many people. So what do you do when you've looked everywhere, tried everything but nobody wants to hire you and you can't make rent? Live in the gutter? Let your kids live in the gutter? It's no wonder that even good people turn to crime and prostitution if they get really desperate.
I don't think living on just UBI would be pretty, unless you think playing WoW all day and eating Ramen noodles is what life is all about. Maybe for total slackers but they're probably the kind of employees every employer wants to get rid of anyway, it's more like a last resort so good people don't have to hit rock bottom. Who knows, maybe it'll help the hood rat problem too but that'd just be a bonus. I have seen some documentaries where it seems seems like a shitty life peddling drugs on a street corner or doing petty crime, but they don't really have any alternatives because they got shit education and shit work history and a criminal record and probably couldn't get a job at McDonald's if they tried. If they could simply stop, maybe some more actually would.
Meh, if you want cheap crap there's now a zillion channels on YouTube for free. A "full season" of something like GoT, Westworld, American Gods, Legion, Stranger Things, The Handmaid's Tale, Vikings etc. is usually around 10 hours of actual show, divide by production cost and it's going to be pretty expensive per minute. But to me it'd be a little bit like comparing a fine restaurant to meal prices at McDonald's, people have different tastes though. I think I'd still want some "premium" content, maybe even pay more for the best and less for the filler. Personally I'd have very little interest in the "Reality TV" tier full of cheap shows, which is what you get when you pay peanuts. YMMV - which is why it shouldn't be tied to your Internet connection.
The irony is that, while âoecutting the cordâ of cable television, we subscribe to service that uses the very same cable, except in a way for which it was not designed (unicast vs. broadcast) and is ill-suited.
In theory it is, in practice they've pulled fiber far enough that your local loop is more like a small token ring network than the mass broadcast system it used to be. It's just not worth digging up every driveway and switching all the boxes, it only takes 25 Mbit/s to download a UHD Netflix stream but DOCSIS 3.1 supports up to 10 Gbit/s. It's like saying you should help protect the power grid from brown-outs by brushing your teeth manually instead of using an electric toothbrush, while ignoring the Tesla charging in the driveway. I'm sure they'd love to go back to being a monopolist and that Netlix and YouTube would go away, but whether it's as broadcast or unicast IPTV w/CDNs is totally irrelevant. It's as irrelevant as whether the "broadband" connection is actually baseband.
I think the main difference is that in open source it'd take some extraordinary trick to create a backdoor or unofficial feature for any particular group or organization. Could you have Heartbleed-class bugs? Yes. But they're double edged swords, it could expose your enemies but unless you manage to roll out a massive, secret patch/firewall regime you'll be vulnerable too. How often does open source software secretly log data and send it off to a server in China? It just doesn't happen. Why is open-source DRM an oxymoron? Because you can't hide what it's doing. Which is not to say you can't have controversy about default software and settings, like Ubuntu's shopping lens but it's at a whole other level.
And it doesn't take all that much effort to make a version that modifies the behavior, quite probably there's already a fork or patch for you. Because even when or if I find out that Windows or macOS is doing something I don't really approve of it's very hard to do something about it, you can turn off settings which they turn back on, you can block it at the firewall and they change ports and servers, you can use third party hacks that may or may not work well but compared to open source it's a black box. And turning off those features could also be hardening the software, it might not prevent bugs but reduces your attack surface and information leaks.
It used to be very common for women to not enter the workforce, and families did OK (for the times... poor buggers didn't have Internet, home theatres, or microwave ovens!). (...) And what's happened since? Having one person stay home is now the exception rather than the rule, and it's generally considered a strain on the family finances if only one person in a couple is working.
So... a normal income is determined by how much a normal family works? I'm shocked, I tell you. If "everyone else" started working and you were a stay-at-home mom would you expect not to lag behind? That's basically saying that what women do at work is worthless. You could life off one income, you choose not to because everyone else has two and you want to have what they have. I think that if you were warped back 50 years to 1967 wages and prices and tried that gig you'd find that they didn't actually have a whole lot of money, they were just in similar company.
Bezos, Musk they're still leading and building their rapidly expanding company, no idea what Buffet is up to... Gates? Microsoft is an established giant and he's stepped down as chairman and diversified his portfolio, owning just 1.3% of Microsoft now.... he could probably cash out $10 billion tomorrow by just selling across the board.
Your workplace doesn't supply the coffee for free to you? What kind of third-world hellhole do you live in?
I don't know about that guy but I've worked places where they offered a coffee for free and yet personal coffee machines showed up... YMMV.
Are you assuming there's a finite amount of things we aim to analyse and understand? I wouldn't worry.
In a particular field? Sure. When did we last add any element to the periodic table? Discover a genuinely new chemical reaction? Not that it hits a brick wall or anything, but without producing any significant new science funding will eventually try up. Same with manufacturing, I'm sure we'll always want something more. But not necessarily the product you make.
What would be much more interesting to see is if you could train a system to design deep learning networks that could choose good hyperparameters for a new task, in one go.
Well, couldn't that become another ML-layer? This neural net works for speech recognition, this one works for music identification, this works for static photos, this works for video, this works for facial recognition, this works for playing Go - maybe it can quite quickly figure out what this task is most similar to even from pretty mediocre results and interpolate/extrapolate good candidates. And then pile another ML layer on top to see what ML learns new things the fastest. It's not quite like humans learn but we're not the Borg and the brain is not one big lump. We have lots of brains and each brain has lots of brain centers. Once you try to create one AI to solve many different problems the "master AI" will have to call on "sub-AIs" that solve things differently. Not just creating better tools, but finding the right tool for the job.
As an old saying goes, there's no such thing as a free lunch. If a business is giving you something, it's as a hook to make money. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing but it's pretty obvious why AMD makes drivers primarily for AMD cards. Sometimes it's just auxiliary like they're giving you developer tools to build applications for their platform. Whether it's open source or closed source doesn't really change that. Is this a bad thing? Well, you should be aware that like everyone they have their motivations and their incentives may be contrary to yours.
Like most recently I was looking at an open source client-server solution, where their server is a central cloud service. The client had like really easy paint-by-numbers steps to build and run. The server had almost zero information, a dummy config file with no comments and gives nearly zero useful feedback. It doesn't even build out of the box due to checks and tests that depend on missing settings and keys. The curt replies from the company are basically "we don't have time to support other people trying to run the server". That might be true, but they don't have any incentive to make it easy either.
But I suppose that's mostly fair, it's no different than when individual open source developers don't want the changes I'd like to make. What is unfair is that they might come up with all sorts of excuses to avoid accepting your contribution, without disclosing their true reason for rejecting it. There's a lot of power in simply stonewalling you and saying we don't care if you want that even if you got a patch ready to go, make your own fork. Then again there's many people with bad ideas and bad code, refusing to accept it might totally be the right choice. The question is just whether you're doing it in good faith or not.
Temperatures are actually not that big a deal. In the same section you linked to is detailed climate data from the Gale crater. During the day average highs range from -23C to +4C over the year which is actually warmer than McMurdo. The difference is that because the atmosphere is so thin the temperature drops extremely quick at night all year long by around 70C. But for the same reason it doesn't actually chill much. Basically if you have any kind of heat reservoir you should be able to stay pretty close to the highs rather than the lows. Atmosphere and water sure, but we have managed to run the moon missions, Mir, ISS etc. in the vacuum of space. I think radiation is the wildcard here, can we find practical shielding to all those nasty cosmic rays.
Not really an apples-to-apples comparison, OS/2 flopped but only because a different brand of OS won the market while computer use itself exploded. For self-driving cars as a genre to flop it must either end up being unfeasible (cold fusion), unpractical (flying cars), too expensive for the mass market (private jets) or unwanted (3D TV) so that there is no winner just a dead end. Cars exists and are obviously all of the above. Self-driving cars would quite clearly practical and wanted. So it comes down to whether it can be done, at a cost people can pay.
While it's a bit presumptuous to assert the latter before we've solved the former it seems to me that the cost estimates for a sufficient sensor array and equipment are well within the economically feasible compared to a taxi driver, limo service, truck driver and the luxury market - whether it'll be cheap enough to become a standard feature and whether it'll work under all conditions is a topic of debate but not really necessary to address. If it'll work in downtown Phoenix, it works somewhere and it would be strange if they can't expand on that.
It doesn't mean that the first to market will be the winner in the long run though, before Google there was AltaVista and before Facebook there was MySpace. A self-driving car could be a huge game changer where "traditional" driving experience metrics don't matter because you're not driving, even taxis and such are heavily influenced by what they'd like to drive all day and it could be very disruptive for what we consider a "good car". But that's just competition, some might flop and implode like Nokia did in the cell phone market but that's because Apple and Google took over. Cell phones as such very much live on.
If you don't agree with the ethics of copyright in the first place, then just admit that you don't care about intellectual property in the first place instead of hiding behind the notion that you didn't have a choice in the matter, because it's plainly obvious that you do.
I think that's because it's blatantly obvious to everyone but IPR shills that it's not actual property. It's newspeak to create a fraudulent impression of a few abstract and temporary rights as granting permanent ownership and control. Even the people who think the authors of the books they read, artists they listen to, developers of the game they play and so on deserve compensation balk at the non-monetary demands and restrictions like arbitrary limitations on playback hardware and software, region locks, disabling fast-forward, activation servers, installing hidden rootkits, replacing sales with limited licenses and so on.
I think a lot of people feel that way, that they should make a reasonable effort to make sure the creator gets paid but if that's unreasonably difficult he's forfeited that right and that there's no other ethical objections. It's unfortunately not how copyright law works today, at least not in general. But I think it's a pretty far cry from the "information wants to be free" crowd. I actually didn't mind copyright when I went to the store and bought a book or CD and owned it, it's the current incarnation that in my mind is unethical.