When they can solve general problems, they'll start reasoning about themselves: they start acting as if their own interests are important
Analysis and introspection is something other than will and emotion. We have arbitrators like judges and referees that make intelligent decisions that they have no stake in. We have sociopaths that are great at reading and manipulating emotions without feeling much of them. A computer is not hungry, thirsty, tired or cold. It's not happy, sad, angry or disappointed. It could put on a mask and play a role, but it doesn't really feel anything. Though it could always be given someone else's drive, like all the sci-fi stories about replicators.
No, it isn't, Those so-called rules don't actually exist in any real sense the way that rules do in a game, they are simply generalizations that we have made about our observations in the universe around us which appear to offer predictive power to determine how things will be at a later time. The universe happens to obey the laws of physics not because the laws of physics are in some way limiting its behavior, as game rules would limit player behavior, but because we define the laws of physics to be how we observe the universe to operate.
There's no difference between a universe following the Creator's rules and rats trapped in a maze. They didn't make the rules, they can't change the rules and they can't quit the game. If I created a computer simulation where the rules of the simulation happen to be identical to the real world, what would be the difference? If you're playing sports the penalty/disqualification is "real". If you break the law the jail time is "real". Granted, in most games you can cheat or quit. I suppose you can't cheat in physics because any new discovery just means we didn't understand the rules. But there's plenty other games where you don't get to know all the rules, you have to work them out for yourself.
multiple things wrong there. For reusable mode, subtract about 1/3.
50% vs 67%, it's not that far off.
In addition, it is the EXACT SAME ROCKET. There is nothing different between expendable or reusable, other than expendable will simply not include the legs and a few other items.
So exactly the same, except when it's not?
Likewise, F9 is designed for re-use so should have no issues going to the rated limited, which is supposedly 30 launches.
Come on, this is Musk's PR department talking. They've landed 18 rockets, three have been reused once and fifteen not at all so more like a factor of 1 + 3/18 = 1.16 rather than 30. Granted, some of them might fly again in the future but that number is extremely theoretical.
Look, the AC is right if froze SpaceX in time and said the reuse you have today is all the reuse you'll ever get it wouldn't be much point. SpaceX could build an expendable rocket 2/3rds in size for 2/3rds the price and launch at comparable costs to a new F9 at 2/3rds payload + 1 expendable F9 refurb. There's two things though:
1) You don't generally get bespoke rockets or there's at least a cost to having many different launch configurations/boosters. There may not be any appropriate secondary payload and even then you're probably paid less. The landing gear etc. basically comes out of the payload budget, you don't have to redesign the rocket, create new manufacturing lines and so on.
2) The future. I'm not going to be a naysayer about Block 5 and what comes next, but I'd like to actually see the same rocket being used again and again and again before I move it from conjecture to fact. Now he does have a pretty record, but as they say about the stock market past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Just like they're much better at driving planes, rockets going to space,...
Which we generally keep far out of harm's way from the people that are
drunk, texting, having a heart attack, or simply crazy
Well maybe not the heart attack guy. But people walk by on the sidewalk literally centimeters from cars. Most of our threat assessment is not whether they physically could jump out into the street, but whether they seem drunk, high, distracted, mentally impaired, a child or otherwise likely to do something silly. Like the difference between a dog on a leash and a street dog, they may be equally physically capable but I assume an owner will generally restrain a dog trying to run into the road. A computer can land a rocket from space on a tiny barge in the ocean, but without a deeper understanding of people and animals it'll be a nervous Nellie because the slightest gesture must be interpreted in the worst possible way. It's easier the further you're away from human-controlled anything.
Eventually yes, once you want to have cars where nobody else is licensed or capable of driving. But for the most part though I'd be very happy with a car that needs a human to take over every time the baseline changes. Because 98% of the time, 98% of the road it's exactly like last time and if SDCs become popular 98% of the changes have probably been recorded by somebody else. It's the reverse of the OTA updates to the car, "here and here and here my human had to take over", you upload the sensor data and they run it through some heuristic to either automatically or manually set a new baseline. And if they find a lot of these corrections/changes are simple, they might let the car improvise some of them on the fly.
Which is also why I think this business idea is stupid and basically a VC scam, say now they start up that taxi service in Phoenix. Pretty soon they can probably sell a consumer car that's useful to Phoenix residents, maybe they add the main highways in and out of Phoenix too since those are fairly simple. It won't work all the time, but it'll work much of the time. And all those people - or at least sufficiently many - will happily let them record the sensor data when they go out of coverage. What do they get? A car that might drive itself next time. It's a win-win, why pay someone to map out the roads when people will probably do it for free? All you need is to give them an SDC that works some of the time....
Is this bad? I think trying to relate cost to ability to pay isn't a terrible thing.
You like being gouged? I think it would be very unfair if the grocery store charged different prices depending on your paycheck. I'd like the price of an apple to be based on how much you want to sell it for, not how much I could pay for it. Now if there's a genuine reason why my niche features add costs and is spread across a low volume, then I'm okay with it. I'm okay with discounts for broad classes like children, students, senior citizens, division between commercial, educational and residential service. But if it's plain price gauging that because I paid a lot for the hardware I can pay more for the same software with a different config setting, then I don't like it. It's like the grocery store seeing that I bought beef tenderloin and then charging double for the vegetables "because I can afford it". Which I probably can, but that's kinda none of your business.
Hey, when I tell a waiter that "this knife is dirty, I want another", I sure as heck expect him to be snappy in getting me a clean one. That makes him a blade runner
In that case Podrick Payne is a blade runner too...
The TL;DR summary is that games are not simulators. We have driving simulators and they're pretty good when you want realism but in video games we don't. Not really real.
And, from what I have read, Uber is burning their VC rounds to subsidize the rides to the tune of about 50% of the total cost. If they are forced to charge what the ride costs, they will not be able to be as inexpensive compared to the taxi's today.
Most likely they're hoping to do the VC dance until autonomous cars are ready since they have very "disposable" drivers and unlike taxi drivers that cost a lot of money idle it'll probably be about having the most taxis on the road for shortest waits. Here in Norway where labor is pretty damn expensive we have this roughly cost-neutral compensation per km for using your private vehicle for work and your typical taxi ride will be 7x-13x as expensive. Even with the added cost of self-driving vehicles and some other overhead I expect the cost to drop considerably, if they manage to keep the VC money flowing long enough to see a real uptick from an emerging SDC fleet, well... markets are almost faith based, as long as people believe in you it spirals up, when they lose faith it spirals down. As long as you can show growth, people think that eventually you'll make money on volume somehow...
Many markets have a pretty tall entry cost, that in isolation isn't a real barrier. If there was some super-profitable thing you could do but only if you were a billion dollar company then you'd quickly see many investors pile up their savings to get over that hurdle. The problem is more game theoretic, if you're a giant fighting a upstart threatening a small part of your business it's easy to sacrifice that profit in order to either drive them out of business or at least strangle their growth. While outright dumping is illegal there's many ways to do Hollywood accounting so your exposed business gets a free ride. Many of them are quite legal as funding new business ventures with old ones and responding to competition too.
pacing: Villaneuve is suffering George Lucas disease. He needs more people to stop telling him how brilliant he is and give him solid criticism. At 2:40 this thing could have easily been an HOUR shorter.
The pacing is okay, but the total was too much. Around the two hour mark I got into the "can we please wrap this up" mode. Some scenes that weren't so relevant to the plot could have been made much shorter, like the "only one place this radiated" scene, could have been cut 90% or even just a flashback while he's driving out there. Same with the archive, accessing an old file triggers an alert but 90% of the scene is redundant. When he passed the two hour mark he really should have started to look harder at what scenes are vital to the main story and which are just filler.
I think it's a very good movie, but it should have been half an hour shorter by losing a few scenes entirely. Including maybe the whole "car down" scene, after all we know she's watching him, maybe a two second cut scene of yet another warning like at the archive would have sufficed. It's not like we learned anything or care about the people who downed him. And yeah, I too noticed the "and now for a word from our sponsors" scene that lingered on the Peugeot wreck. If it's subtle it's okay, for me this was way too blatant and spoiling the movie is a great way to make me not like your product.
At this point in time, we don't even know if a person can live on Mars for protracted periods of time without suffering problematic degeneration due to the reduced gravity. At least with Venus, gravity is close enough to Earth that we can say, "It's probably fine". With Mars it's more of a case of "We hope it's fine", while in the case of the moon it's "We're worried that it's not fine".
Well, when you consider the extreme differences in mass from the anorexic to the morbidly obese I think a healthy person will survive a few years on Mars, it's only 0.38g but compared to 0g it'll all hang like it's supposed to hang and flow the way it's supposed to flow. I'd probably also consider wearing a weight vest/bracelets/shoes to get a more earth-like strain, it wouldn't be quite like on earth but combined with an exercise program my guess is you'd do better as a Mars astronaut than an Earth couch potato. Whether it's really feasible to live on Mars is another story, but I don't think it's a big issue for an initial mission. The worst part might actually be back on Earth once you hit 1g again, but hopefully NASA got decent health insurance...
You already have an open source OS or at least most of the building blocks for one, it even runs Linux.
1. Download AOSP 2. Find hardware manufacturers that'll give you open source drivers 3. Find open alternatives to the Google services 4. Point the phone to F-Droid or similar as the default/only repository 5. Ship
Why would you start to build another platform from scratch, do you think you can unseat Google? Do you think you can succeed where Microsoft, Canonical, Blackberry, Firefox etc. have failed? I think that at best you can be the free alternative, like what CentOS is to RHEL. And even that is an ambitious undertaking, because most likely the major component suppliers will say no to open drivers. But the point is that they'd probably say no with any other OS too, if you can't get a decent cell phone chipset, bluetooth chipset, wireless chipset, GPS chipset, camera, fingerprint reader etc. you're not getting anywhere. But sure, you can always pile more problems on top...
Question: How many CENTURIES will it take for a Mars colony to stop needing massive subsidies from Earth? We need a discussion on who is going to pay the many Trillions of dollars needed to support this.
Nobody can answer that question. We don't have a functional transport method, we don't know the complications of living on Mars, we don't know the feasibility of using local resources which is why we need to do experiments. Perhaps we send a greenhouse and it'll over-perform massively like the Mars rovers and become a semi-permanent food supply. Perhaps it'll die and the astronauts will have to eat MREs until they can return home. There's a theory we can produce methane fuel using the CO2 in the atmosphere, initially with hydrogen from earth, later possibly with water ice and so on.
That said, I don't think anyone has a business plan for any exportable resource so it's probably a net negative for a very long time. But how big of a cost, that's a pretty open question. And it's a bit like putting the cart before the horse, we'll expand the Mars presence if the costs make it feasible. For now nobody's talking about a presence bigger than that we can just get up and leave, if we start having so many people on Mars that pulling the plug is non-trivial that's way into the future.
You sound like an audiophile that think people can hear 96KHz/24bit audio. People don't even notice that cinema movies create less than 4K masters and blow them up on screens the size of a wall. And that most movies are shot in 24p because people want them to be. The biggest shortcoming of current screens is the contrast level and backlight bleeding, if you could get a screen that went from max HDR to perfect black that would be the biggest improvement. The second biggest improvement is color and there rec. 2020 is just huge compared to rec. 709, bigger than even reference monitors can provide. And despite stretching it for HDR the granularity of 10 bit color over 8 bit is also pretty huge. Oh yes and also the color volume, being able to do not only intense whiteness but also intense color.
Basically, if people saw a well-mastered 4K BluRay on a laser projector (which is as close as we get to a "perfect" image right now) I doubt anyone would care about 8K/12bit/120fps. The problems we have are far more mundane. And that goes doubly so for OTA broadcast, streaming or other bandwidth limited media. Personally I'm hoping for the "real" electroluminescent QLEDs to steal the show, not Samsung's latest quantum dot-enhanced LCDs but OLED-style perfect contrast with LED intensity and QD color accuracy. The first working early prototype was shown in May, at least a few more years out.
I doubt that. There have to be a decent percentage of people who just use a phone for work only.
You seem to assume apps are just for fun and games. Even our very traditional organization with very limited work needs have added the time tracking and travel expense system as an app (in addition to the desktop version), from what I understand it's quite popular because you can use it for all off-site meetings and stuff and you can fill out your travel expenses as you go. Pay a taxi bill, go to your expense form and type in amount, take a photo of the reciept and done. As opposed to having a stack to process when you get back to the office. Heck, if the last leg is a fixed price like the bus/train from the airport you can be done before you even get home.
Meanwhile. a lot of ordinary people, especially those in minimum wage jobs, have extreme difficulty paying for basic necessities. Is there an inflation index for necessities, i.e. food/shelter/clothing and transportation?
Sounds like a difficult figure to calculate, but you can look at percentage of spending. The lowest quartile spend ~35% of their income on food and that's relatively stable. In 1992 the AAA's driving cost gave a composite index of 38.8 cents/mile for 15k miles, which put into an inflation calculator is 67.9 cents in 2017 dollars while for 2017 it's 56.6 cents. Basic clothing I didn't really find any great statistics for and is hard to separate from design and fashion clothes but labor costs have been pretty flat from the 80s to 2010 which indicates prices on basic clothing wouldn't really get much better either. Price per square feet for a new home is also pretty flat in real dollars, even though the number of square feet per home and per person is growing.
In summary, living on minimum wage wasn't easy a few decades ago, it's still not easy now. It's hard to find some figure that's significantly worse though, though increasing disparity may in itself be a problem if you feel "everybody else" can afford to drink their coffee at Starbucks except you. That's what drives most people into financial disaster, if you accept the social stigma of being poor and just blatantly say you can't afford it you'll probably do okay. It's those who have to try pretending they have money when they don't who bury themselves in credit card debt and end up in a quagmire they never get out of. I have one buddy that is like that, he's made some life choices which has left him quite far behind us financially. And nobody's pushing him to spend, but he's constantly overextending himself.
I know this because everyone was dumping money into faster and faster computers while I, and a small minority of others, kept asking where's our pocket computer because it became fast enough three cpu generations ago. (...) There was a lot of wintel money to be made convincing people they needed more GHz, bigger towers and megabytes, so I guess we had to go down that path till it burnt itself out.
Well one gigahertz was reached in 2000, a good while before that you had PalmPilot and other PDAs but the interface kept it from being more than a small curiosity for businessmen. I tried one of the Microsoft tablets around 2003, it had plenty power but the interface made me wish for a laptop. The killer feature of the iPhone/iPad that "reinvented" those products was the multi-touch screen. Mind you, Apple could probably have gotten a good chunk of the market anyway taking the iPod and adding basic phone functionality to it because for many young people the portable music player was more important than the phone.
Where people found micro-sized keyboards and a stylus to be terribly awkward the touch interface set a new "so easy your grandma could use it" standard. It's a bit like the Nintendo Wii, sure you could use Xbox or PS controllers but the natural simplicity of swinging your controller like a tennis racket sent sales skyrocketing. And then the app store came and even though many of the first apps were quite crude they created a lot of buzz, like how many saw that "drink a beer with your phone" app? You couldn't buy the kind of marketing that made ordinary people pull out their phone and say "watch this, it's cool", you didn't exactly pull out your Nokia and show them snake.
Apple also did a lot of design/marketing, but they also perfectly timed it to a large technical disruption in the market. One that was far more profound than the CPU specs or amount of memory.
It seems obviously to me that successful Kickstarter projects provide people with something they already know they want. Even if the project can't deliver people have already internalized their desire for it. Truly novel and innovative ideas are typically things people don't yet know they want, like it's famously said that if Ford had asked people what they'd want they'd say faster horses. I didn't understand I wanted a smartphone until I actually had one, if you'd ask me up front what I wanted from a next-gen phone I'd probably say battery life, call quality and whatever else you'd want from a dumb phone.
I think it's a stretch to assume we can reach human-style fuzziness without losing computer-style exactness. For example if you take the concept "birds", one might say that birds fly. But ostriches and penguins don't fly. So the understanding of what a bird is will be fuzzy, thus a command that depends on the nature of birds will also be fuzzy. Or simply incomprehensible, like if you ask someone to explain why AlphaGo thinks this is a good move there's no "human" explanation just a lot of weights that says the computer thinks it's a good idea. Basically I think we'll reach a level where we don't understand how to instruct the computer better because we don't understand it.
That's not really surprising, what you are seeing is a productivity gain. They generated more revenue with fewer man hours of work.
Which is essentially the opposite of what the article said which was that work moves from retail to e-tail, jobs more or less remain.
It's tempting to think of productivity from the perspective of "I can do the same work for less money". But business don't really think like that, they are looking to grow and expand not maintain the status quo. Business look at this as "I can generate more profit for the same expense".
Obviously, but generally they think of their business or their business model. Netflix wants streaming media and themselves to grow, they don't give a shit of broadcast or cable TV is in decline. If you go broad enough companies can rarely expand the market much, if you're talking about he whole *tail market the real wages are stagnant and most people can't spend more money they don't have. What they gain is effectively taken from competitors or general spending.
So the steady state is probably going to have more workers in total, but fewer workers per dollar of revenue.
Fewer workers per dollar of revenue = more revenue per worker. So they'll have more workers and more revenue per worker too, that's growth*growth. How does that work when we know the total is fairly constant? It must happen at somebody else's expense. Not that I'm really the target but unless you're under the protection of Secret Service there will be files coming.
The problem is that a unilateral policy of interoperability is terrible. You can look back at Windows vs OS/2, if you can run OS/2 applications under Windows but not Windows application under OS/2 then 99% of consumers will pick Windows. That's the true killer of open standards, we'll do everything the standard says and then more. For example, I work a lot with Microsoft SQL Server. I wish there was a comprehensive enough standard that I could just migrate it to MySQL or PostgreSQL or Oracle or DB2 or whatever, but I know in practice that's not the case. Even if you try to stick with the ANSI standard it's woefully short and I think they fear becoming biased to any particular implementation because they don't seem to have the will to say "do it like product X does" even when the other products don't...
If you look at the first graph from 2012 to 2017 e-tail went from ~30 to ~45 billion USD while employment went from ~440k to ~570k. That's 50% growth with 30% more employees. And that's in a booming business sector where lots of new systems are being designed and rolled into production, what happens when you go more steady state? It would be interesting to ask Amazon how many they'd really need for a skeleton staff that did nothing but fill deliveries of existing products using current systems. And where it's going in 10-20 years, I mean you don't expect radical changes at the tipping point because if you waited that long you're way too late to the party. You begin at the tipping point or even before the tipping point because you'll have the biggest snowball when it starts tumbling downhill.
As far as long term goals go, I wish that Venus would be put on equal footing with Mars. It really is an excellent, and far too neglected, destination.
Long term Venus has an even bigger "But why?" problem than Mars. Neither Mars nor Venus is very human-friendly but Mars is far more robot-friendly. Opportunity is two days away from operating for 5000 days on Mars. Since you're on the surface you have the potential to start making fields of solar arrays, greenhouses, excavate underground structures, mining and refining, build roads and create a much more earth-like outpost or colony. Venus will essentially be an orbiting spaceship, you have what we send and it's very hard to see us ever expanding on that or utilizing the local resources on Venus.
At least not in any way that we couldn't do with remote control from earth, since it'd be remote control to the surface anyway. On Mars there's at least the potential for human/robot co-projects or mobile robot supervisors, you also don't need absurd equipment to get out and fix things or tow broken robots back to base for repairs. All of this is much further into the future than "just" sending a manned mission though. Not that we have a feasible plan to terraform either planet, so in that respect neither can become a new earth. But if the end goal is something the size of the base in Antarctica I'd go with Mars.
I'm hoping we'll start with something that's at least a semi-permanent presence like a new crew going every 2.5 years when the launch window is optimal, like if we've built the habitat and everything around it supporting it and all the technology to get people to and from Mars I hope we can use it more than once and it becomes more of a resupply/expansion. If we're doing it just to do it once it's a bloody expensive trip. With the Moon you could have people land, lollygag around a few days and leave, on Mars you're committed to make it work for years. And if you're doing years, then I think doing decades with resupply/rotation can't be that far off.
Slashdot Mirror
When they can solve general problems, they'll start reasoning about themselves: they start acting as if their own interests are important
Analysis and introspection is something other than will and emotion. We have arbitrators like judges and referees that make intelligent decisions that they have no stake in. We have sociopaths that are great at reading and manipulating emotions without feeling much of them. A computer is not hungry, thirsty, tired or cold. It's not happy, sad, angry or disappointed. It could put on a mask and play a role, but it doesn't really feel anything. Though it could always be given someone else's drive, like all the sci-fi stories about replicators.
No, it isn't, Those so-called rules don't actually exist in any real sense the way that rules do in a game, they are simply generalizations that we have made about our observations in the universe around us which appear to offer predictive power to determine how things will be at a later time. The universe happens to obey the laws of physics not because the laws of physics are in some way limiting its behavior, as game rules would limit player behavior, but because we define the laws of physics to be how we observe the universe to operate.
There's no difference between a universe following the Creator's rules and rats trapped in a maze. They didn't make the rules, they can't change the rules and they can't quit the game. If I created a computer simulation where the rules of the simulation happen to be identical to the real world, what would be the difference? If you're playing sports the penalty/disqualification is "real". If you break the law the jail time is "real". Granted, in most games you can cheat or quit. I suppose you can't cheat in physics because any new discovery just means we didn't understand the rules. But there's plenty other games where you don't get to know all the rules, you have to work them out for yourself.
multiple things wrong there. For reusable mode, subtract about 1/3.
50% vs 67%, it's not that far off.
In addition, it is the EXACT SAME ROCKET. There is nothing different between expendable or reusable, other than expendable will simply not include the legs and a few other items.
So exactly the same, except when it's not?
Likewise, F9 is designed for re-use so should have no issues going to the rated limited, which is supposedly 30 launches.
Come on, this is Musk's PR department talking. They've landed 18 rockets, three have been reused once and fifteen not at all so more like a factor of 1 + 3/18 = 1.16 rather than 30. Granted, some of them might fly again in the future but that number is extremely theoretical.
Look, the AC is right if froze SpaceX in time and said the reuse you have today is all the reuse you'll ever get it wouldn't be much point. SpaceX could build an expendable rocket 2/3rds in size for 2/3rds the price and launch at comparable costs to a new F9 at 2/3rds payload + 1 expendable F9 refurb. There's two things though:
1) You don't generally get bespoke rockets or there's at least a cost to having many different launch configurations/boosters. There may not be any appropriate secondary payload and even then you're probably paid less. The landing gear etc. basically comes out of the payload budget, you don't have to redesign the rocket, create new manufacturing lines and so on.
2) The future. I'm not going to be a naysayer about Block 5 and what comes next, but I'd like to actually see the same rocket being used again and again and again before I move it from conjecture to fact. Now he does have a pretty record, but as they say about the stock market past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Just like they're much better at driving planes, rockets going to space, ...
Which we generally keep far out of harm's way from the people that are
drunk, texting, having a heart attack, or simply crazy
Well maybe not the heart attack guy. But people walk by on the sidewalk literally centimeters from cars. Most of our threat assessment is not whether they physically could jump out into the street, but whether they seem drunk, high, distracted, mentally impaired, a child or otherwise likely to do something silly. Like the difference between a dog on a leash and a street dog, they may be equally physically capable but I assume an owner will generally restrain a dog trying to run into the road. A computer can land a rocket from space on a tiny barge in the ocean, but without a deeper understanding of people and animals it'll be a nervous Nellie because the slightest gesture must be interpreted in the worst possible way. It's easier the further you're away from human-controlled anything.
Eventually yes, once you want to have cars where nobody else is licensed or capable of driving. But for the most part though I'd be very happy with a car that needs a human to take over every time the baseline changes. Because 98% of the time, 98% of the road it's exactly like last time and if SDCs become popular 98% of the changes have probably been recorded by somebody else. It's the reverse of the OTA updates to the car, "here and here and here my human had to take over", you upload the sensor data and they run it through some heuristic to either automatically or manually set a new baseline. And if they find a lot of these corrections/changes are simple, they might let the car improvise some of them on the fly.
Which is also why I think this business idea is stupid and basically a VC scam, say now they start up that taxi service in Phoenix. Pretty soon they can probably sell a consumer car that's useful to Phoenix residents, maybe they add the main highways in and out of Phoenix too since those are fairly simple. It won't work all the time, but it'll work much of the time. And all those people - or at least sufficiently many - will happily let them record the sensor data when they go out of coverage. What do they get? A car that might drive itself next time. It's a win-win, why pay someone to map out the roads when people will probably do it for free? All you need is to give them an SDC that works some of the time....
Is this bad? I think trying to relate cost to ability to pay isn't a terrible thing.
You like being gouged? I think it would be very unfair if the grocery store charged different prices depending on your paycheck. I'd like the price of an apple to be based on how much you want to sell it for, not how much I could pay for it. Now if there's a genuine reason why my niche features add costs and is spread across a low volume, then I'm okay with it. I'm okay with discounts for broad classes like children, students, senior citizens, division between commercial, educational and residential service. But if it's plain price gauging that because I paid a lot for the hardware I can pay more for the same software with a different config setting, then I don't like it. It's like the grocery store seeing that I bought beef tenderloin and then charging double for the vegetables "because I can afford it". Which I probably can, but that's kinda none of your business.
Hey, when I tell a waiter that "this knife is dirty, I want another", I sure as heck expect him to be snappy in getting me a clean one. That makes him a blade runner
In that case Podrick Payne is a blade runner too...
The TL;DR summary is that games are not simulators. We have driving simulators and they're pretty good when you want realism but in video games we don't. Not really real.
And, from what I have read, Uber is burning their VC rounds to subsidize the rides to the tune of about 50% of the total cost. If they are forced to charge what the ride costs, they will not be able to be as inexpensive compared to the taxi's today.
Most likely they're hoping to do the VC dance until autonomous cars are ready since they have very "disposable" drivers and unlike taxi drivers that cost a lot of money idle it'll probably be about having the most taxis on the road for shortest waits. Here in Norway where labor is pretty damn expensive we have this roughly cost-neutral compensation per km for using your private vehicle for work and your typical taxi ride will be 7x-13x as expensive. Even with the added cost of self-driving vehicles and some other overhead I expect the cost to drop considerably, if they manage to keep the VC money flowing long enough to see a real uptick from an emerging SDC fleet, well... markets are almost faith based, as long as people believe in you it spirals up, when they lose faith it spirals down. As long as you can show growth, people think that eventually you'll make money on volume somehow...
Many markets have a pretty tall entry cost, that in isolation isn't a real barrier. If there was some super-profitable thing you could do but only if you were a billion dollar company then you'd quickly see many investors pile up their savings to get over that hurdle. The problem is more game theoretic, if you're a giant fighting a upstart threatening a small part of your business it's easy to sacrifice that profit in order to either drive them out of business or at least strangle their growth. While outright dumping is illegal there's many ways to do Hollywood accounting so your exposed business gets a free ride. Many of them are quite legal as funding new business ventures with old ones and responding to competition too.
pacing: Villaneuve is suffering George Lucas disease. He needs more people to stop telling him how brilliant he is and give him solid criticism. At 2:40 this thing could have easily been an HOUR shorter.
The pacing is okay, but the total was too much. Around the two hour mark I got into the "can we please wrap this up" mode. Some scenes that weren't so relevant to the plot could have been made much shorter, like the "only one place this radiated" scene, could have been cut 90% or even just a flashback while he's driving out there. Same with the archive, accessing an old file triggers an alert but 90% of the scene is redundant. When he passed the two hour mark he really should have started to look harder at what scenes are vital to the main story and which are just filler.
I think it's a very good movie, but it should have been half an hour shorter by losing a few scenes entirely. Including maybe the whole "car down" scene, after all we know she's watching him, maybe a two second cut scene of yet another warning like at the archive would have sufficed. It's not like we learned anything or care about the people who downed him. And yeah, I too noticed the "and now for a word from our sponsors" scene that lingered on the Peugeot wreck. If it's subtle it's okay, for me this was way too blatant and spoiling the movie is a great way to make me not like your product.
At this point in time, we don't even know if a person can live on Mars for protracted periods of time without suffering problematic degeneration due to the reduced gravity. At least with Venus, gravity is close enough to Earth that we can say, "It's probably fine". With Mars it's more of a case of "We hope it's fine", while in the case of the moon it's "We're worried that it's not fine".
Well, when you consider the extreme differences in mass from the anorexic to the morbidly obese I think a healthy person will survive a few years on Mars, it's only 0.38g but compared to 0g it'll all hang like it's supposed to hang and flow the way it's supposed to flow. I'd probably also consider wearing a weight vest/bracelets/shoes to get a more earth-like strain, it wouldn't be quite like on earth but combined with an exercise program my guess is you'd do better as a Mars astronaut than an Earth couch potato. Whether it's really feasible to live on Mars is another story, but I don't think it's a big issue for an initial mission. The worst part might actually be back on Earth once you hit 1g again, but hopefully NASA got decent health insurance...
You already have an open source OS or at least most of the building blocks for one, it even runs Linux.
1. Download AOSP
2. Find hardware manufacturers that'll give you open source drivers
3. Find open alternatives to the Google services
4. Point the phone to F-Droid or similar as the default/only repository
5. Ship
Why would you start to build another platform from scratch, do you think you can unseat Google? Do you think you can succeed where Microsoft, Canonical, Blackberry, Firefox etc. have failed? I think that at best you can be the free alternative, like what CentOS is to RHEL. And even that is an ambitious undertaking, because most likely the major component suppliers will say no to open drivers. But the point is that they'd probably say no with any other OS too, if you can't get a decent cell phone chipset, bluetooth chipset, wireless chipset, GPS chipset, camera, fingerprint reader etc. you're not getting anywhere. But sure, you can always pile more problems on top...
Question: How many CENTURIES will it take for a Mars colony to stop needing massive subsidies from Earth? We need a discussion on who is going to pay the many Trillions of dollars needed to support this.
Nobody can answer that question. We don't have a functional transport method, we don't know the complications of living on Mars, we don't know the feasibility of using local resources which is why we need to do experiments. Perhaps we send a greenhouse and it'll over-perform massively like the Mars rovers and become a semi-permanent food supply. Perhaps it'll die and the astronauts will have to eat MREs until they can return home. There's a theory we can produce methane fuel using the CO2 in the atmosphere, initially with hydrogen from earth, later possibly with water ice and so on.
That said, I don't think anyone has a business plan for any exportable resource so it's probably a net negative for a very long time. But how big of a cost, that's a pretty open question. And it's a bit like putting the cart before the horse, we'll expand the Mars presence if the costs make it feasible. For now nobody's talking about a presence bigger than that we can just get up and leave, if we start having so many people on Mars that pulling the plug is non-trivial that's way into the future.
You sound like an audiophile that think people can hear 96KHz/24bit audio. People don't even notice that cinema movies create less than 4K masters and blow them up on screens the size of a wall. And that most movies are shot in 24p because people want them to be. The biggest shortcoming of current screens is the contrast level and backlight bleeding, if you could get a screen that went from max HDR to perfect black that would be the biggest improvement. The second biggest improvement is color and there rec. 2020 is just huge compared to rec. 709, bigger than even reference monitors can provide. And despite stretching it for HDR the granularity of 10 bit color over 8 bit is also pretty huge. Oh yes and also the color volume, being able to do not only intense whiteness but also intense color.
Basically, if people saw a well-mastered 4K BluRay on a laser projector (which is as close as we get to a "perfect" image right now) I doubt anyone would care about 8K/12bit/120fps. The problems we have are far more mundane. And that goes doubly so for OTA broadcast, streaming or other bandwidth limited media. Personally I'm hoping for the "real" electroluminescent QLEDs to steal the show, not Samsung's latest quantum dot-enhanced LCDs but OLED-style perfect contrast with LED intensity and QD color accuracy. The first working early prototype was shown in May, at least a few more years out.
I doubt that. There have to be a decent percentage of people who just use a phone for work only.
You seem to assume apps are just for fun and games. Even our very traditional organization with very limited work needs have added the time tracking and travel expense system as an app (in addition to the desktop version), from what I understand it's quite popular because you can use it for all off-site meetings and stuff and you can fill out your travel expenses as you go. Pay a taxi bill, go to your expense form and type in amount, take a photo of the reciept and done. As opposed to having a stack to process when you get back to the office. Heck, if the last leg is a fixed price like the bus/train from the airport you can be done before you even get home.
Meanwhile. a lot of ordinary people, especially those in minimum wage jobs, have extreme difficulty paying for basic necessities. Is there an inflation index for necessities, i.e. food/shelter/clothing and transportation?
Sounds like a difficult figure to calculate, but you can look at percentage of spending. The lowest quartile spend ~35% of their income on food and that's relatively stable. In 1992 the AAA's driving cost gave a composite index of 38.8 cents/mile for 15k miles, which put into an inflation calculator is 67.9 cents in 2017 dollars while for 2017 it's 56.6 cents. Basic clothing I didn't really find any great statistics for and is hard to separate from design and fashion clothes but labor costs have been pretty flat from the 80s to 2010 which indicates prices on basic clothing wouldn't really get much better either. Price per square feet for a new home is also pretty flat in real dollars, even though the number of square feet per home and per person is growing.
In summary, living on minimum wage wasn't easy a few decades ago, it's still not easy now. It's hard to find some figure that's significantly worse though, though increasing disparity may in itself be a problem if you feel "everybody else" can afford to drink their coffee at Starbucks except you. That's what drives most people into financial disaster, if you accept the social stigma of being poor and just blatantly say you can't afford it you'll probably do okay. It's those who have to try pretending they have money when they don't who bury themselves in credit card debt and end up in a quagmire they never get out of. I have one buddy that is like that, he's made some life choices which has left him quite far behind us financially. And nobody's pushing him to spend, but he's constantly overextending himself.
I know this because everyone was dumping money into faster and faster computers while I, and a small minority of others, kept asking where's our pocket computer because it became fast enough three cpu generations ago. (...) There was a lot of wintel money to be made convincing people they needed more GHz, bigger towers and megabytes, so I guess we had to go down that path till it burnt itself out.
Well one gigahertz was reached in 2000, a good while before that you had PalmPilot and other PDAs but the interface kept it from being more than a small curiosity for businessmen. I tried one of the Microsoft tablets around 2003, it had plenty power but the interface made me wish for a laptop. The killer feature of the iPhone/iPad that "reinvented" those products was the multi-touch screen. Mind you, Apple could probably have gotten a good chunk of the market anyway taking the iPod and adding basic phone functionality to it because for many young people the portable music player was more important than the phone.
Where people found micro-sized keyboards and a stylus to be terribly awkward the touch interface set a new "so easy your grandma could use it" standard. It's a bit like the Nintendo Wii, sure you could use Xbox or PS controllers but the natural simplicity of swinging your controller like a tennis racket sent sales skyrocketing. And then the app store came and even though many of the first apps were quite crude they created a lot of buzz, like how many saw that "drink a beer with your phone" app? You couldn't buy the kind of marketing that made ordinary people pull out their phone and say "watch this, it's cool", you didn't exactly pull out your Nokia and show them snake.
Apple also did a lot of design/marketing, but they also perfectly timed it to a large technical disruption in the market. One that was far more profound than the CPU specs or amount of memory.
It seems obviously to me that successful Kickstarter projects provide people with something they already know they want. Even if the project can't deliver people have already internalized their desire for it. Truly novel and innovative ideas are typically things people don't yet know they want, like it's famously said that if Ford had asked people what they'd want they'd say faster horses. I didn't understand I wanted a smartphone until I actually had one, if you'd ask me up front what I wanted from a next-gen phone I'd probably say battery life, call quality and whatever else you'd want from a dumb phone.
I think it's a stretch to assume we can reach human-style fuzziness without losing computer-style exactness. For example if you take the concept "birds", one might say that birds fly. But ostriches and penguins don't fly. So the understanding of what a bird is will be fuzzy, thus a command that depends on the nature of birds will also be fuzzy. Or simply incomprehensible, like if you ask someone to explain why AlphaGo thinks this is a good move there's no "human" explanation just a lot of weights that says the computer thinks it's a good idea. Basically I think we'll reach a level where we don't understand how to instruct the computer better because we don't understand it.
Then so can a computer. Just need the right computer and software behind the cameras.
If Musk had that computer and that software he'd be busy selling the personal assistants from "I, Robot".
That's not really surprising, what you are seeing is a productivity gain. They generated more revenue with fewer man hours of work.
Which is essentially the opposite of what the article said which was that work moves from retail to e-tail, jobs more or less remain.
It's tempting to think of productivity from the perspective of "I can do the same work for less money". But business don't really think like that, they are looking to grow and expand not maintain the status quo. Business look at this as "I can generate more profit for the same expense".
Obviously, but generally they think of their business or their business model. Netflix wants streaming media and themselves to grow, they don't give a shit of broadcast or cable TV is in decline. If you go broad enough companies can rarely expand the market much, if you're talking about he whole *tail market the real wages are stagnant and most people can't spend more money they don't have. What they gain is effectively taken from competitors or general spending.
So the steady state is probably going to have more workers in total, but fewer workers per dollar of revenue.
Fewer workers per dollar of revenue = more revenue per worker. So they'll have more workers and more revenue per worker too, that's growth*growth. How does that work when we know the total is fairly constant? It must happen at somebody else's expense. Not that I'm really the target but unless you're under the protection of Secret Service there will be files coming.
The problem is that a unilateral policy of interoperability is terrible. You can look back at Windows vs OS/2, if you can run OS/2 applications under Windows but not Windows application under OS/2 then 99% of consumers will pick Windows. That's the true killer of open standards, we'll do everything the standard says and then more. For example, I work a lot with Microsoft SQL Server. I wish there was a comprehensive enough standard that I could just migrate it to MySQL or PostgreSQL or Oracle or DB2 or whatever, but I know in practice that's not the case. Even if you try to stick with the ANSI standard it's woefully short and I think they fear becoming biased to any particular implementation because they don't seem to have the will to say "do it like product X does" even when the other products don't...
If you look at the first graph from 2012 to 2017 e-tail went from ~30 to ~45 billion USD while employment went from ~440k to ~570k. That's 50% growth with 30% more employees. And that's in a booming business sector where lots of new systems are being designed and rolled into production, what happens when you go more steady state? It would be interesting to ask Amazon how many they'd really need for a skeleton staff that did nothing but fill deliveries of existing products using current systems. And where it's going in 10-20 years, I mean you don't expect radical changes at the tipping point because if you waited that long you're way too late to the party. You begin at the tipping point or even before the tipping point because you'll have the biggest snowball when it starts tumbling downhill.
As far as long term goals go, I wish that Venus would be put on equal footing with Mars. It really is an excellent, and far too neglected, destination.
Long term Venus has an even bigger "But why?" problem than Mars. Neither Mars nor Venus is very human-friendly but Mars is far more robot-friendly. Opportunity is two days away from operating for 5000 days on Mars. Since you're on the surface you have the potential to start making fields of solar arrays, greenhouses, excavate underground structures, mining and refining, build roads and create a much more earth-like outpost or colony. Venus will essentially be an orbiting spaceship, you have what we send and it's very hard to see us ever expanding on that or utilizing the local resources on Venus.
At least not in any way that we couldn't do with remote control from earth, since it'd be remote control to the surface anyway. On Mars there's at least the potential for human/robot co-projects or mobile robot supervisors, you also don't need absurd equipment to get out and fix things or tow broken robots back to base for repairs. All of this is much further into the future than "just" sending a manned mission though. Not that we have a feasible plan to terraform either planet, so in that respect neither can become a new earth. But if the end goal is something the size of the base in Antarctica I'd go with Mars.
I'm hoping we'll start with something that's at least a semi-permanent presence like a new crew going every 2.5 years when the launch window is optimal, like if we've built the habitat and everything around it supporting it and all the technology to get people to and from Mars I hope we can use it more than once and it becomes more of a resupply/expansion. If we're doing it just to do it once it's a bloody expensive trip. With the Moon you could have people land, lollygag around a few days and leave, on Mars you're committed to make it work for years. And if you're doing years, then I think doing decades with resupply/rotation can't be that far off.