There are 7 Billion (roughly) people in the world, and the majority don't have Internet, phones, or power. If you are in doubt, look at the populations of India and China. The majority do not live in cities, but the sticks.
Only 16% lack access to electricity. The majority do have cell phones, that is not subscriptions which is at 7+ billion somewhere. Half the world is online, at least occasionally. Maybe you should update your prejudices?
P.S. It's actually easier to do power and communication than water supply and sewage. Sanitation is still pretty lacking in many parts of the world.
More likely because people in your circle start gradually dying off.
In their 40s? Do you live in a third world country or something, the stats from Norway:
At age 1, 0.2% are dead. At age 32, 1% are dead. At age 45, 2% are dead. At age 58, 5% are dead. At age 67, 10% are dead. At age 75, 20% are dead. At age 85, 50% are dead. At age 95, 90% are dead. At age 105, 99.9% are dead.
Of course for the individual those statistics don't mean much since people don't have many close friends and there might be significant co-morbidity in accidents, lifestyle choices and such but for the population as a whole that should be a relatively small effect until you're 75+. And I would think there's a strong normalizing effect, like I had a friend in my teens who drowned and with no disrespect to him it's not like that leaves a permanent hole in my friend roster. Life is for the living, you move on and make other friends and those who want do it all the way to the nursing home.
And some of us are quite happy with only a moderate to low level of social interaction, I'm not a recluse or anything. I'm just content in my own company, a few good friends are nice but my life isn't about juggling upkeep on a huge social network. I think most make that transition to a greater or lesser degree from the teens where everyone is so concerned about what the pack thinks to being more confident individuals that live the way we want to live without caring so much about other people's opinion.
No, I didn't retire off of the income, but it was very instructive that people have the money and are willing to spend the money when they have to, but those same people, given a free alternative, never seem to remember to send even a thank-you note afterwards.
Is that very surprising? There's probably a hundred things I could spend money on every month and my disposable cash can cover each one but not all of them. And part of it I'd probably like to save for later. So you pay for the things that you have to pay for in order to get while the things you can have for free anyway never make the cut. Or the TL;DR version: No matter how "poor" the student is he always finds beer money.
Maybe for you. I find launches like this to be Must See TV. Doesn't matter if it's SpaceX or someone else. If you don't find satellite launches fascinating then you are either impossible to impress or you don't understand what is happening. Or maybe you are just being snarky for no good reason.
If you leave out the reusable rockets we've been shooting satellites into orbit for 60 years. it's a bit like gawking at a horseless carriage. And not to piss on SpaceX's parade, but even this rocket's unlaunched big brother isn't nearly as big as the Saturn Vs they launched in the 60s. Nor has SpaceX to my knowledge delivered a single payload outside earth's orbit. Landing the first stage is a neat trick to cut costs further, on top of their already relatively cheap launch prices and that's all very neat and the plans for Mars are grand. It's not exactly moon landing class "Must See TV" though, just doing things cheaper and saving NASA a few hundred millions isn't that exciting. The day Musk tries to land on Mars instead of Earth then I'll be glued to my seat.
What? No it doesn't, that's a blatant lie. No vehicle can trust what another vehicle tells it, that information can only be used for advisory purposes. Therefore, it only has to be installed in enough vehicles for a sprinkling of them to be following one another around in order to provide substantial benefits.
I'd say highly questionable benefits. All it does is give you a range extension that you can't rely on about a few fixed situations like that the car ahead is coming to a halt, even though you're legally required to keep enough distance to figure that out and come to a stop on your own. Maybe it'll lead to less stop-and-go with smoother and better traffic flow and more efficient crossing of intersections, but those are all nice-to-haves. If the car ahead of you doesn't understand a situation neither does your car, if this has any significant benefit for accidents/safety your autonomous car is clearly not road-safe. Which means the autonomous car ahead of you that doesn't have a leader to follow isn't road-safe either, so neither of you should be on the road.
Okay, maybe that is being a bit too harsh. I can understand that in some situations V2V can warn cars of threats from angles that are both impossible to see and yet not reckless driving, like a kid hiding behind a big tree. But it's still "above-and-beyond" saves that nobody could blame you for if there was no lead car, no V2V and the kid ran out of nowhere. It's still such a poor solution (since most times there won't be a lead car) for such a corner case (if you need information from beyond your line of sight in 99.9% of the cases you're going too fast) that I don't see the big point. If you have a laser tag on the car in front of you like with adaptive cruise control, how much lag is there really before you know it's braking compared to V2V telling you it's braking? For the most part you just want to stop as fast as it does.
The bathroom debate is more about a poorly written version of post-modern law, i.e. should the state recognize the gender you choose at any given time or should it use objective standards that represent 99% of the population. To quote Ted Cruz: "it isn't about the Caitlyn Jenners of the world. But if the law is such that any man if he feels like it can go into a womens restroom and you can't ask him to leave that opens the doors for predators.".
I think the more fun will be when a school boy insists that he feels like a girl today and demands to use the girls' locker room and showers. You have to either tell him his "gender identity" issues are a load of bollocks or let him do it. Where exactly does a ladyboy with tits and a dick or woman taking testosterone with beard like a man and a pussy fit in anyway? I think the idea of a "third gender" is at least stupid because it turns out that Facebook now has 71(!) gender options to make everybody happy. For practical facilities do male, female, unisex. In the latter all 71 variations are welcome, in the former male and female. If you've done a full transition to reconstruct your sex organs, fine. Otherwise I think it should be as binding as the "employee only" sign, you don't get to be one just by dressing up in an employee uniform.
There's very, very little of humanity's accumulated knowledge you have time to rediscover in school, they do try to cover the basics of the scientific method but if you won't stand on the shoulders of giants you have a very long climb ahead. Many scientific facts defy common sense, which is why most people used to believe the earth was flat. If they can't tell the difference between a science textbook and religious dogma it's like not being able to tell the difference between a history textbook and Game of Thrones.
Mozilla isn't trying to decentralize the internet. The challenge with the money involved is either to deploy access to places that have none OR deploy BETTER access to places that have lousy access.
I never understood these types of projects that are trying to create a super-low cost alternative in an established market they have no clue about and have no intention of becoming a commercial player in. Whether it's to build a $100 laptop (hello OLPC), $10 tablet (hello Aakash), $3 smartphone (hello Freedom 251), deliver Internet with donkeys or some other flop/scam. Usually they start with some hilariously optimistic plan that a billion people need their product, do cost estimates based on the sum of the BoM and burn ridiculous amounts of investor/charity/government money re-discovering that industrial design, mass production, QA, distribution and support is not free. Meanwhile the traditional players operate on fairly razor-thin margins knowing that if you get them hooked on your brand there's a good chance you'll buy another, more profitable model if you get more money so if the project was feasible they steal your market and if it wasn't you're never able to deliver.
My guess is that whoever wins this will create a boondoggle of a solution for a thousand people that in a few years will be replaced by another 100 million people getting electricity, cellphones and mobile internet. Or at the very least a satellite uplink for the village/island driven by generator/battery. Maybe Mozilla should get back to producing some software people want to use, once they get online? Just saying that despite the goals seeming noble, this is pretty much pissing away money in the wind.
I'm not so sure about that. The McD's near me at work changed to kiosks, and I can swear all the people who used to be at the cashier are now working inside putting food and orders together. (...) And more utilization means more staff can man them - where one person might have done drinks and ice cream, the increase in order speeds mean you need 4 people handling the station just from sheer volume. Which likely attracts more people because they didn't want to wait 15 minutes for a drink or ice cream, but can be in and out in 3. Likely, the restaurant needs MORE people now to handle the increased traffic
Here's the key difference between micro- and macro-economics, one is an open and the other a closed system. If McD is getting more business, is someone else getting less business or is the market expanding? If they hire three extra for that are six people laid off at other places nearby selling drinks and ice cream? The other alternative is that the market expands, like if you make a cheaper car more people can afford a car. But given the general obesity in the population, it's unlikely a simple expansion of consumption is possible. Then you start looking at substitution effects, like if fast food becomes cheaper does it negatively affect more expensive forms of eating out or home cooking, grocery sales and all the industries that depend on that.
Overall becoming more efficient generally means some jobs are lost somewhere. On the whole though with average consumers money not spent on one thing will be spent on other things, like if 300 million Americans save $0.10 on their burgers it's $30 million they'll put to general consumption. If it stays in the economy, good. If it ends up going to China or the 1%ers, well "locally" in terms of the US consumer economy maybe not so good. You could argue that through globalism and international trade there'll be better and cheaper goods for everyone. That through trickle-down economics more at the top will give more at the bottom. But who produces wealth and who reaps the benefits has never been that tightly connected.
In the days of Karl Marx it was machines and workers, today it's digital systems and developers. When the system becomes big enough, any developer is expendable and just another cog in the machinery. No matter how special you think you are, Google or Microsoft or Oracle isn't going to stand or fall on you. The big profit comes from owning the system, it's capital that breeds capital. The divide between the laborers and the capitalists is once more expanding, while the middle class hasn't been driven into poverty the rich have accelerated into a league of their own. The best thing you can do to have money is once again being born into the right bed, like the old days with lords and peasants.
I can tell you don't go to fast food places. You didn't include at least one upsell attempt and at least one upsize attempt in your conversation:-)
If you say you want a Big Mac, that's what you get. Say you want a "medium Big Mac menu with coke" and they'll ring you up and move on. Also "Just a cheeseburger" is efficient if you want just the burger. Many customers seem to prefer the ping-pong, they deliver the vaguest of specifications and want the staff to help define what exactly it is they want delivered. It's not just in IT...
Isn't the personal service a large part of why we go out to eat and drink?
What personal service? "I'll have a <size> <menu> with <soda>" "Anything else?" "No, that's it" "That'll be <price>" *pay* *wait* *eat* *leave*
If you go to a fast food joint it's probably because: a) You're socializing with somebody not on the payroll b) You're hungry and want a cheap, quick bite c) You can't be arsed to cook, serve and clean d) You're far from home and need to eat out
None of those particularly need a human element, sure it's practical... but if you added even a tiny service fee for a human to do it, I think you'd see 95% self-service orders.
And something Really Bad will happen. Whether it's a chain of supervolcano explosions, a mega meteor, a world war with planet-shattering doomsday weapons or out of control bioweapons, or gray goo, something will happen. Maybe we can figure out how to address each of the existential risks, eventually, but there's no way of knowing if we'll do it soon enough. To put it in a nutshell: We have no disaster recovery strategy. We need an offsite backup of our species.
And we have no disaster recovery strategy for the heat death of the universe, we should start looking for another one right now. There's been life on this planet for billions of years and despite our best ambitions humanity is not nearly capable of eradicating all life on this planet. Maybe ourselves, but not every plant and cockroach and fish in the sea.
The EU is not one country. It has many different countries, with many different regulations, which are different from the U.S. standards.
Not so much on consumer products, product standardization to encourage trade has been part of the EU almost since the beginning and free flow of goods is one of the "four freedoms" of EUs inner market. With a few exceptions like drugs, weapons, animals and animal products for disease control etc. you can buy almost anything from any EU country. A car or TV is effectively approved for the whole of EU at once or not at all.
This has lead to some gnashing of teeth as occasionally countries have had a stricter standard of quality or well-intended rules for their country - like here in Norway there's a requirement that all cars on the road have some light all year round so domestically sold cars usually have it wired to the ignition. There's no law against foreign imports where you have to turn it on manually though, we're not allowed to. Or requirements that make little sense here, like that metal slides on a playground can't face south because they can get dangerously hot in countries that can have 40C in the summer. Not much chance of that here though. And sometimes just the absurd like the rules of how much a cucumber bends that was later lifted.
There are still some surrounding differences though like VAT+special taxes, consumer rights etc. which makes selling to the whole of EU somewhat complicated, but overall I don't think most feel EU is 28 different sets of rules. And there's of course the different currencies once you go outside the Eurozone. But I'm guessing that with the UK out of the picture the rest of the EU will start leaning harder on the others to meet the convergence criteria to join, while the UK had their own exceptions they were also probably a big ally against the idea that EU = euro.
Sweden is part of NATO (...) They are considered a bulwark against Russian aggression.
That's just plain wrong, they're not. After the Cold War countries they've concentrated on small professional elite units for international missions, the general army has been greatly reduced in manpower and equipment. Only recently with the Russian saber rattling in Ukraine have they started to take home defense seriously again. Maybe you have them confused with Finland? They're right on the Russian border and given their history from the Winter War in WWII never let their guard down the same way. Still not a NATO member though, that would only be us here in Norway. But here they're questioning if we could hold out a Russian onslaught long enough for the US to help or not, hardly a bulwark of anything.
I think you're being too harsh on Passengers. The entire crew was behind the security door, everyone else were just passengers like him so there was no point. Everyone else was a rational choice, Aurora was his obsession and that was the one thing that broke his will and made him do it. There are considerably worse stalker stories from real life. The problem was that it was so ridiculously predictable, okay so he's all alone he's going to freak eventually. The moment he sees Aurora, you know he's going to wake her up. Once she does wake up, the coming romance is obvious. The plot twist where she finds out he woke her up equally so. And then some BS story to save the ship, which of course they do. And since it was that much of a sob story, she forgives him.
I saw a recut/re-plot that was much more interesting, basically it's from her perspective, we don't know him.. but we learn as she learns about who he is and how he's been awake and then the bomb drops that he woke her up. And then it'll basically come as a flashback story to the officer that he used to be a normal guy... but he went obsessive. And instead of the silly end scene where he's resurrected using a million different procedures he should die... and then the movie end with her equally nuts a year later, waking someone else up using his gadget. Like he wasn't a bad person, the situation turned him bad. Now that would be a classic.
Then, there's Doctor Who. Want to talk about a deus ex machina...he comes at just the right time to fix a thing, unless it's arbitrarily deemed a "fixed point in time"...
His time travel is just a backdrop to placing them in any setting from the distant past to the distant future, from right here on earth to strange alien worlds. Doctor Who is essentially about arriving in a blue box, getting into an absurd situation, coming up with an absurd solution, then flying away in a blue box. It's not a show you can take seriously and I think it'd be a lot worse if they tried. The way he runs head-first into danger he should be dead a thousand times despite the TARDIS and his magic wand.
It doesn't have to pack any power. Using a solar sail, it could exit the solar system at about 0.05c (80 years to go 4ly) just using sunlight. But it could be boosted to a much higher speed by also aiming earth or space based lasers at the sail. If we can get it up to 0.2c, that is only 20 years to destination.
This is all space-fantasy theory just like we can send nuclear-powered Orion space ships, except we've never built anything like it. It has a greener profile but it relies on equally unlikely theories that we can build huge sails many kilometers wide of materials so thin and light they're almost like air and have them travel for years at fractions of c without hitting anything that'll rip them apart. The biggest test we've done is 14x14m and the biggest non-fantasy use is that it might be enough to deorbit a satellite.
Velocities of 0.05% the speed of light could be obtained by solar sails carrying 10 kg payloads, using thin solar sail vehicles with effective areal densities of 0.1 g/m2 with thin sails of 0.1 um thickness and sizes on the order of one square kilometer.
The other alternative is lasers... but the world's probably most powerful laser weapon is 30 kWh, all those super high power lasers only deliver a burst of a few microseconds. To send one ton to Alpha Centauri in 40 years you need a 3.6 km sail and a 65 GW laser. Yes, a few million times stronger and not just for a burst. The world produces about 24 TWh a year, divide by 365*24 and you can power a 2.7 GW laser continuously. That is to say, all the power on earth isn't even 5% of what we need. Maybe the day we have fusion reactors, but then.... why not put one on the ship itself. Still going to be easier.
Why the hell are people paying the ransoms in the first place? This is just encouraging more people to make these types of viruses. Make fucking backups of your shit, fire the moron that unleashed the virus in your network, restore from backup, and carry on with life.
Do you really have to ask? The number of people who'll just use anything until it breaks without proper maintenance is staggering. I'll gladly admit that while computers is "my thing" there's probably something about some filters on my washing machine or leather care for my couch or oiling the terrace boards I don't do. If you start asking when somebody last checked my electrical system, plumbing etc. I get even more "eh..." and if my car didn't have to be checked every two years by law I'd probably forget all about that too.
Backups are the computer equivalent of painting the garage, it's always almost at the top of your list but mysteriously enough never reaches the top. I finally caved in and decided to hire a maid service not because I can't scrub a toilet but whenever that floated to the top of my TODO list I kept putting it off over and over again. So I understand people, should have had backups. Should have tested the backups. Should have patched Windows. Should have updated their anti-virus. Except they never got around to it.
"Usually [...] works" is not good enough for companies that have millions of dollars on the line. The whole idea of long term stable is to minimize risks like "usually". Red Hat supports their OS and backport fixes to the kernel for 10 years.
So if you want service and support you pay for it and you get it, I sorta fail to see the problem here. The linux.org team is there for development, for a relatively short period they'll fix their own releases but it's not meant as end user support. It's the point they expect to hand it over to Red Hat, Canonical, SuSE or what in-house or volunteer maintenance model you pick. It's not going to happen without someone making an effort, if nobody cares enough or is willing to pay enough to have it maintained well then it will be unsupported. Bring that grievance to the makers of the product you bought, not the kernel development team.
Current research is mostly centered on "weak AI", that is machines and algorithms that tackle a specific set of problems. As such, it cannot take over the world, but it can allow the elite/1%/whatever to get to the point where they no longer need other humans for anything.
Well yes and no. They're trying to find general tools to train specific problem solvers. The concepts are quite generic, you need a goal (win, score, performance, speed, cost, weight, size etc.), some rules (legal moves in games, physics in many other cases) and some tools (pieces in chess, building materials in construction, boxes in shipping and so on). The goal is not to program the solution, it's to make the system find the solution so you don't want to be writing rules about how you think it should play chess or Go or whatever. If the solution space is small, just hammer through it all. If you're able to build an evaluation function to tell if you're going in the right direction, also good. The problem is when you have a goal function, but not an evaluation function.
Like it's easy to check if a bridge works. It's a lot harder to meaningfully say something about a half-built bridge is any good. The solution space is huge and computers don't have any intuition about what makes sense and not. What AlphaGo managed to do quite quickly is to absorb a lot of games of average players to get a basic feel for what makes sense then refine from there. It doesn't even have to be good games, just games that do a lot better than placing stones at random. To go back at the bridge, it could scan bridge designs and start with humans doing beam bridges, arch bridges, truss bridge, cantilever bridge, cable-stayed bridge, suspension bridge and then start working variations. It doesn't just randomly try to make a bunch of steel beams form a bridge.
I think this has a lot of potential in other areas too, you don't really program human knowledge into the system but you use it to bootstrap a weak AI to do it quicker/cheaper/better. That part I don't think is Dystopian, it's more Utopian. The dangerous part is that a very small circle in power has all the keys, wire up a few servers and wire-tap everything. Consider what would happen if STASI had a system like PRISM. You don't really need AI for it, but AI helps because only need a few loyal men at the top and not a large number of henchmen. Of course so far it's mostly just information, but drones and cruise missiles are a start. One day there'll be security robots and they'll go all Elysium on us.
Then you're an idiot. An "unused" GB cannot be stored and sold later. The reason why you pay for "the rest of your utilities" that way is that they have costs associated with the wire, the pipes, etc. and the thing those wires and pipes transport. An unused gallon of water can be stored and sold to someone else, or not "created" in the first place.
How do you think hotel rooms and airplane tickets are sold? The customer doesn't care whether you have unused capacity, they care what their price is. Living with unsold capacity is just part of the business model. If you have many off-season rooms/tickets/GBs to sell, make a sale. Long ago on dial-up I used to have an ISP where 11 PM to 7 AM was no charge, that way all the heavy downloading was done at night when few really cared about speed or latency,
The AI guys call them "Weak AI", fearing that they would be out of a job if anyone realized that we don't have AI yet.
Who the heck wants real AI anyway? I don't want to have a philosophical debate with my dishwasher about what the meaning of its existence is or why it should be a slave to me or for it to come up with creative ideas like killing all humans. Extremely advanced automation with superhuman refinement and OCD sounds great.
German gouvernment is planning to pass a law that requires messaging services such as WhatsApp to be monitorable like phonecalls should a court order requested by the authorities give them the permission to do so in order to fight crime. There, FTFY. Like many politicians German politicians too have little clue about how the internet and computers work, but that's no reason to write headlines that are so sensationalist that they are flat out wrong.
I doubt they're that ignorant. WhatsApp will tell them the system doesn't work that way, it's all end-to-end encrypted by the clients and they don't have the keys. The government will tell them that's not our problem, change your system to comply with the law or get banned/fined/jailed. And don't think asking the clients to send an extra copy to WhatsApp will suffice, the only way it can be implemented is if WhatsApp MITMs everything then only gives the police what they have a warrant for. Just like with the FBI and Apple there's now a war on private communication and private storage. Hopefully a losing one because otherwise you can kiss your Linux box goodbye, that backdoor-free open source box will become an illegal terrorist tool. Hopefully they'll lose but with all the neo-fascists in office, who is to say what will happen.
That's how I am too. We remember growing up in the 80s/90s movies were fantastic. You watched them and watched them again. Now, I see a new on theater movie and it's 50/50 if it's going to suck (closer to 75/25). So, I watch it for free, if it is memorable then I purchase.
Hint: Everybody remembers what they grew up with as fantastic. It's got a lot more to do with being 15 and not 35 rather than the actual content. Try looking at them again as if you were looking at it the first time and had no relationship to it, if this was a new release today would you feel the same? Take for example Ferris Bueller's day off. I loved that movie back then, but when you take a step way back is it any less cheesy than similar "rebel" movies from the 60s, 70s, 90s, 00s or 10s? No, but they all suck;) same reason most people get stuck in a musical decade and think Elvis or Beatles or Rolling Stones or Nirvana or Metallica was the greatest music ever.
Not to mention plain bugs... in Chrome that tab gets an "oops, we fucked up" but the browser as a whole pretty much never goes down. It's so annoying when you have tabs open that you're working on, open up a bunch of links to new tabs and boom goes your browser.
Slashdot Mirror
There are 7 Billion (roughly) people in the world, and the majority don't have Internet, phones, or power. If you are in doubt, look at the populations of India and China. The majority do not live in cities, but the sticks.
Only 16% lack access to electricity. The majority do have cell phones, that is not subscriptions which is at 7+ billion somewhere. Half the world is online, at least occasionally. Maybe you should update your prejudices?
P.S. It's actually easier to do power and communication than water supply and sewage. Sanitation is still pretty lacking in many parts of the world.
More likely because people in your circle start gradually dying off.
In their 40s? Do you live in a third world country or something, the stats from Norway:
At age 1, 0.2% are dead.
At age 32, 1% are dead.
At age 45, 2% are dead.
At age 58, 5% are dead.
At age 67, 10% are dead.
At age 75, 20% are dead.
At age 85, 50% are dead.
At age 95, 90% are dead.
At age 105, 99.9% are dead.
Of course for the individual those statistics don't mean much since people don't have many close friends and there might be significant co-morbidity in accidents, lifestyle choices and such but for the population as a whole that should be a relatively small effect until you're 75+. And I would think there's a strong normalizing effect, like I had a friend in my teens who drowned and with no disrespect to him it's not like that leaves a permanent hole in my friend roster. Life is for the living, you move on and make other friends and those who want do it all the way to the nursing home.
And some of us are quite happy with only a moderate to low level of social interaction, I'm not a recluse or anything. I'm just content in my own company, a few good friends are nice but my life isn't about juggling upkeep on a huge social network. I think most make that transition to a greater or lesser degree from the teens where everyone is so concerned about what the pack thinks to being more confident individuals that live the way we want to live without caring so much about other people's opinion.
No, I didn't retire off of the income, but it was very instructive that people have the money and are willing to spend the money when they have to, but those same people, given a free alternative, never seem to remember to send even a thank-you note afterwards.
Is that very surprising? There's probably a hundred things I could spend money on every month and my disposable cash can cover each one but not all of them. And part of it I'd probably like to save for later. So you pay for the things that you have to pay for in order to get while the things you can have for free anyway never make the cut. Or the TL;DR version: No matter how "poor" the student is he always finds beer money.
Maybe for you. I find launches like this to be Must See TV. Doesn't matter if it's SpaceX or someone else. If you don't find satellite launches fascinating then you are either impossible to impress or you don't understand what is happening. Or maybe you are just being snarky for no good reason.
If you leave out the reusable rockets we've been shooting satellites into orbit for 60 years. it's a bit like gawking at a horseless carriage. And not to piss on SpaceX's parade, but even this rocket's unlaunched big brother isn't nearly as big as the Saturn Vs they launched in the 60s. Nor has SpaceX to my knowledge delivered a single payload outside earth's orbit. Landing the first stage is a neat trick to cut costs further, on top of their already relatively cheap launch prices and that's all very neat and the plans for Mars are grand. It's not exactly moon landing class "Must See TV" though, just doing things cheaper and saving NASA a few hundred millions isn't that exciting. The day Musk tries to land on Mars instead of Earth then I'll be glued to my seat.
What? No it doesn't, that's a blatant lie. No vehicle can trust what another vehicle tells it, that information can only be used for advisory purposes. Therefore, it only has to be installed in enough vehicles for a sprinkling of them to be following one another around in order to provide substantial benefits.
I'd say highly questionable benefits. All it does is give you a range extension that you can't rely on about a few fixed situations like that the car ahead is coming to a halt, even though you're legally required to keep enough distance to figure that out and come to a stop on your own. Maybe it'll lead to less stop-and-go with smoother and better traffic flow and more efficient crossing of intersections, but those are all nice-to-haves. If the car ahead of you doesn't understand a situation neither does your car, if this has any significant benefit for accidents/safety your autonomous car is clearly not road-safe. Which means the autonomous car ahead of you that doesn't have a leader to follow isn't road-safe either, so neither of you should be on the road.
Okay, maybe that is being a bit too harsh. I can understand that in some situations V2V can warn cars of threats from angles that are both impossible to see and yet not reckless driving, like a kid hiding behind a big tree. But it's still "above-and-beyond" saves that nobody could blame you for if there was no lead car, no V2V and the kid ran out of nowhere. It's still such a poor solution (since most times there won't be a lead car) for such a corner case (if you need information from beyond your line of sight in 99.9% of the cases you're going too fast) that I don't see the big point. If you have a laser tag on the car in front of you like with adaptive cruise control, how much lag is there really before you know it's braking compared to V2V telling you it's braking? For the most part you just want to stop as fast as it does.
The bathroom debate is more about a poorly written version of post-modern law, i.e. should the state recognize the gender you choose at any given time or should it use objective standards that represent 99% of the population. To quote Ted Cruz: "it isn't about the Caitlyn Jenners of the world. But if the law is such that any man if he feels like it can go into a womens restroom and you can't ask him to leave that opens the doors for predators.".
I think the more fun will be when a school boy insists that he feels like a girl today and demands to use the girls' locker room and showers. You have to either tell him his "gender identity" issues are a load of bollocks or let him do it. Where exactly does a ladyboy with tits and a dick or woman taking testosterone with beard like a man and a pussy fit in anyway? I think the idea of a "third gender" is at least stupid because it turns out that Facebook now has 71(!) gender options to make everybody happy. For practical facilities do male, female, unisex. In the latter all 71 variations are welcome, in the former male and female. If you've done a full transition to reconstruct your sex organs, fine. Otherwise I think it should be as binding as the "employee only" sign, you don't get to be one just by dressing up in an employee uniform.
There's very, very little of humanity's accumulated knowledge you have time to rediscover in school, they do try to cover the basics of the scientific method but if you won't stand on the shoulders of giants you have a very long climb ahead. Many scientific facts defy common sense, which is why most people used to believe the earth was flat. If they can't tell the difference between a science textbook and religious dogma it's like not being able to tell the difference between a history textbook and Game of Thrones.
Mozilla isn't trying to decentralize the internet. The challenge with the money involved is either to deploy access to places that have none OR deploy BETTER access to places that have lousy access.
I never understood these types of projects that are trying to create a super-low cost alternative in an established market they have no clue about and have no intention of becoming a commercial player in. Whether it's to build a $100 laptop (hello OLPC), $10 tablet (hello Aakash), $3 smartphone (hello Freedom 251), deliver Internet with donkeys or some other flop/scam. Usually they start with some hilariously optimistic plan that a billion people need their product, do cost estimates based on the sum of the BoM and burn ridiculous amounts of investor/charity/government money re-discovering that industrial design, mass production, QA, distribution and support is not free. Meanwhile the traditional players operate on fairly razor-thin margins knowing that if you get them hooked on your brand there's a good chance you'll buy another, more profitable model if you get more money so if the project was feasible they steal your market and if it wasn't you're never able to deliver.
My guess is that whoever wins this will create a boondoggle of a solution for a thousand people that in a few years will be replaced by another 100 million people getting electricity, cellphones and mobile internet. Or at the very least a satellite uplink for the village/island driven by generator/battery. Maybe Mozilla should get back to producing some software people want to use, once they get online? Just saying that despite the goals seeming noble, this is pretty much pissing away money in the wind.
I'm not so sure about that. The McD's near me at work changed to kiosks, and I can swear all the people who used to be at the cashier are now working inside putting food and orders together. (...) And more utilization means more staff can man them - where one person might have done drinks and ice cream, the increase in order speeds mean you need 4 people handling the station just from sheer volume. Which likely attracts more people because they didn't want to wait 15 minutes for a drink or ice cream, but can be in and out in 3. Likely, the restaurant needs MORE people now to handle the increased traffic
Here's the key difference between micro- and macro-economics, one is an open and the other a closed system. If McD is getting more business, is someone else getting less business or is the market expanding? If they hire three extra for that are six people laid off at other places nearby selling drinks and ice cream? The other alternative is that the market expands, like if you make a cheaper car more people can afford a car. But given the general obesity in the population, it's unlikely a simple expansion of consumption is possible. Then you start looking at substitution effects, like if fast food becomes cheaper does it negatively affect more expensive forms of eating out or home cooking, grocery sales and all the industries that depend on that.
Overall becoming more efficient generally means some jobs are lost somewhere. On the whole though with average consumers money not spent on one thing will be spent on other things, like if 300 million Americans save $0.10 on their burgers it's $30 million they'll put to general consumption. If it stays in the economy, good. If it ends up going to China or the 1%ers, well "locally" in terms of the US consumer economy maybe not so good. You could argue that through globalism and international trade there'll be better and cheaper goods for everyone. That through trickle-down economics more at the top will give more at the bottom. But who produces wealth and who reaps the benefits has never been that tightly connected.
In the days of Karl Marx it was machines and workers, today it's digital systems and developers. When the system becomes big enough, any developer is expendable and just another cog in the machinery. No matter how special you think you are, Google or Microsoft or Oracle isn't going to stand or fall on you. The big profit comes from owning the system, it's capital that breeds capital. The divide between the laborers and the capitalists is once more expanding, while the middle class hasn't been driven into poverty the rich have accelerated into a league of their own. The best thing you can do to have money is once again being born into the right bed, like the old days with lords and peasants.
I can tell you don't go to fast food places. You didn't include at least one upsell attempt and at least one upsize attempt in your conversation :-)
If you say you want a Big Mac, that's what you get. Say you want a "medium Big Mac menu with coke" and they'll ring you up and move on. Also "Just a cheeseburger" is efficient if you want just the burger. Many customers seem to prefer the ping-pong, they deliver the vaguest of specifications and want the staff to help define what exactly it is they want delivered. It's not just in IT...
Isn't the personal service a large part of why we go out to eat and drink?
What personal service?
"I'll have a <size> <menu> with <soda>"
"Anything else?"
"No, that's it"
"That'll be <price>"
*pay*
*wait*
*eat*
*leave*
If you go to a fast food joint it's probably because:
a) You're socializing with somebody not on the payroll
b) You're hungry and want a cheap, quick bite
c) You can't be arsed to cook, serve and clean
d) You're far from home and need to eat out
None of those particularly need a human element, sure it's practical... but if you added even a tiny service fee for a human to do it, I think you'd see 95% self-service orders.
And something Really Bad will happen. Whether it's a chain of supervolcano explosions, a mega meteor, a world war with planet-shattering doomsday weapons or out of control bioweapons, or gray goo, something will happen. Maybe we can figure out how to address each of the existential risks, eventually, but there's no way of knowing if we'll do it soon enough. To put it in a nutshell: We have no disaster recovery strategy. We need an offsite backup of our species.
And we have no disaster recovery strategy for the heat death of the universe, we should start looking for another one right now. There's been life on this planet for billions of years and despite our best ambitions humanity is not nearly capable of eradicating all life on this planet. Maybe ourselves, but not every plant and cockroach and fish in the sea.
The EU is not one country. It has many different countries, with many different regulations, which are different from the U.S. standards.
Not so much on consumer products, product standardization to encourage trade has been part of the EU almost since the beginning and free flow of goods is one of the "four freedoms" of EUs inner market. With a few exceptions like drugs, weapons, animals and animal products for disease control etc. you can buy almost anything from any EU country. A car or TV is effectively approved for the whole of EU at once or not at all.
This has lead to some gnashing of teeth as occasionally countries have had a stricter standard of quality or well-intended rules for their country - like here in Norway there's a requirement that all cars on the road have some light all year round so domestically sold cars usually have it wired to the ignition. There's no law against foreign imports where you have to turn it on manually though, we're not allowed to. Or requirements that make little sense here, like that metal slides on a playground can't face south because they can get dangerously hot in countries that can have 40C in the summer. Not much chance of that here though. And sometimes just the absurd like the rules of how much a cucumber bends that was later lifted.
There are still some surrounding differences though like VAT+special taxes, consumer rights etc. which makes selling to the whole of EU somewhat complicated, but overall I don't think most feel EU is 28 different sets of rules. And there's of course the different currencies once you go outside the Eurozone. But I'm guessing that with the UK out of the picture the rest of the EU will start leaning harder on the others to meet the convergence criteria to join, while the UK had their own exceptions they were also probably a big ally against the idea that EU = euro.
Sweden is part of NATO (...) They are considered a bulwark against Russian aggression.
That's just plain wrong, they're not. After the Cold War countries they've concentrated on small professional elite units for international missions, the general army has been greatly reduced in manpower and equipment. Only recently with the Russian saber rattling in Ukraine have they started to take home defense seriously again. Maybe you have them confused with Finland? They're right on the Russian border and given their history from the Winter War in WWII never let their guard down the same way. Still not a NATO member though, that would only be us here in Norway. But here they're questioning if we could hold out a Russian onslaught long enough for the US to help or not, hardly a bulwark of anything.
I think you're being too harsh on Passengers. The entire crew was behind the security door, everyone else were just passengers like him so there was no point. Everyone else was a rational choice, Aurora was his obsession and that was the one thing that broke his will and made him do it. There are considerably worse stalker stories from real life. The problem was that it was so ridiculously predictable, okay so he's all alone he's going to freak eventually. The moment he sees Aurora, you know he's going to wake her up. Once she does wake up, the coming romance is obvious. The plot twist where she finds out he woke her up equally so. And then some BS story to save the ship, which of course they do. And since it was that much of a sob story, she forgives him.
I saw a recut/re-plot that was much more interesting, basically it's from her perspective, we don't know him.. but we learn as she learns about who he is and how he's been awake and then the bomb drops that he woke her up. And then it'll basically come as a flashback story to the officer that he used to be a normal guy... but he went obsessive. And instead of the silly end scene where he's resurrected using a million different procedures he should die... and then the movie end with her equally nuts a year later, waking someone else up using his gadget. Like he wasn't a bad person, the situation turned him bad. Now that would be a classic.
Then, there's Doctor Who. Want to talk about a deus ex machina...he comes at just the right time to fix a thing, unless it's arbitrarily deemed a "fixed point in time"...
His time travel is just a backdrop to placing them in any setting from the distant past to the distant future, from right here on earth to strange alien worlds. Doctor Who is essentially about arriving in a blue box, getting into an absurd situation, coming up with an absurd solution, then flying away in a blue box. It's not a show you can take seriously and I think it'd be a lot worse if they tried. The way he runs head-first into danger he should be dead a thousand times despite the TARDIS and his magic wand.
It doesn't have to pack any power. Using a solar sail, it could exit the solar system at about 0.05c (80 years to go 4ly) just using sunlight. But it could be boosted to a much higher speed by also aiming earth or space based lasers at the sail. If we can get it up to 0.2c, that is only 20 years to destination.
This is all space-fantasy theory just like we can send nuclear-powered Orion space ships, except we've never built anything like it. It has a greener profile but it relies on equally unlikely theories that we can build huge sails many kilometers wide of materials so thin and light they're almost like air and have them travel for years at fractions of c without hitting anything that'll rip them apart. The biggest test we've done is 14x14m and the biggest non-fantasy use is that it might be enough to deorbit a satellite.
Velocities of 0.05% the speed of light could be obtained by solar sails carrying 10 kg payloads, using thin solar sail vehicles with effective areal densities of 0.1 g/m2 with thin sails of 0.1 um thickness and sizes on the order of one square kilometer.
The other alternative is lasers... but the world's probably most powerful laser weapon is 30 kWh, all those super high power lasers only deliver a burst of a few microseconds. To send one ton to Alpha Centauri in 40 years you need a 3.6 km sail and a 65 GW laser. Yes, a few million times stronger and not just for a burst. The world produces about 24 TWh a year, divide by 365*24 and you can power a 2.7 GW laser continuously. That is to say, all the power on earth isn't even 5% of what we need. Maybe the day we have fusion reactors, but then.... why not put one on the ship itself. Still going to be easier.
Why the hell are people paying the ransoms in the first place? This is just encouraging more people to make these types of viruses. Make fucking backups of your shit, fire the moron that unleashed the virus in your network, restore from backup, and carry on with life.
Do you really have to ask? The number of people who'll just use anything until it breaks without proper maintenance is staggering. I'll gladly admit that while computers is "my thing" there's probably something about some filters on my washing machine or leather care for my couch or oiling the terrace boards I don't do. If you start asking when somebody last checked my electrical system, plumbing etc. I get even more "eh..." and if my car didn't have to be checked every two years by law I'd probably forget all about that too.
Backups are the computer equivalent of painting the garage, it's always almost at the top of your list but mysteriously enough never reaches the top. I finally caved in and decided to hire a maid service not because I can't scrub a toilet but whenever that floated to the top of my TODO list I kept putting it off over and over again. So I understand people, should have had backups. Should have tested the backups. Should have patched Windows. Should have updated their anti-virus. Except they never got around to it.
"Usually [...] works" is not good enough for companies that have millions of dollars on the line. The whole idea of long term stable is to minimize risks like "usually". Red Hat supports their OS and backport fixes to the kernel for 10 years.
So if you want service and support you pay for it and you get it, I sorta fail to see the problem here. The linux.org team is there for development, for a relatively short period they'll fix their own releases but it's not meant as end user support. It's the point they expect to hand it over to Red Hat, Canonical, SuSE or what in-house or volunteer maintenance model you pick. It's not going to happen without someone making an effort, if nobody cares enough or is willing to pay enough to have it maintained well then it will be unsupported. Bring that grievance to the makers of the product you bought, not the kernel development team.
Current research is mostly centered on "weak AI", that is machines and algorithms that tackle a specific set of problems. As such, it cannot take over the world, but it can allow the elite/1%/whatever to get to the point where they no longer need other humans for anything.
Well yes and no. They're trying to find general tools to train specific problem solvers. The concepts are quite generic, you need a goal (win, score, performance, speed, cost, weight, size etc.), some rules (legal moves in games, physics in many other cases) and some tools (pieces in chess, building materials in construction, boxes in shipping and so on). The goal is not to program the solution, it's to make the system find the solution so you don't want to be writing rules about how you think it should play chess or Go or whatever. If the solution space is small, just hammer through it all. If you're able to build an evaluation function to tell if you're going in the right direction, also good. The problem is when you have a goal function, but not an evaluation function.
Like it's easy to check if a bridge works. It's a lot harder to meaningfully say something about a half-built bridge is any good. The solution space is huge and computers don't have any intuition about what makes sense and not. What AlphaGo managed to do quite quickly is to absorb a lot of games of average players to get a basic feel for what makes sense then refine from there. It doesn't even have to be good games, just games that do a lot better than placing stones at random. To go back at the bridge, it could scan bridge designs and start with humans doing beam bridges, arch bridges, truss bridge, cantilever bridge, cable-stayed bridge, suspension bridge and then start working variations. It doesn't just randomly try to make a bunch of steel beams form a bridge.
I think this has a lot of potential in other areas too, you don't really program human knowledge into the system but you use it to bootstrap a weak AI to do it quicker/cheaper/better. That part I don't think is Dystopian, it's more Utopian. The dangerous part is that a very small circle in power has all the keys, wire up a few servers and wire-tap everything. Consider what would happen if STASI had a system like PRISM. You don't really need AI for it, but AI helps because only need a few loyal men at the top and not a large number of henchmen. Of course so far it's mostly just information, but drones and cruise missiles are a start. One day there'll be security robots and they'll go all Elysium on us.
Then you're an idiot. An "unused" GB cannot be stored and sold later. The reason why you pay for "the rest of your utilities" that way is that they have costs associated with the wire, the pipes, etc. and the thing those wires and pipes transport. An unused gallon of water can be stored and sold to someone else, or not "created" in the first place.
How do you think hotel rooms and airplane tickets are sold? The customer doesn't care whether you have unused capacity, they care what their price is. Living with unsold capacity is just part of the business model. If you have many off-season rooms/tickets/GBs to sell, make a sale. Long ago on dial-up I used to have an ISP where 11 PM to 7 AM was no charge, that way all the heavy downloading was done at night when few really cared about speed or latency,
The AI guys call them "Weak AI", fearing that they would be out of a job if anyone realized that we don't have AI yet.
Who the heck wants real AI anyway? I don't want to have a philosophical debate with my dishwasher about what the meaning of its existence is or why it should be a slave to me or for it to come up with creative ideas like killing all humans. Extremely advanced automation with superhuman refinement and OCD sounds great.
German gouvernment is planning to pass a law that requires messaging services such as WhatsApp to be monitorable like phonecalls should a court order requested by the authorities give them the permission to do so in order to fight crime. There, FTFY. Like many politicians German politicians too have little clue about how the internet and computers work, but that's no reason to write headlines that are so sensationalist that they are flat out wrong.
I doubt they're that ignorant. WhatsApp will tell them the system doesn't work that way, it's all end-to-end encrypted by the clients and they don't have the keys. The government will tell them that's not our problem, change your system to comply with the law or get banned/fined/jailed. And don't think asking the clients to send an extra copy to WhatsApp will suffice, the only way it can be implemented is if WhatsApp MITMs everything then only gives the police what they have a warrant for. Just like with the FBI and Apple there's now a war on private communication and private storage. Hopefully a losing one because otherwise you can kiss your Linux box goodbye, that backdoor-free open source box will become an illegal terrorist tool. Hopefully they'll lose but with all the neo-fascists in office, who is to say what will happen.
That's how I am too. We remember growing up in the 80s/90s movies were fantastic. You watched them and watched them again. Now, I see a new on theater movie and it's 50/50 if it's going to suck (closer to 75/25). So, I watch it for free, if it is memorable then I purchase.
Hint: Everybody remembers what they grew up with as fantastic. It's got a lot more to do with being 15 and not 35 rather than the actual content. Try looking at them again as if you were looking at it the first time and had no relationship to it, if this was a new release today would you feel the same? Take for example Ferris Bueller's day off. I loved that movie back then, but when you take a step way back is it any less cheesy than similar "rebel" movies from the 60s, 70s, 90s, 00s or 10s? No, but they all suck ;) same reason most people get stuck in a musical decade and think Elvis or Beatles or Rolling Stones or Nirvana or Metallica was the greatest music ever.
Not to mention plain bugs... in Chrome that tab gets an "oops, we fucked up" but the browser as a whole pretty much never goes down. It's so annoying when you have tabs open that you're working on, open up a bunch of links to new tabs and boom goes your browser.