It's that "barring any revelations in the nature of matter and/or space" part. We had so many this past hundred years it seems likely there are more to come.
Given that the typical human lifespan is under 100 years and Hawking says we have 1000 years to get there, letting a few billion die off doesn't seem to be an insurmountable problem.
what economic benefit will it provide while we spend 10s or 100s of trillions of dollars getting it going?
Science. Every time we try to do something just out of reach we learn metric assloads of new stuff about how things work. And every time we do that, inventors and engineers take that new knowledge and turn it in to awesome things to buy.
We don't know that it's impossible to get from point A to point B faster than light naturally travels from point A to point B.
We do know a large set of techniques, covering every currently-understood physical phenomenon, which won't permit us to move from point A to point B faster than light can or, as you say, at any appreciable fraction thereof.
If the past several centuries of advancement in physics has taught us nothing else, it has taught that proof of the latter is not proof of the former.
David Brin, who does not claim to predict the future, did a remarkable job with his settings in Earth, published 1990. He describes a world-spanning wireless data network, forums that look virtually identical to modern social media, social implications of ubiquitous cell phone cameras recording to the cloud, etc.
In 1990. When cell phones big bricks that did phone calls, one-way pagers were just starting to become widespread, the Internet was half a decade away from being generally accessible to the public and cameras were clunky things with film or videotape.
So no, not all futurists are lousy at the job. A few actually have insights the rest of the world hasn't caught up with. Hawking is not one of the few.
Lol, that's because the killer AIs he keeps predicting have taken over the speech synthesizer and are trying to fool the rest of us in to looking out for killer aliens while the AIs quietly take over the world.
With Ross Perot as a spoiler both times, it's hardly a surprise that none of the candidates topped 50% of the popular vote. Clinton got the plurality of the vote by very large margins.
Johnson was this year's protest vote. Respectfully, your supposition that more of those votes would have gone to Trump is unfounded.
The problem with Java is not the language, it's the developers. Java is so good at doing things for you that it allows even incompetent developers to thrive. Which is unfortunate, because they're just as incompetent in java as they were in other programming languages and while their software runs to completion it often runs incorrectly and produces wrong results.
I know several Java gurus, folks I'd hire to write software for me any day of the week. But I know so many more incompetent hacks who claim java expertise and if you're not an expert software developer yourself its very hard to tell which is which.
1. Multithreading. In some languages (e.g. Java) multithreading is no worse than any kind of parallel processing. Can you be a buffoon and fail? Yes you can. But you can do that in a single-threaded program too.
In other languages (e.g. C) the chance of errors impacting some completely random data structure are so high that it's frankly important to stay away from anything that would confuse the control flow, such as multithreading.
2. Closures. Okay, you're talking about Javascript here. javascript is a hideous language which should not be used to the maximum extent practical. Why complain about closers when all of javascript is bad mojo?
3. Too big data. Also known as lazy-ass programmers who don't want to be bothered to deal with the possibility that their program may be called upon to process a large data set. Solutions for processing large data sets explicitly on the disk (not with virtual memory) are well understood. You just have to choose to use them.
4. NP-complete. There's no particular dragon there... the elephant in the room is those programmers too ignorant or clueless to bother computing the big-oh running time of their algorithms, so they write software that appears to "lock up" as soon as anyone gives it a useful data set to process.
5. Security. Correct security implements defense in depth. Break one level so what? Even patched slowly, it's patched before enough layers can be broken to grant access.
Programmers make two classes of stupid mistake: a. They assume they don't need defense in depth because they've written secure software. b. They carelessly implement functionality that cuts through all layers of security. Like single-sign on.
6. Encryption. The odds of a long-surviving conspiracy to hide mathematical breakthroughs which bypass encryption are essentially zero. You can relax on that score. You can also expect one-time-pad encryption to remain unbreakable regardless of mathematical improvements. Because no analysis of extremely long strings of random bits is meaningful.
You have to be pretty bone-headed to mess up security in this day and age. Yes, many many programmers are bone-headed. But that's not encryption's fault.
7. Identity management. The only thing which makes this hard is its constant misuse. No authentication is perfect, so correct programming makes authenticated actions reversible instead. The more critical the action, the more critical it be reversible.
8. Measuring hardness. Now we're in to mumbo-jumbo territory. A simple big-oh evaluation will tell you whether your algorithm is usable. Trying to figure out whether it will be easier or harder to solve one problem or another, neither of which have a known useful algorithm? Silliness! Problems like that are solved when someone finally has the key insight. Inspiration is not a product of work, it's a product of the creative mind.
9. The authors can't measure. They claimed 7 but listed 8 things.
If this is such a real issue, why is it brought up after the election?
Because for the second time in as many decades (and only the fifth time in history) the candidate with the most votes lost the election. And both of these last two put a Republican in office.
I won't say Clinton lost the election -because of- the electoral college, but the answer to the question you asked is: the discrepancy between the popular vote and the electoral college is why the issue has come up -now- instead of some other time.
"So how could any decent, intelligent person not support [Instant Runoff Voting]? One answer is that situations can arise in which IRV results are clearly unreasonable"
The undivided like-minds approach tends to exacerbate Alexis de Tocqueville's Tyranny of the Majority. That's not a good thing either, because every individual is in the minority for at least some issues they care about and its not good for large numbers to drown those causes out.
It's important that a candidate win as much of the country as possible, not just the populous areas. The broad but sparse rural population has different concerns than suburbanites. A voting system which disenfranchises them would be a bad thing.
If there was a 20 point spread in popular vote and the election went to the other candidate I'd change my tune. But that's not the case. The popular vote numbers are functionally a tie.
Connect the VM to the VPS with OpenVPN and route all traffic through it.
Browse without flash and wipe the cookies every session. Reboot the AWS VPS regularly so you get a different public IP address.
Don't use the anonymized browsing VM to access any web site that's tied to you in some other way, such as your bank account or gmail account. Use your existing web browsing process to reach those servers.
Maybe the devs were trying to avoid a false sense of security. It's an FTP client. You have to be out of your mind to use FTP in any scenario where security is important.
This isn't a case of ignorant browser devs making choices which promote plain-text transfers (completely vulnerable) over encrypted transfers with self-signed certs (vulnerable only to mitm attacks). Like telnet and rlogin, FTP's use is obsolete and insecure for all scenarios which use a password. Period.
A good editor would have added [sic] to alert readers of the problem. A great editor would have dropped the quote and rearranged other text around it.
Only an incompetent editor would have corrected the quote. It's not the editor's job to put words in someone else's mouth or to try to guess what the other person really meant.
In fairness, the slashdot submitter was exactly quoting Lauren Ohnesorge of the Triangle Business Journal who listened to a speech where the speaker said, "eighty two eighty-six" and thought he said "eighty-two eighty-six." Could have stood the addition of a "[sic]" if the editors were sharper.
Why Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst thought Linux ever ran on an 80286 is more a mystery.
"Acceptance [of 286 protected mode] was additionally hampered by the fact that the 286 only allowed memory access in 16 bit segments via each of four segment registers, meaning only 4*216 bytes, equivalent to 256 kilobytes, could be accessed at a time.[11] "
So that's correct: no flat memory model in the 286. 386 protected mode switched the memory bus and segment size to 32 bits, allowing 4gigs to be accessed at once.
Slashdot Mirror
It's that "barring any revelations in the nature of matter and/or space" part. We had so many this past hundred years it seems likely there are more to come.
Given that the typical human lifespan is under 100 years and Hawking says we have 1000 years to get there, letting a few billion die off doesn't seem to be an insurmountable problem.
If you believe that nihilist crap, help mother gaia by removing yourself from her presence.
what economic benefit will it provide while we spend 10s or 100s of trillions of dollars getting it going?
Science. Every time we try to do something just out of reach we learn metric assloads of new stuff about how things work. And every time we do that, inventors and engineers take that new knowledge and turn it in to awesome things to buy.
Which would be relevant if his reported comments were legitimately rooted in cosmology instead of futurism.
We don't know that it's impossible to get from point A to point B faster than light naturally travels from point A to point B.
We do know a large set of techniques, covering every currently-understood physical phenomenon, which won't permit us to move from point A to point B faster than light can or, as you say, at any appreciable fraction thereof.
If the past several centuries of advancement in physics has taught us nothing else, it has taught that proof of the latter is not proof of the former.
David Brin, who does not claim to predict the future, did a remarkable job with his settings in Earth, published 1990. He describes a world-spanning wireless data network, forums that look virtually identical to modern social media, social implications of ubiquitous cell phone cameras recording to the cloud, etc.
In 1990. When cell phones big bricks that did phone calls, one-way pagers were just starting to become widespread, the Internet was half a decade away from being generally accessible to the public and cameras were clunky things with film or videotape.
So no, not all futurists are lousy at the job. A few actually have insights the rest of the world hasn't caught up with. Hawking is not one of the few.
Lol, that's because the killer AIs he keeps predicting have taken over the speech synthesizer and are trying to fool the rest of us in to looking out for killer aliens while the AIs quietly take over the world.
I may not be smarter than Hawking but I'm easily smart enough to recognize when even geniuses are speaking with the wrong orifice.
Stephen Hawking is a brilliant man and solid scientist. His abilities as a futurist leave something to be desired.
With Ross Perot as a spoiler both times, it's hardly a surprise that none of the candidates topped 50% of the popular vote. Clinton got the plurality of the vote by very large margins.
Johnson was this year's protest vote. Respectfully, your supposition that more of those votes would have gone to Trump is unfounded.
The problem with Java is not the language, it's the developers. Java is so good at doing things for you that it allows even incompetent developers to thrive. Which is unfortunate, because they're just as incompetent in java as they were in other programming languages and while their software runs to completion it often runs incorrectly and produces wrong results.
I know several Java gurus, folks I'd hire to write software for me any day of the week. But I know so many more incompetent hacks who claim java expertise and if you're not an expert software developer yourself its very hard to tell which is which.
Ooh, dragons.
1. Multithreading. In some languages (e.g. Java) multithreading is no worse than any kind of parallel processing. Can you be a buffoon and fail? Yes you can. But you can do that in a single-threaded program too.
In other languages (e.g. C) the chance of errors impacting some completely random data structure are so high that it's frankly important to stay away from anything that would confuse the control flow, such as multithreading.
2. Closures. Okay, you're talking about Javascript here. javascript is a hideous language which should not be used to the maximum extent practical. Why complain about closers when all of javascript is bad mojo?
3. Too big data. Also known as lazy-ass programmers who don't want to be bothered to deal with the possibility that their program may be called upon to process a large data set. Solutions for processing large data sets explicitly on the disk (not with virtual memory) are well understood. You just have to choose to use them.
4. NP-complete. There's no particular dragon there... the elephant in the room is those programmers too ignorant or clueless to bother computing the big-oh running time of their algorithms, so they write software that appears to "lock up" as soon as anyone gives it a useful data set to process.
5. Security. Correct security implements defense in depth. Break one level so what? Even patched slowly, it's patched before enough layers can be broken to grant access.
Programmers make two classes of stupid mistake:
a. They assume they don't need defense in depth because they've written secure software.
b. They carelessly implement functionality that cuts through all layers of security. Like single-sign on.
6. Encryption. The odds of a long-surviving conspiracy to hide mathematical breakthroughs which bypass encryption are essentially zero. You can relax on that score. You can also expect one-time-pad encryption to remain unbreakable regardless of mathematical improvements. Because no analysis of extremely long strings of random bits is meaningful.
You have to be pretty bone-headed to mess up security in this day and age. Yes, many many programmers are bone-headed. But that's not encryption's fault.
7. Identity management. The only thing which makes this hard is its constant misuse. No authentication is perfect, so correct programming makes authenticated actions reversible instead. The more critical the action, the more critical it be reversible.
8. Measuring hardness. Now we're in to mumbo-jumbo territory. A simple big-oh evaluation will tell you whether your algorithm is usable. Trying to figure out whether it will be easier or harder to solve one problem or another, neither of which have a known useful algorithm? Silliness! Problems like that are solved when someone finally has the key insight. Inspiration is not a product of work, it's a product of the creative mind.
9. The authors can't measure. They claimed 7 but listed 8 things.
If this is such a real issue, why is it brought up after the election?
Because for the second time in as many decades (and only the fifth time in history) the candidate with the most votes lost the election. And both of these last two put a Republican in office.
I won't say Clinton lost the election -because of- the electoral college, but the answer to the question you asked is: the discrepancy between the popular vote and the electoral college is why the issue has come up -now- instead of some other time.
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~u...
"So how could any decent, intelligent person not support [Instant Runoff Voting]? One answer is that situations can arise in which IRV results are clearly unreasonable"
The undivided like-minds approach tends to exacerbate Alexis de Tocqueville's Tyranny of the Majority. That's not a good thing either, because every individual is in the minority for at least some issues they care about and its not good for large numbers to drown those causes out.
It's important that a candidate win as much of the country as possible, not just the populous areas. The broad but sparse rural population has different concerns than suburbanites. A voting system which disenfranchises them would be a bad thing.
If there was a 20 point spread in popular vote and the election went to the other candidate I'd change my tune. But that's not the case. The popular vote numbers are functionally a tie.
The folks who voted for Donald Trump will get exactly what they deserve. Unfortunately, I'll get what they deserve too.
Webs are sticky. They catch the spider's prey and don't let go.
Buy an AWS Linux VPS with a prepaid debit card.
Set up OpenVPN
Create a Linux VM on your PC.
Connect the VM to the VPS with OpenVPN and route all traffic through it.
Browse without flash and wipe the cookies every session. Reboot the AWS VPS regularly so you get a different public IP address.
Don't use the anonymized browsing VM to access any web site that's tied to you in some other way, such as your bank account or gmail account. Use your existing web browsing process to reach those servers.
Maybe the devs were trying to avoid a false sense of security. It's an FTP client. You have to be out of your mind to use FTP in any scenario where security is important.
This isn't a case of ignorant browser devs making choices which promote plain-text transfers (completely vulnerable) over encrypted transfers with self-signed certs (vulnerable only to mitm attacks). Like telnet and rlogin, FTP's use is obsolete and insecure for all scenarios which use a password. Period.
A good editor would have added [sic] to alert readers of the problem. A great editor would have dropped the quote and rearranged other text around it.
Only an incompetent editor would have corrected the quote. It's not the editor's job to put words in someone else's mouth or to try to guess what the other person really meant.
In fairness, the slashdot submitter was exactly quoting Lauren Ohnesorge of the Triangle Business Journal who listened to a speech where the speaker said, "eighty two eighty-six" and thought he said "eighty-two eighty-six." Could have stood the addition of a "[sic]" if the editors were sharper.
Why Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst thought Linux ever ran on an 80286 is more a mystery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Acceptance [of 286 protected mode] was additionally hampered by the fact that the 286 only allowed memory access in 16 bit segments via each of four segment registers, meaning only 4*216 bytes, equivalent to 256 kilobytes, could be accessed at a time.[11] "
So that's correct: no flat memory model in the 286. 386 protected mode switched the memory bus and segment size to 32 bits, allowing 4gigs to be accessed at once.
First off, that's 80286. Missed a zero there.
Second off, that's wrong. Linux needed an 80386sx as its minimum supported CPU.
What battery tech is in these devices you stick in your ear? Did they choose Lithium Ion?