Pedestrians and Segway riders aren't likely to make it to their destination if they're walking/riding in an air-evacuated tunnel. I agree this will solve the congestion problem, though.
I think YOU accidentally stumbled across the truth, but not in the way you think. Going to many different districts instead of going between only a few means many more places giving subsidies to construction/operation. The same thing happened with rail lines long ago.
The most interesting use of processing power for mining a cryptocoin I've heard of is Render Token. Instead of trying to find an arbitrary hash, the processor renders 3d graphics as part of a cloud-computing job. Thus, useful work is accomplished. However, I'm unsure why the cryptocoin angle is necessary when it could be given a standard monetary reward. Presumably each frame rendered has to be verified by another worker to ensure you didn't cheat in the rendering, and the contents of the scene/render wouldn't be secret, so it won't be anything particularly sensitive.
India charging a 75% import duty on American cars would be to protect domestic production. They don't care if we won't buy their cars... because they're not trying to sell us any, anyways. What they WOULD BE trying to do is make sure American auto manufacturers can't outcompete the domestic producers, in the domestic market, thus driving the domestic producers out of business. Having the independent ability to manufacture cars is useful if, say, India were to go to war with the USA, or if India were blockaded by China.
I'd expect Musk to care more about Chinese solar panels than Chinese cars.
We wouldn't want cars made by Chinese companies, because they're poorly designed. If an American company made cars there, I'd worry about substandard materials substitution, like the Kobe Steel scandal but far worse and more common. Also, their designs would almost certainly be stolen and reused by domestic companies.
If import duties were a significant factor, car companies would just find a loophole around it, like they do already with the Chicken Tax, which ends up making cars slightly more expensive but has no protectionism effect.
Funny, 25 years ago I was told in school that the brain was the only part of the body that didn't produce new cells after birth. Only about 10, 15 years ago did I first hear that there was now good evidence that new neurons were produced after birth.
The point is that you plug in somewhere you won't be caught and thrown in prison. China is a much better option than within spitting distance of the crime scene. There are enough cryptocoin mining operations in China (still) that it won't stick out nearly as bad.
Police tracking the stolen computers are monitoring electric consumption across the country in hopes the thieves will show their hand
The computers are probably in China already, using cheap subsidized electricity, in a corner of a factory that runs ghost shifts. Good luck monitoring electricity usage to find that.
When Jeremy Rowley, an executive vice president at DigiCert, asked for proof the certificates were compromised, the Trustico CEO emailed the private keys of 23,000 certificates
Those certificates are DEFINITELY compromised now.
Not everyone killed by a gangbanger is another gang member. Gang members tend to be poor shots, and kill innocent bystanders regularly. Bullets go through walls and hit people, etc., drive-bys hit everyone in the vicinity, so just being near a gang member (maybe a relative) is enough to get you killed. Wear the wrong color clothes and you can be mistaken for being a member of a gang that has those as their identifying colors. Gang initiations sometimes involve killing a stranger, or so the rumor goes at least.
I read Fahrenheit 451, years before I read 1984. IMO, the latter is more relevant to today's society, and gives a more complete and insightful view of totalitarianism (and it was written first, even). Oral history can be passed down even if the history books are burned (and this was standard practice until literacy became common). The practices of modifying historical records and promoting 'alternative facts' shown in 1984 are more worrisome, although Fahrenheit 451 had some of this as well (George Washington was said to be the first Firefighter IIRC). Digital information storage makes destruction of paper books, specifically, less worrisome. The entirety of the world's history books could fit on a disc or microSD card nowadays, which is easier to hide than a cache of books (and its contents are less obvious). The internet means countries that don't do this could host websites that contain the forbidden history texts. Now in North Korea, this story might be more relevant.
Took me years to learn that that is not, in fact, the temperature that paper burns at (~450C IIRC). There is also an old film adaptation, which I don't remember a lick of, but don't think it had as many people on fire as the book did, given flame-resistant gels weren't employed in film until (IIRC) Firestarter 20 years later.
While the difference between individuals may only be a couple megabytes, the human genome is around a terabyte (able to fit on one of those quartz discs...). Over a long enough distance, that much data (sent via radio waves) is likely to get corrupted, and a receiver is unlikely to successfully be in place long enough to receive all that data. Also, if we replicate only one alien individual, there'd be diversity problems... and unless they were genetically engineered to have no negative recessive traits , there could be inbreeding depression problems.
Indeed. There are only enough novel cryptocoin features that come out each year to prop up a few new ones. Expect more forks (a la Bitcoin Cash) of various cryptocoins with increasingly dubious 'improvements' to come.
(Spoilers for 10 year old game) In Star Ocean 4, the protagonist gives the secret of Antimatter reactors to an alternate-universe earlier Earth (IIRC). This is done in order to skip over nuclear power, and the problems of nuclear proliferation. The prototype reactor goes out of control, and blows up the entire planet.
I wonder if alien hackers will get us to destroy ourselves 'for the lulz', that's probably more plausible than a supposedly logical reason. However, as anyone who's seen Contact will point out, there will be MUCH skepticism about any device/tech that aliens send us.
Actually... you know whenever a cosmic ray flips a bit? Alien hackers. That's my explanation from now on.
It's plausible, but it assumes that all aliens have genetic material which undergoes random mutations at a standard rate. If speciation periodically occurred due to the genetic code 'locking', refusing to mutate, and reproduction were asexual, then there may be species of genetically-identical beings. If one of those species was sentient, then social darwinism may lead to learning to control personality traits that would eventually lead to nuclear war. Or they master biotech before physics, and genetically engineer themselves to eliminate strong emotions etc. that lead to nuclear war. Or there's no fissile material on their planet. Or they have some kind of hive mind who has no conceptualization of 'factions' and thus has no war. Or they live underground, and nuclear blasts scouring the surface wouldn't significantly affect their survival. Or the planet's population is kept small or localized (due to hospitable surface area or resource location) such that factionalization is impossible, it effectively remains one tribe. Or the period of time between "nuclear power discovered" and "reasons for war still exist" is narrow enough they get through it, somehow. Or they achieve pluralism/equality/post-scarcity before nuclear power. Or they DO have a nuclear war but survive it.
Assuming nuclear war is the only answer is to anthropomorphize aliens. And hey, we're still here.
The world's last human burger flipper will be paid the minimum wage of $10,000/hr. However, $9,985 of that will be taken as taxes to pay all the unemployed former burger flippers.
It's unpopular and annoying because it uses sucky old voice recognition tech. If it were replaced with, say, Siri levels of enunciation and comprehension, then many people wouldn't even realize it wasn't a human.
Slashdot Mirror
No but you can use Mushrooms.
Pedestrians and Segway riders aren't likely to make it to their destination if they're walking/riding in an air-evacuated tunnel. I agree this will solve the congestion problem, though.
I think YOU accidentally stumbled across the truth, but not in the way you think. Going to many different districts instead of going between only a few means many more places giving subsidies to construction/operation. The same thing happened with rail lines long ago.
It'll crash on the one that 'contributes' the least to certain Chinese officials.
Pretty much what I expected. Did they use Toyota designs under their own name?
Thanks, that's news to me.
The most interesting use of processing power for mining a cryptocoin I've heard of is Render Token. Instead of trying to find an arbitrary hash, the processor renders 3d graphics as part of a cloud-computing job. Thus, useful work is accomplished. However, I'm unsure why the cryptocoin angle is necessary when it could be given a standard monetary reward. Presumably each frame rendered has to be verified by another worker to ensure you didn't cheat in the rendering, and the contents of the scene/render wouldn't be secret, so it won't be anything particularly sensitive.
India charging a 75% import duty on American cars would be to protect domestic production. They don't care if we won't buy their cars... because they're not trying to sell us any, anyways. What they WOULD BE trying to do is make sure American auto manufacturers can't outcompete the domestic producers, in the domestic market, thus driving the domestic producers out of business. Having the independent ability to manufacture cars is useful if, say, India were to go to war with the USA, or if India were blockaded by China.
I'd expect Musk to care more about Chinese solar panels than Chinese cars.
We wouldn't want cars made by Chinese companies, because they're poorly designed. If an American company made cars there, I'd worry about substandard materials substitution, like the Kobe Steel scandal but far worse and more common. Also, their designs would almost certainly be stolen and reused by domestic companies.
If import duties were a significant factor, car companies would just find a loophole around it, like they do already with the Chicken Tax, which ends up making cars slightly more expensive but has no protectionism effect.
Funny, 25 years ago I was told in school that the brain was the only part of the body that didn't produce new cells after birth. Only about 10, 15 years ago did I first hear that there was now good evidence that new neurons were produced after birth.
Does Flippy flip flimsy fast food flippantly? Throw in Talkie Toaster and I'm THERE.
The point is that you plug in somewhere you won't be caught and thrown in prison. China is a much better option than within spitting distance of the crime scene. There are enough cryptocoin mining operations in China (still) that it won't stick out nearly as bad.
Sanding down humans is SO 20th century. Now they can be ablated with lasers!
Police tracking the stolen computers are monitoring electric consumption across the country in hopes the thieves will show their hand
The computers are probably in China already, using cheap subsidized electricity, in a corner of a factory that runs ghost shifts. Good luck monitoring electricity usage to find that.
When Jeremy Rowley, an executive vice president at DigiCert, asked for proof the certificates were compromised, the Trustico CEO emailed the private keys of 23,000 certificates
Those certificates are DEFINITELY compromised now.
Not everyone killed by a gangbanger is another gang member. Gang members tend to be poor shots, and kill innocent bystanders regularly. Bullets go through walls and hit people, etc., drive-bys hit everyone in the vicinity, so just being near a gang member (maybe a relative) is enough to get you killed. Wear the wrong color clothes and you can be mistaken for being a member of a gang that has those as their identifying colors. Gang initiations sometimes involve killing a stranger, or so the rumor goes at least.
I read Fahrenheit 451, years before I read 1984. IMO, the latter is more relevant to today's society, and gives a more complete and insightful view of totalitarianism (and it was written first, even). Oral history can be passed down even if the history books are burned (and this was standard practice until literacy became common). The practices of modifying historical records and promoting 'alternative facts' shown in 1984 are more worrisome, although Fahrenheit 451 had some of this as well (George Washington was said to be the first Firefighter IIRC).
Digital information storage makes destruction of paper books, specifically, less worrisome. The entirety of the world's history books could fit on a disc or microSD card nowadays, which is easier to hide than a cache of books (and its contents are less obvious). The internet means countries that don't do this could host websites that contain the forbidden history texts. Now in North Korea, this story might be more relevant.
Took me years to learn that that is not, in fact, the temperature that paper burns at (~450C IIRC). There is also an old film adaptation, which I don't remember a lick of, but don't think it had as many people on fire as the book did, given flame-resistant gels weren't employed in film until (IIRC) Firestarter 20 years later.
While the difference between individuals may only be a couple megabytes, the human genome is around a terabyte (able to fit on one of those quartz discs...). Over a long enough distance, that much data (sent via radio waves) is likely to get corrupted, and a receiver is unlikely to successfully be in place long enough to receive all that data. Also, if we replicate only one alien individual, there'd be diversity problems... and unless they were genetically engineered to have no negative recessive traits , there could be inbreeding depression problems.
Indeed. There are only enough novel cryptocoin features that come out each year to prop up a few new ones. Expect more forks (a la Bitcoin Cash) of various cryptocoins with increasingly dubious 'improvements' to come.
And the other half WILL fail.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
(Spoilers for 10 year old game)
In Star Ocean 4, the protagonist gives the secret of Antimatter reactors to an alternate-universe earlier Earth (IIRC). This is done in order to skip over nuclear power, and the problems of nuclear proliferation. The prototype reactor goes out of control, and blows up the entire planet.
I wonder if alien hackers will get us to destroy ourselves 'for the lulz', that's probably more plausible than a supposedly logical reason. However, as anyone who's seen Contact will point out, there will be MUCH skepticism about any device/tech that aliens send us.
Actually... you know whenever a cosmic ray flips a bit? Alien hackers. That's my explanation from now on.
It's plausible, but it assumes that all aliens have genetic material which undergoes random mutations at a standard rate. If speciation periodically occurred due to the genetic code 'locking', refusing to mutate, and reproduction were asexual, then there may be species of genetically-identical beings. If one of those species was sentient, then social darwinism may lead to learning to control personality traits that would eventually lead to nuclear war.
Or they master biotech before physics, and genetically engineer themselves to eliminate strong emotions etc. that lead to nuclear war.
Or there's no fissile material on their planet.
Or they have some kind of hive mind who has no conceptualization of 'factions' and thus has no war.
Or they live underground, and nuclear blasts scouring the surface wouldn't significantly affect their survival.
Or the planet's population is kept small or localized (due to hospitable surface area or resource location) such that factionalization is impossible, it effectively remains one tribe.
Or the period of time between "nuclear power discovered" and "reasons for war still exist" is narrow enough they get through it, somehow.
Or they achieve pluralism/equality/post-scarcity before nuclear power.
Or they DO have a nuclear war but survive it.
Assuming nuclear war is the only answer is to anthropomorphize aliens. And hey, we're still here.
Well played. Virtual +1 Funny from me
The world's last human burger flipper will be paid the minimum wage of $10,000/hr. However, $9,985 of that will be taken as taxes to pay all the unemployed former burger flippers.
It's unpopular and annoying because it uses sucky old voice recognition tech. If it were replaced with, say, Siri levels of enunciation and comprehension, then many people wouldn't even realize it wasn't a human.