IIRC most personal planes still run on leaded fuel. Even the 'low-lead' variant contains shocking amounts of lead. It's recently been shown that use of leaded gasoline is highly correlated with rise in crime due to lowered intelligence. Eliminating this source of lead pollution will be better for our air and society. I'm sure recreational flyers can find something like driving down Route 66 or camping at a wildlife refuge that give a similar feeling of Freedom yet don't harm children's brain development.
So every switch between commercials, or from commercial to program or back again, causes your TV to switch resolution/framerate? Older TVs go blank for a few seconds when that happens, causing viewers to miss the first few seconds of whatever is now showing. It makes more sense for your cable box to scale to whatever resolution it detects your TV is (or that you set it to use).
The FCC sure has done a 180 on Title 2 net neutrality. Remember the "Muslims from these countries can't come into the USA" that was smacked down by judges multiple times? I'd call those all 'attacks on freedom.'
I suppose they would've used 'iHome' if that weren't already a brand name of electronics. If they're targeting the "high-end Bluetooth speaker" market, that happens to be able to tie in to the connected iDevice's OS, that angle could work. People are used to shitty $10 Bluetooth speakers, and if the speakers are really as great as they say, it should be a big improvement over the competition, particularly if the comparison is Google Home type devices. I wonder how sales will compare to the Apple Watch; I see some people wear them but noone talks about them anymore.
Baseball might be watchable if it were 5 innings and there were a 'shot clock' in which the pitcher must throw or else it's counted as a Ball. (American) Football timeouts should be 60 seconds unless there's a flag, and the clock shouldn't stop on out-of-bounds (which is flagrantly abused by everyone.) The glacial nature of these sports is exacerbated by the broadcasters wanting space for regular commercial breaks. The athletes actually have to wait to resume play until the broadcaster comes back from commercial break and they get the all-clear; this is a huge F-you to people at the stadium. This could be eliminated by limiting commercials to inbetween quarters. Of course, the longer people are stuck at the stadium, the more beer/food they buy, and the more they have to pay for parking.
Actually Disney Channel is in deep trouble. Seen a young child lately? Good luck prying them away from their tablet/parent's smartphone. Chances are it's cued up to Youtube watching a Let's Play or random children's program; maybe not a premium exclusive-to-Disney program, but chances are the child doesn't care. The Youtube Kids app has more than enough content, and is 'good enough' entertainment for many young children. If they don't want to watch a video, there are long tons of free games. The tablet is TV's worst nightmare when it comes to entertaining young children. Short attention span? New game/video! All the major wireless carriers now offer unlimited 480p Youtube on an unlimited plan, most now offer unlimited 720p, so you don't even have to worry about data caps. If the $50 tablet breaks, who cares? Buy a thicker case next time. Once children are raised on the idea of on-demand video, they won't put up with watching shows on a schedule.
I would rather watch eSports than real sports. Hint: I have never watched eSports. In the time it takes to watch other people play one game of baseball, or even League of Legends, I could win a few games of Hearthstone. I'd rather win at something I can do myself, than watch other people win at a level I can't play at.
Complying with NCLB gets a school additional federal funding. So yes, it is optional. Noone goes to jail or gets fired/shut down if they say 'fuck NCLB'. Although considering how poorly managed most schools are, they probably rely on that federal funding. And yes, if you don't mind paying the additional fine/tax, you can go without health insurance if you want to boycott the industry.
What's it matter if people work less due to UBI? If a UBI is implemented due to automation permanently displacing jobs at a faster rate than new jobs can be created, then it would be expected that people would be working less. Even if that's not the case, it's not necessarily due to laziness. Many old people who would/should be retired, find work because their retirement savings/pension/social security payments are inadequate for their lifestyle (or any lifestyle, potentially.) Others are effectively disabled, alcoholic, or otherwise 'can' work but only at great disadvantage, generally through no fault of their own; many of these people are considered unemployable. Others aren't disabled but have some medical issue (arthritis etc.) that causes great pain doing any work; some people hurt standing for long periods of time, or can't sit still for long periods of time. Are these people 'lazy'? If so, does that mean they deserve to starve to death in the gutter?
As easy, unambitious jobs go away, layabouts won't suddenly rise to the occasion and gain some professional skills; they'll complain that there's no jobs, and continue being leeches (usually, on their family and friends.) In reality I don't think many of these people exist, they tend to either a) do odd jobs, or bounce from job to job constantly, or b) are low-grade criminals, petty thieves et cetera. In both cases, it probably costs society less to just hand them some money to leave the rest of society alone.
Pretty sure it was meant that people didn't work less on the average, even if specific groups did work less. It was thought that people in their 20s were going to school instead of working right away, which is probably beneficial to the country in the long run. It's like how dropping out of school after 6th grade to work on the family farm is no longer considered a good decision long-term.
This is why I keep all my passwords on a post-it note in my desk drawer. I used to keep it on my monitor but the bezel is too small now. Hey, where'd the post-it go?! I swear it was in this drawer.
Yes, thus why I said "Sure, if everyone had their own universal constructor and people were downloading pirate designs with cracked DRM, this might be possible." I remember the RepRap promising an inexorable technological drive towards this, although AFAIK we still don't have 3d printers that can completely print 100% of their own components. My understanding is that 3d printer technology has been held up due to patent litigation as well, proving my point.
Modify the algorithm so that the larger the disparity between the largest cell and the others becomes, the greater the chances that the surrounding cells will join together to loot and destroy it. I'm guessing the endgame of that is that a backstabbing nobility class surrounds the old warlord's corpse, and a new 'king' comes into being where the warlord was; the wealth is distributed just barely enough (i.e. to the nobility class) that the cells surrounding the nobles won't be able to gather enough power to destroy all of the nobles at once. Sure you get minor skirmishes at the fringes but not organized enough to upend the nobles. The nobles still gradually drain the serfs of wealth, and the king gets assassinated every now and then.
Add in a rule that cells can use some wealth to reduce the likelihood that neighbors will attack them, and you've coded in propaganda and danegeld.
The Soviet Union was notorious for paying or otherwise turning huge swathes of the population into agents and informants; social media flagged posts being forwarded directly to the Secret Police can make any movement stillborn. There's an old Russian saying: "When three men sit down to discuss revolution, two are government agents, and the third is a fool." No new surveillance tech is needed for agents and informants to kill uprisings, although the internet makes casually passing info along to the Powers That Be much easier. The internet can make organizing easier, flash mobs for example; I seem to recall some of this happened during the Arab Spring, however look at what happened afterward: how good a job is internet organization doing at stopping ISIS militants in the middle east? So much for toppling badly-run states.
'Open source will create a shadow economy, routing around the existing corruption' is a fancy as well. Sure, if everyone had their own universal constructor and people were downloading pirate designs with cracked DRM, this might be possible. However, barring that, the incumbents can simply lobby for laws to be passed that restrict usage of open source/shadow economy tools. Look at laws that prohibit municipal wifi/fiber, or mandate govt. usage of MS Office/Oracle, or restrict or ban usage of Bitcoin. Doctorow's ideas here remind me of the phrase "The solution to the problems of Democracy, is more Democracy." As in, direct democracy can route around the corruption in a representative democracy. However, with propaganda, and how willingly people will sell their vote, this is arguably not as conclusive a solution as one would think, just a temporary rerouting of the problem. Imagine how many millions of poverty-level people would vote for the USA SAVE PUPPIES Act, because they love puppies right? And because the sponsor loves puppies SO MUCH, they're paying $100 to ensure they make the right choice and don't give in to the immoral temptations of the Act's opponents. Doing the right thing should feel good, ya know? And the act is being fast-tracked through referendum and is 900 pages long and noone has time to pore over it to find the evils it hides; and it's log-rolled so that individual clauses can't be stricken later once discovered without undoing the entire law which contains a myriad of other, actually-desirable things. Propaganda can get people to oppose net neutrality or countless other things that would be to their own benefit, thinking doing so will help them more (indirectly, once it trickles down... any day now...) and thus democracy dies to thunderous applause.
Sure we can get Wikipedia and Linux, but there was LOTS of hubbub at one time about how unreliable Wikipedia is, because it can be edited by anyone, until several studies found it to be as or more reliable on average than respected encyclopedias. Remember the Get The Facts campaign by MS about Linux, and FUD about backdoors being hidden in the Linux source because, again, anyone can edit it, and corporations using Linux being liable to be sued by SCO etc. for patent infringement? Bitcoin has been thoroughly associated with drug trafficking, ransomware, and money laundering in the public eye, not completely unwarranted. The problem is corruption tends to have money, which can buy propaganda, which can fool people into supporting the status quo; about the best I hope for is that principled people will obtain money, then use counter-propaganda. Knowledgeable people who don't fall for the propaganda can use the open-source stuff... but only when the sheeple don't go along with the plot to make it illegal. That's what we should really be afraid of here, and no ad-hoc tech group is going to get around that any better than The Pirate Bay has. How many of its operators are in prison now?
I find it very suspicious that the techs are specifically scanning unallocated space. It's as if they're looking for files deleted before the computer broke, as in, images that weren't intended to be downloaded. Are they specifically trying to catch people that weren't intending to break the law, taking advantage of strict liability? If so, this is Exhibit B for why Mens Rea should be an allowable defense for every law. Planted drugs would be Exhibit A.
FBI: "We're not doing an end-run around the Constitution. We're paying civilians to do an end-run around the Constitution FOR us! There's a difference!" Courts need to come down on this hard or else it'll become standard practice.
Assuming the response time is adequate enough. Mirasol (which also used structural color) had this problem at first. Hopefully the color isn't washed-out, another problem Mirasol had. Theoretically, the higher brightness allowed by this tech could lead to killer HDR, and brighter digital projectors (of particular importance for 3d films.) The higher backlighting efficiency should allow for lower-power displays, since the backlight wouldn't need to be so bright.
How about giving benefits to workers scheduled exactly 29 hours per week, or who are 'contractors' in name only. This sounds more like a plan to create a committee that will start to think about the issue, rather than a solution.
I wasn't aware of the Turnaround ads, mostly because I stopped watching TV by that point. I used to joke about their old slogan: "Don't get the door, it's Domino's." Their stuff was so bad I got a better experience from a Tombstone and some extra oregano.
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I recall enthusiast sites talking about the .130 micrometer process, it wasn't often put in terms of nanometers until the 90nm process.
IIRC most personal planes still run on leaded fuel. Even the 'low-lead' variant contains shocking amounts of lead. It's recently been shown that use of leaded gasoline is highly correlated with rise in crime due to lowered intelligence. Eliminating this source of lead pollution will be better for our air and society. I'm sure recreational flyers can find something like driving down Route 66 or camping at a wildlife refuge that give a similar feeling of Freedom yet don't harm children's brain development.
So every switch between commercials, or from commercial to program or back again, causes your TV to switch resolution/framerate? Older TVs go blank for a few seconds when that happens, causing viewers to miss the first few seconds of whatever is now showing. It makes more sense for your cable box to scale to whatever resolution it detects your TV is (or that you set it to use).
The FCC sure has done a 180 on Title 2 net neutrality. Remember the "Muslims from these countries can't come into the USA" that was smacked down by judges multiple times? I'd call those all 'attacks on freedom.'
I suppose they would've used 'iHome' if that weren't already a brand name of electronics. If they're targeting the "high-end Bluetooth speaker" market, that happens to be able to tie in to the connected iDevice's OS, that angle could work. People are used to shitty $10 Bluetooth speakers, and if the speakers are really as great as they say, it should be a big improvement over the competition, particularly if the comparison is Google Home type devices. I wonder how sales will compare to the Apple Watch; I see some people wear them but noone talks about them anymore.
People expecting to find Target, found themselves a mark.
Baseball might be watchable if it were 5 innings and there were a 'shot clock' in which the pitcher must throw or else it's counted as a Ball. (American) Football timeouts should be 60 seconds unless there's a flag, and the clock shouldn't stop on out-of-bounds (which is flagrantly abused by everyone.) The glacial nature of these sports is exacerbated by the broadcasters wanting space for regular commercial breaks. The athletes actually have to wait to resume play until the broadcaster comes back from commercial break and they get the all-clear; this is a huge F-you to people at the stadium. This could be eliminated by limiting commercials to inbetween quarters. Of course, the longer people are stuck at the stadium, the more beer/food they buy, and the more they have to pay for parking.
Actually Disney Channel is in deep trouble. Seen a young child lately? Good luck prying them away from their tablet/parent's smartphone. Chances are it's cued up to Youtube watching a Let's Play or random children's program; maybe not a premium exclusive-to-Disney program, but chances are the child doesn't care. The Youtube Kids app has more than enough content, and is 'good enough' entertainment for many young children. If they don't want to watch a video, there are long tons of free games. The tablet is TV's worst nightmare when it comes to entertaining young children. Short attention span? New game/video! All the major wireless carriers now offer unlimited 480p Youtube on an unlimited plan, most now offer unlimited 720p, so you don't even have to worry about data caps. If the $50 tablet breaks, who cares? Buy a thicker case next time. Once children are raised on the idea of on-demand video, they won't put up with watching shows on a schedule.
I would rather watch eSports than real sports. Hint: I have never watched eSports.
In the time it takes to watch other people play one game of baseball, or even League of Legends, I could win a few games of Hearthstone. I'd rather win at something I can do myself, than watch other people win at a level I can't play at.
Sounds like they need to hire some telephone sanitizers.
Complying with NCLB gets a school additional federal funding. So yes, it is optional. Noone goes to jail or gets fired/shut down if they say 'fuck NCLB'. Although considering how poorly managed most schools are, they probably rely on that federal funding.
And yes, if you don't mind paying the additional fine/tax, you can go without health insurance if you want to boycott the industry.
Sufficiently advanced pragmatism is indistinguishable from hypocrisy.
What's it matter if people work less due to UBI? If a UBI is implemented due to automation permanently displacing jobs at a faster rate than new jobs can be created, then it would be expected that people would be working less. Even if that's not the case, it's not necessarily due to laziness. Many old people who would/should be retired, find work because their retirement savings/pension/social security payments are inadequate for their lifestyle (or any lifestyle, potentially.) Others are effectively disabled, alcoholic, or otherwise 'can' work but only at great disadvantage, generally through no fault of their own; many of these people are considered unemployable. Others aren't disabled but have some medical issue (arthritis etc.) that causes great pain doing any work; some people hurt standing for long periods of time, or can't sit still for long periods of time. Are these people 'lazy'? If so, does that mean they deserve to starve to death in the gutter?
As easy, unambitious jobs go away, layabouts won't suddenly rise to the occasion and gain some professional skills; they'll complain that there's no jobs, and continue being leeches (usually, on their family and friends.) In reality I don't think many of these people exist, they tend to either a) do odd jobs, or bounce from job to job constantly, or b) are low-grade criminals, petty thieves et cetera. In both cases, it probably costs society less to just hand them some money to leave the rest of society alone.
Pretty sure it was meant that people didn't work less on the average, even if specific groups did work less. It was thought that people in their 20s were going to school instead of working right away, which is probably beneficial to the country in the long run. It's like how dropping out of school after 6th grade to work on the family farm is no longer considered a good decision long-term.
This is why I keep all my passwords on a post-it note in my desk drawer. I used to keep it on my monitor but the bezel is too small now.
Hey, where'd the post-it go?! I swear it was in this drawer.
Yes, thus why I said "Sure, if everyone had their own universal constructor and people were downloading pirate designs with cracked DRM, this might be possible." I remember the RepRap promising an inexorable technological drive towards this, although AFAIK we still don't have 3d printers that can completely print 100% of their own components. My understanding is that 3d printer technology has been held up due to patent litigation as well, proving my point.
Modify the algorithm so that the larger the disparity between the largest cell and the others becomes, the greater the chances that the surrounding cells will join together to loot and destroy it. I'm guessing the endgame of that is that a backstabbing nobility class surrounds the old warlord's corpse, and a new 'king' comes into being where the warlord was; the wealth is distributed just barely enough (i.e. to the nobility class) that the cells surrounding the nobles won't be able to gather enough power to destroy all of the nobles at once. Sure you get minor skirmishes at the fringes but not organized enough to upend the nobles. The nobles still gradually drain the serfs of wealth, and the king gets assassinated every now and then.
Add in a rule that cells can use some wealth to reduce the likelihood that neighbors will attack them, and you've coded in propaganda and danegeld.
The Soviet Union was notorious for paying or otherwise turning huge swathes of the population into agents and informants; social media flagged posts being forwarded directly to the Secret Police can make any movement stillborn. There's an old Russian saying: "When three men sit down to discuss revolution, two are government agents, and the third is a fool." No new surveillance tech is needed for agents and informants to kill uprisings, although the internet makes casually passing info along to the Powers That Be much easier. The internet can make organizing easier, flash mobs for example; I seem to recall some of this happened during the Arab Spring, however look at what happened afterward: how good a job is internet organization doing at stopping ISIS militants in the middle east? So much for toppling badly-run states.
'Open source will create a shadow economy, routing around the existing corruption' is a fancy as well. Sure, if everyone had their own universal constructor and people were downloading pirate designs with cracked DRM, this might be possible. However, barring that, the incumbents can simply lobby for laws to be passed that restrict usage of open source/shadow economy tools. Look at laws that prohibit municipal wifi/fiber, or mandate govt. usage of MS Office/Oracle, or restrict or ban usage of Bitcoin. Doctorow's ideas here remind me of the phrase "The solution to the problems of Democracy, is more Democracy." As in, direct democracy can route around the corruption in a representative democracy. However, with propaganda, and how willingly people will sell their vote, this is arguably not as conclusive a solution as one would think, just a temporary rerouting of the problem. Imagine how many millions of poverty-level people would vote for the USA SAVE PUPPIES Act, because they love puppies right? And because the sponsor loves puppies SO MUCH, they're paying $100 to ensure they make the right choice and don't give in to the immoral temptations of the Act's opponents. Doing the right thing should feel good, ya know? And the act is being fast-tracked through referendum and is 900 pages long and noone has time to pore over it to find the evils it hides; and it's log-rolled so that individual clauses can't be stricken later once discovered without undoing the entire law which contains a myriad of other, actually-desirable things. Propaganda can get people to oppose net neutrality or countless other things that would be to their own benefit, thinking doing so will help them more (indirectly, once it trickles down... any day now...) and thus democracy dies to thunderous applause.
Sure we can get Wikipedia and Linux, but there was LOTS of hubbub at one time about how unreliable Wikipedia is, because it can be edited by anyone, until several studies found it to be as or more reliable on average than respected encyclopedias. Remember the Get The Facts campaign by MS about Linux, and FUD about backdoors being hidden in the Linux source because, again, anyone can edit it, and corporations using Linux being liable to be sued by SCO etc. for patent infringement? Bitcoin has been thoroughly associated with drug trafficking, ransomware, and money laundering in the public eye, not completely unwarranted. The problem is corruption tends to have money, which can buy propaganda, which can fool people into supporting the status quo; about the best I hope for is that principled people will obtain money, then use counter-propaganda. Knowledgeable people who don't fall for the propaganda can use the open-source stuff... but only when the sheeple don't go along with the plot to make it illegal. That's what we should really be afraid of here, and no ad-hoc tech group is going to get around that any better than The Pirate Bay has. How many of its operators are in prison now?
I find it very suspicious that the techs are specifically scanning unallocated space. It's as if they're looking for files deleted before the computer broke, as in, images that weren't intended to be downloaded. Are they specifically trying to catch people that weren't intending to break the law, taking advantage of strict liability? If so, this is Exhibit B for why Mens Rea should be an allowable defense for every law. Planted drugs would be Exhibit A.
FBI: "We're not doing an end-run around the Constitution. We're paying civilians to do an end-run around the Constitution FOR us! There's a difference!"
Courts need to come down on this hard or else it'll become standard practice.
Assuming the response time is adequate enough. Mirasol (which also used structural color) had this problem at first. Hopefully the color isn't washed-out, another problem Mirasol had. Theoretically, the higher brightness allowed by this tech could lead to killer HDR, and brighter digital projectors (of particular importance for 3d films.) The higher backlighting efficiency should allow for lower-power displays, since the backlight wouldn't need to be so bright.
Indeed, the research paper points this out as a problem.
How about giving benefits to workers scheduled exactly 29 hours per week, or who are 'contractors' in name only.
This sounds more like a plan to create a committee that will start to think about the issue, rather than a solution.
I wasn't aware of the Turnaround ads, mostly because I stopped watching TV by that point. I used to joke about their old slogan: "Don't get the door, it's Domino's." Their stuff was so bad I got a better experience from a Tombstone and some extra oregano.
Have a leaking problem?
DEPENDS!