Another alternative would be to just let them buy as fast as they want, but enforce e.g. a 1-week minimum time before you can sell that stock again. That ought to eliminate high-speed trading, since people won't buy a stock because they think they can fetch a profit in an unstable market in a minute, but because they genuinely believe in that company's long-term success. That in turn, ought to stabilize the market, since people can actually read up on what's going on before a transaction, instead of having algorithms buy and sell based on nanosecond-by-nanosecond fluctuations in the market.
If you're interested, using the XPosed framework with the XPrivacy module used to fix this problem (assuming you've rooted your phone): you could generate fake location data, white noise mic input, white noise camera input, etc., and the apps couldn't tell the difference. I haven't used it in a few years, but XPrivacyLua seems to be the modern successor of the XPrivacy project.
Scandinavian here. Near each house, we have one bin for recycling paper, one bin for food waste, and one for non-recyclable waste. Most convenience stores have an automated system for recycling bottles and cans (you get money back for each object you return, since especially aluminum cans are expensive to make from scratch). Throughout the city (usually outside large convenience stores), there are then centralized containers where you can throw away other objects made of metal, glass, plastic, and paper for recycling (one container per category). In addition, electronic waste can be returned at electronics stores for recycling, and the salvation army operates recycling points for clothes.
Are you suggesting we publish a ton of fake papers to hurt their reputation? That's a horrible idea. These predatory journals charge per publication, so you'd just be funding them and thus making their scam more successful. In addition, these are definitely low-tier journals anyway, so I doubt there's much reputation left to hurt.
Norway is a long and narrow country, so travel distances are actually extremely long. Counting just the larger airports in Norway (i.e. those that transport more than a million passengers per year), the air distance from Kristiansand to Tromsø is 860 miles, which is about the distance from New York to Florida. If you count smaller airports (but still with more than a hundred thousand passengers per year), the distance from Kristiansand to Kirkenes is about 1030 miles. If you don't only count mainland Norway, but also include Svalbard, then the distance from Longyearbyen to Kristiansand is 1400 miles, which is about the distance from New York to Texas.
I hope this spreads. Not just for the bats' sake, but because white light (and the blue frequencies in particular) tend to disrupt the sleep patterns of any mammal, including humans. Red lights let us see where we're going without keeping us awake.
Not sure what your point is. But the royal families were stripped of power in favour of democratically elected governments a long time ago. Personally, I'd love to see them stripped of their official titles too, as I'm generally opposed to the idea of hereditary titles, but I doubt that'll happen in my time.
Perhaps I should clarify. When I mean that these machines can work on their own, I believe that in the future people will be able to routinely scan themselves without involving a physician. There will always be a limited supply of human physicians, and for many diseases, noticing it early on is key to efficient treatment. So if the whole population can routinely screen themselves for common diseases, and let human physicians only intervene when anything strange is found, this will likely improve the general health of the population. But that's of course a different situation from someone coming in to the doctor's office with visible symptoms — in that case, I agree that the doctor will want to supervise the process anyway. But my point is that I think machine learning systems will have the largest impact on general screening of the population for diseases, not diagnostics on patients that already have visible symptoms.
That's why you don't start by letting the AIs out on their own. Let these systems point out what they find, and let a traditional doctor check their work, like you would with any human trainee. Then, after a few years of active training, the systems will probably be ready to work on their own.
What legislation? Well, I presume that a civilised country like the US registers who buys guns in the first place? Start by banning hand-guns (since they are easily concealed in public places), and give people a year to sell them back to the government. After that year has passed, make the police go after people who haven't done it by checking the gun registry (failing to return an illegal gun counts as probable cause for a search), and confiscate their hand-guns without giving them any money for it (so there should be a financial incentive to return it voluntarily during the first year). Also, after that year when all guns should be returned, carrying a hand-gun in a public place should land you a prison sentence.
At first, don't do anything with rifles and shotguns; a lot of countries have these legally available for e.g. hunting without gun violence problems. After waiting 5-10 years, reevaluate how the ban has worked, and consider whether more legislation is needed or not.
It's not like the US would be the first country to go through with this—most countries didn't regulate firearms at some point, and then managed to get rid of them. Australia did so relatively recently, and it seems to have worked quite fine there.
We live on a planet of finite size with finite resources, and it's very unlikely that we'll have the means to ship billions of people into space over the next century. So the exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely, and we might as well start looking for a better economical model today—one that doesn't break down if the population stabilizes.
Being large enough for gravity to deform it into a ball is one possible definition, and looking at it's geological structure is another. The latter would likely disqualify the gas giants, but you could probably make several definitions for "gas planet" and "rock planet", for instance. But I'd still call the IAU definition a science-based alternative as well.
There is a gap of several orders of magnitude in the so-called planetary discriminant between typical "planets" (50-50,000) and "dwarf planets" (<0.03), which indicates that there really is a qualitative difference between these. Personally, I don't see the problem with having a two-tier classification scheme where something deformed into a ball classifies as a dwarf planet, and a dwarf planet that is dominant in its region of space classifies as a large planet. It's also a definition that fits with the historical notion that moons and asteroids are not "planets" (even though e.g. Ganymede is larger than Mercury).
Neptune has definitely cleared its zone. The mathematical definition is a planetary discriminant, and Pluto's is 4 orders of magnitude below Neptune's.
This. I've recently gone through a phase where I've been trying to get monopolies and clouds out of my life myself. If you need any inspiration, this is what I've ended up with:
* KolabNow as an email provider instead of GMail. They have a good privacy policy, are hosted in Switzerland which has fair privacy laws, and costs about $3/month.
* Syncthing for making your own open-source "cloud storage" as a replacement for Dropbox and Google Drive. I've played around with a few alternatives, but this was my favourite; it's very straight-forward to set up, fully peer-to-peer so you don't need a centralized server if you don't want one, and it has clients for most operating systems. The Android app lets you set it to only sync when it's on WiFi and/or charging.
* Maps is an alternative to Google Maps, which uses OpenStreetMaps, the "Wikipedia of navigation". It doesn't have the same knowledge of local shops and restaurants as Google Maps does, but it is "good enough" for most of my needs, and in contrast to other clients like OsmAnd, the interface is actually quite slick.
* CopperheadOS for my phone. It's still partially in the Google ecosystem, by being an Android distribution that requires a Nexus or Pixel. But Android itself is still mostly open-source, and this comes with all Google apps and services stripped out. (Lineage works as well, but Copperhead is more focused on privacy and security.)
* Yalp. Some apps are simply not available outside Google Store (e.g. online banking apps in my case); this helps you install such apps without having to install the full Google Services platform on your phone.
* Firefox Focus/Klar. In contrast to the usual Firefox browser, this new app is actually useable on a phone; and last time I checked it had better privacy settings than the Chrome browsers you find on most androids.
Comparing Dropbox to FTP, is like comparing Facebook to email, and comparing Google to grep. I mean, at some level those analogies all work; but most people use these in completely different ways. In Dropbox' case, you have some people that use it solely like FTP (push a backup of your pics to a central server), but I think most people use it to just automatically keep their work available and up-to-date between all their computers and phones without manual pushing and pulling.
If you want a free alternative at some point, you could also look into Syncthing. I moved from Dropbox to Syncthing a few months ago, and have been very satisfied so far; it's decentralized, secure, and easy to setup. In my case, I also ended up with an always-on Raspberry Pi with an external harddrive in the same role as Dropbox' central server: a machine that's always available for syncing and that runs daily backups.
That's browsers that are lightweight on system resources, not lightweight on internet usage. How does that help? Or was the point that some browsers don't support images etc.?
Well, your body replaces all your atoms every few years as you eat and shit, but I still regard myself as roughly the same person I was a few years ago. It's like the old philosophical anecdote about "never crossing the same river twice"; well, all the water molecules are different after an hour, but I'd still call it the same river personally. I identify with the information, not the atoms. That includes the atoms of my brain, where what we call "consciousness" is simulated (we don't have any evidence of any "soul" being needed to explain it).
So if someone made a perfect copy and I woke up as that copy, I really wouldn't care at all; the informatiion that defines me is still there, and I might not even notice.
value of the dollar, which is not worth much nowadays anyway
What are you on about? About 10 years ago, 1 USD was worth e.g. 0.6 EUR and 5 NOK, but now it's 0.81 EUR and 7.69 NOK. Are you just complaining about general inflation?
Slashdot Mirror
Another alternative would be to just let them buy as fast as they want, but enforce e.g. a 1-week minimum time before you can sell that stock again. That ought to eliminate high-speed trading, since people won't buy a stock because they think they can fetch a profit in an unstable market in a minute, but because they genuinely believe in that company's long-term success. That in turn, ought to stabilize the market, since people can actually read up on what's going on before a transaction, instead of having algorithms buy and sell based on nanosecond-by-nanosecond fluctuations in the market.
If you're interested, using the XPosed framework with the XPrivacy module used to fix this problem (assuming you've rooted your phone): you could generate fake location data, white noise mic input, white noise camera input, etc., and the apps couldn't tell the difference. I haven't used it in a few years, but XPrivacyLua seems to be the modern successor of the XPrivacy project.
Scandinavian here. Near each house, we have one bin for recycling paper, one bin for food waste, and one for non-recyclable waste. Most convenience stores have an automated system for recycling bottles and cans (you get money back for each object you return, since especially aluminum cans are expensive to make from scratch). Throughout the city (usually outside large convenience stores), there are then centralized containers where you can throw away other objects made of metal, glass, plastic, and paper for recycling (one container per category). In addition, electronic waste can be returned at electronics stores for recycling, and the salvation army operates recycling points for clothes.
Are you suggesting we publish a ton of fake papers to hurt their reputation? That's a horrible idea. These predatory journals charge per publication, so you'd just be funding them and thus making their scam more successful. In addition, these are definitely low-tier journals anyway, so I doubt there's much reputation left to hurt.
And in the rest of the US. In 2012, 71% of US police departments had licence-plate scanners, now it's probably higher.
Norway is a long and narrow country, so travel distances are actually extremely long. Counting just the larger airports in Norway (i.e. those that transport more than a million passengers per year), the air distance from Kristiansand to Tromsø is 860 miles, which is about the distance from New York to Florida. If you count smaller airports (but still with more than a hundred thousand passengers per year), the distance from Kristiansand to Kirkenes is about 1030 miles. If you don't only count mainland Norway, but also include Svalbard, then the distance from Longyearbyen to Kristiansand is 1400 miles, which is about the distance from New York to Texas.
I hope this spreads. Not just for the bats' sake, but because white light (and the blue frequencies in particular) tend to disrupt the sleep patterns of any mammal, including humans. Red lights let us see where we're going without keeping us awake.
Not sure what your point is. But the royal families were stripped of power in favour of democratically elected governments a long time ago. Personally, I'd love to see them stripped of their official titles too, as I'm generally opposed to the idea of hereditary titles, but I doubt that'll happen in my time.
Perhaps I should clarify. When I mean that these machines can work on their own, I believe that in the future people will be able to routinely scan themselves without involving a physician. There will always be a limited supply of human physicians, and for many diseases, noticing it early on is key to efficient treatment. So if the whole population can routinely screen themselves for common diseases, and let human physicians only intervene when anything strange is found, this will likely improve the general health of the population. But that's of course a different situation from someone coming in to the doctor's office with visible symptoms — in that case, I agree that the doctor will want to supervise the process anyway. But my point is that I think machine learning systems will have the largest impact on general screening of the population for diseases, not diagnostics on patients that already have visible symptoms.
That's why you don't start by letting the AIs out on their own. Let these systems point out what they find, and let a traditional doctor check their work, like you would with any human trainee. Then, after a few years of active training, the systems will probably be ready to work on their own.
What legislation? Well, I presume that a civilised country like the US registers who buys guns in the first place? Start by banning hand-guns (since they are easily concealed in public places), and give people a year to sell them back to the government. After that year has passed, make the police go after people who haven't done it by checking the gun registry (failing to return an illegal gun counts as probable cause for a search), and confiscate their hand-guns without giving them any money for it (so there should be a financial incentive to return it voluntarily during the first year). Also, after that year when all guns should be returned, carrying a hand-gun in a public place should land you a prison sentence.
At first, don't do anything with rifles and shotguns; a lot of countries have these legally available for e.g. hunting without gun violence problems. After waiting 5-10 years, reevaluate how the ban has worked, and consider whether more legislation is needed or not.
It's not like the US would be the first country to go through with this—most countries didn't regulate firearms at some point, and then managed to get rid of them. Australia did so relatively recently, and it seems to have worked quite fine there.
If it survives the toilet, it probably survives being washed with ethanol.
No, they just posted it on Facebook.
Or someone else just agrees with him? For the record, I've been living under a rock too.
We live on a planet of finite size with finite resources, and it's very unlikely that we'll have the means to ship billions of people into space over the next century. So the exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely, and we might as well start looking for a better economical model today—one that doesn't break down if the population stabilizes.
Being large enough for gravity to deform it into a ball is one possible definition, and looking at it's geological structure is another. The latter would likely disqualify the gas giants, but you could probably make several definitions for "gas planet" and "rock planet", for instance. But I'd still call the IAU definition a science-based alternative as well.
There is a gap of several orders of magnitude in the so-called planetary discriminant between typical "planets" (50-50,000) and "dwarf planets" (<0.03), which indicates that there really is a qualitative difference between these. Personally, I don't see the problem with having a two-tier classification scheme where something deformed into a ball classifies as a dwarf planet, and a dwarf planet that is dominant in its region of space classifies as a large planet. It's also a definition that fits with the historical notion that moons and asteroids are not "planets" (even though e.g. Ganymede is larger than Mercury).
Neptune has definitely cleared its zone. The mathematical definition is a planetary discriminant, and Pluto's is 4 orders of magnitude below Neptune's.
Thanks for the WaterFox tip, I'll look into it! The Wikipedia overview seems intriguing :).
Isn't Canada also in America?
Comparing Dropbox to FTP, is like comparing Facebook to email, and comparing Google to grep. I mean, at some level those analogies all work; but most people use these in completely different ways. In Dropbox' case, you have some people that use it solely like FTP (push a backup of your pics to a central server), but I think most people use it to just automatically keep their work available and up-to-date between all their computers and phones without manual pushing and pulling.
If you want a free alternative at some point, you could also look into Syncthing. I moved from Dropbox to Syncthing a few months ago, and have been very satisfied so far; it's decentralized, secure, and easy to setup. In my case, I also ended up with an always-on Raspberry Pi with an external harddrive in the same role as Dropbox' central server: a machine that's always available for syncing and that runs daily backups.
That's browsers that are lightweight on system resources, not lightweight on internet usage. How does that help? Or was the point that some browsers don't support images etc.?
Well, your body replaces all your atoms every few years as you eat and shit, but I still regard myself as roughly the same person I was a few years ago. It's like the old philosophical anecdote about "never crossing the same river twice"; well, all the water molecules are different after an hour, but I'd still call it the same river personally. I identify with the information, not the atoms. That includes the atoms of my brain, where what we call "consciousness" is simulated (we don't have any evidence of any "soul" being needed to explain it).
So if someone made a perfect copy and I woke up as that copy, I really wouldn't care at all; the informatiion that defines me is still there, and I might not even notice.
value of the dollar, which is not worth much nowadays anyway
What are you on about? About 10 years ago, 1 USD was worth e.g. 0.6 EUR and 5 NOK, but now it's 0.81 EUR and 7.69 NOK. Are you just complaining about general inflation?