Pass the popcorn! This should be good, though only the tip of the iceberg.
May there be copycats at the other firms that do this type of business (But make sure you have good encryption and opsec. A lot of these people play very rough.)
Yeah, yeah. Let Schiller sniff about how I'm such a poor deprived second class citizen for using my 5 year old dell Precision dual multicore Xeon with 32 Gig of memory, SSD os drive, 8 TB of normal hard drive, and a Quadro 4000 video card.
Yep. Ancient. Hopeless. Useless. And will still leave most of what Schiller's company makes in the dust when it comes to number crunching.
Happiness is a very misunderstood concept, I think. We confuse it with the feeling we have during a peak moment. In truth, most of the time we don't feel that way. And it's through no fault of our own, or anyone else. Moods come and go for reasons we often don't really understand.
If I'm "happy", great. If not, I keep on living regardless.
I aspire more to "satisfaction" than "happiness". Though it may be just a matter of different terms, I really don't know how to make myself happy (Though a direct increase in dopamine release might come close. That's called snorting cocaine. No thanks.). But I can nearly always do something to make myself more satisfied. Even if it's just putting on dry socks so my feet aren't cold.
A friend was talking about how a Wisconsin company was dumping phosphorus into a river. As I work in a chemistry department, I mentioned that it was phosphate, not pure phosphorus and that it also comes from agricultural fertilizer runoff. Boy was that a mistake. It turned out that the company was owned or affiliated with the Koch brothers and he came back at me on a tear, saying that I was an apologist for them and all the other ills of the world.
I finally got him to understand I was making a technical point and wasn't defending pollution, but I thought he was going to unfriend me over it and take it into our RL friendship. Generally he's a reasonable guy, but this was a button issue for him.
After that, I don't give out technical info on Facebook anymore unless I'm certain it won't result in flame wars, or it's someone I specifically want to be angry with me (neo-Nazis, anti-vaxers, etc.)
I think you just summed up your credibility better than anyone else ever could have, mdsolar. If you don't like what someone says, you'll just argue with something they didn't say instead.
Many restricted military technologies are fairly easy to detect. Nuclear weapons require a massive industrial input that has well known signatures, for example.
A robot is different. It can be something that's dual use. One day it's a regular robot. Look at the software. All civilian and a nice strong optics mount point on it.
Change the software and swap some of the camera gear for a small machine gun and use the rest for aiming, it's a killbot. This is just one example. Another obvious one is putting an autonomous drone software package into the flight computers of an airplane that can also be manned. This game can go on and on with just about any weapons system you can think of.
It doesn't take industrial facilities that are different from usual ones to make them. If you can make versatile robots for civilian use, and separately make weapons you just have to put them together at the last minute. They don't have any particular signatures the way chemical weapons and their precursors do. Most nations are already making ordinance, so who's to say whether a human is going to be in the loop to fire it or if it's triggered by an AI?
If people want to cheat on this, it'll be pretty easy to do so.
So far, the landmine bans haven't seemed to have slowed down the planting of them a bit in various wars. We have to have demining teams, not just for cleaning up old wars, but the very ones that are going on now.
I don't expect this to have a much greater effect.
"There is a huge ethical debate on curing ageing."
And most of the questions are over illusory problems or ones that have to be dealt with regardless of whether we delay aging/increase healthy lifespan.
First off, people say live forever. No. All we've done is remove the decline that is now universal. You're still vulnerable to accidents, infections, murders, etc. etc. Perhaps we can increase safety margins and put in backup systems in time, but for now, if your brain is deprived of oxygen for more than a scant few minutes, you're done. That can happen from many things.
Secondly, we are seeing a birth dearth in many of the industrialized nations. Germany is an excellent example. They'll accept large numbers of Syrian immigrants because they have to, not just out of the goodness of their hearts (And I compliment those who are accepting them. Cold, without employment and in a transit camp without a country is no way to have to live.). They need workers to replace those who are retiring and haven't been replaced by new births in Germany. The reason for this is that birth rate drops have outpaced lifespan gains. For all the hype, waving your hands and mumbling something about robotics and automation is at best a guess about the future, not something that has been fully demonstrated.
Those places with shorter lifespans often are the ones that have major overpopulation problems. If you don't have an acceptable birth rate having people die earlier won't compensate for it.
Often, rather than clearing out the stodgy, what happens is that the last person who knows a crucial piece of information retires or dies unexpectedly (e.g. The maintenance supervisor who knows to grease this particular bearing on a custom made machine monthly or suffer a multimillion dollar downtime for the production line, a major repair bill and a wait for the parts to be fabricated. That happened at a brass plant my brother worked at. I've seen many similar, though less costly cases during my own career.)
Here on Slashdot, we regularly have discussion that note that older programmers are replaced not because of lack of skills, but rather do to high salaries from years of service, and, or high healthcare costs due to greater risk of expensive major health problems.
So, it's not clear that the glut of stodgy but healthy working oldsters will happen. And what with the current demographics we're seeing a major coming glut of stodgy Unhealthy unable to work oldsters that must be taken care of by the smaller numbers who still are working.
Slashdot Mirror
They may go with the number three pick, Henry Worsley (Recently deceased South Polar explorer) and name one of the lifeboats Boaty McBoatface.
But, that would be the intelligent thing rather than the bureaucratic thing, so who knows?
"Why you pig hearted baboon!"
"HP Says It Made the World's Thinnest Laptop"
A construction company I know has a Cat CS44 vibratory soil compactor that says otherwise.
Oh. You mean a useful laptop. :)
Pass the popcorn! This should be good, though only the tip of the iceberg.
May there be copycats at the other firms that do this type of business (But make sure you have good encryption and opsec. A lot of these people play very rough.)
"When did Slashdot become a haven for retarded Republican faggots?"
When you showed up?
Yeah, yeah. Let Schiller sniff about how I'm such a poor deprived second class citizen for using my 5 year old dell Precision dual multicore Xeon with 32 Gig of memory, SSD os drive, 8 TB of normal hard drive, and a Quadro 4000 video card.
Yep. Ancient. Hopeless. Useless. And will still leave most of what Schiller's company makes in the dust when it comes to number crunching.
I hear that you've been feelin' down. Well, I can ease your pain. Get you on your feet again.
Happiness is a very misunderstood concept, I think. We confuse it with the feeling we have during a peak moment. In truth, most of the time we don't feel that way. And it's through no fault of our own, or anyone else. Moods come and go for reasons we often don't really understand.
If I'm "happy", great. If not, I keep on living regardless.
I aspire more to "satisfaction" than "happiness". Though it may be just a matter of different terms, I really don't know how to make myself happy (Though a direct increase in dopamine release might come close. That's called snorting cocaine. No thanks.). But I can nearly always do something to make myself more satisfied. Even if it's just putting on dry socks so my feet aren't cold.
The mods sniffed and said in their best Monty Python voice "We are NOT amused!"
Microsoft must not be allowed to create offense by hiring women and telling them to wear scanty clothing.
They must create offense by hiring women and telling them to wear burkas or ankle length winter coats with hoods!
There shouldn't be any problem with the latter should there?
Isn't this distressingly similar to sending smoke signals to tell people to move to the newer dial type telephones?
This. A thousand time, this.
I just don't say much on Facebook anymore.
A friend was talking about how a Wisconsin company was dumping phosphorus into a river. As I work in a chemistry department, I mentioned that it was phosphate, not pure phosphorus and that it also comes from agricultural fertilizer runoff. Boy was that a mistake. It turned out that the company was owned or affiliated with the Koch brothers and he came back at me on a tear, saying that I was an apologist for them and all the other ills of the world.
I finally got him to understand I was making a technical point and wasn't defending pollution, but I thought he was going to unfriend me over it and take it into our RL friendship. Generally he's a reasonable guy, but this was a button issue for him.
After that, I don't give out technical info on Facebook anymore unless I'm certain it won't result in flame wars, or it's someone I specifically want to be angry with me (neo-Nazis, anti-vaxers, etc.)
Saying that noting a current low cancer rate is equivalent to discounting the bad effects of a nuclear bombing is nonsense.
That you phrased it as a question is just rhetorical device.
I think you just summed up your credibility better than anyone else ever could have, mdsolar.
If you don't like what someone says, you'll just argue with something they didn't say instead.
My office mates are already bad enough at stealing my Doritos without automating it!
"Hey, I am NOT that polluted! :-)"
Well, it's Friday evening. You can head to the bar and do something about that. ;)
Not just that. We don't even know shit about shit.
Well, that's why Tim Horton's does so well there! :)
(I'll take a double double and a box of TimBits.)
Many restricted military technologies are fairly easy to detect. Nuclear weapons require a massive industrial input that has well known signatures, for example.
A robot is different. It can be something that's dual use. One day it's a regular robot. Look at the software. All civilian and a nice strong optics mount point on it.
Change the software and swap some of the camera gear for a small machine gun and use the rest for aiming, it's a killbot. This is just one example. Another obvious one is putting an autonomous drone software package into the flight computers of an airplane that can also be manned. This game can go on and on with just about any weapons system you can think of.
It doesn't take industrial facilities that are different from usual ones to make them. If you can make versatile robots for civilian use, and separately make weapons you just have to put them together at the last minute. They don't have any particular signatures the way chemical weapons and their precursors do. Most nations are already making ordinance, so who's to say whether a human is going to be in the loop to fire it or if it's triggered by an AI?
If people want to cheat on this, it'll be pretty easy to do so.
So far, the landmine bans haven't seemed to have slowed down the planting of them a bit in various wars. We have to have demining teams, not just for cleaning up old wars, but the very ones that are going on now.
I don't expect this to have a much greater effect.
I read the headline as:
"Urban Death Project Aims To Rebuild Our Soil By Composting Congress"
And thought, "What an amazingly good idea!"
"I'm already in my Mom's basement!"
You mean I'm not? Then whose basement is this?
When hitting a key, just tappet.
"There is a huge ethical debate on curing ageing."
And most of the questions are over illusory problems or ones that have to be dealt with regardless of whether we delay aging/increase healthy lifespan.
First off, people say live forever. No. All we've done is remove the decline that is now universal. You're still vulnerable to accidents, infections, murders, etc. etc. Perhaps we can increase safety margins and put in backup systems in time, but for now, if your brain is deprived of oxygen for more than a scant few minutes, you're done. That can happen from many things.
Secondly, we are seeing a birth dearth in many of the industrialized nations. Germany is an excellent example. They'll accept large numbers of Syrian immigrants because they have to, not just out of the goodness of their hearts (And I compliment those who are accepting them. Cold, without employment and in a transit camp without a country is no way to have to live.). They need workers to replace those who are retiring and haven't been replaced by new births in Germany. The reason for this is that birth rate drops have outpaced lifespan gains. For all the hype, waving your hands and mumbling something about robotics and automation is at best a guess about the future, not something that has been fully demonstrated.
Those places with shorter lifespans often are the ones that have major overpopulation problems. If you don't have an acceptable birth rate having people die earlier won't compensate for it.
Often, rather than clearing out the stodgy, what happens is that the last person who knows a crucial piece of information retires or dies unexpectedly (e.g. The maintenance supervisor who knows to grease this particular bearing on a custom made machine monthly or suffer a multimillion dollar downtime for the production line, a major repair bill and a wait for the parts to be fabricated. That happened at a brass plant my brother worked at. I've seen many similar, though less costly cases during my own career.)
Here on Slashdot, we regularly have discussion that note that older programmers are replaced not because of lack of skills, but rather do to high salaries from years of service, and, or high healthcare costs due to greater risk of expensive major health problems.
So, it's not clear that the glut of stodgy but healthy working oldsters will happen. And what with the current demographics we're seeing a major coming glut of stodgy Unhealthy unable to work oldsters that must be taken care of by the smaller numbers who still are working.
"Non-consensual Attitude Adjustment"
I thought that was another term for rubber hose cryptography.
My refrigerator is home to potentially dangerous bacteria and fungi.
I think what's in the vegetable crisper drawer may even be of alien origin.