If the client application is closed-source and is the only option, then it's not hard for the service to determine if the recipient has read the message yet or not (unless they just leave it open all the time of course, I mean if they're logged off). The client app could even see if the window was minimized or obscured.
Yeah, but those pictures were real, right? WWN wouldn't bother with anything like that, because they'd rather report about aliens, wolf-men, Satan coming out of an oil well, etc.
How does monolithic culture not have anything to do with anything? It's plainly self-evident that Danish culture, for instance, is far more homogeneous than American culture. It's a small country, roughly 5M people IIRC, about the size of one US state. They all speak the same language and have pretty much the same culture. So politics in a place like that are much easier: everyone's mostly going to agree on things. How many right-wing, "god and guns" Danish are there in Denmark, who hate public transit and don't want to pay taxes for it but are happy to pay taxes for a giant military? Not many, I suspect. So public transit and projects like that have little trouble getting funding there. Here in the US, we don't speak the same language (there's a huge contingent of Spanish speakers), and the culture varies pretty widely from place to place, so we can't even agree on very basic things, like whether the government should have any social services at all. There's a huge contingent of people here who don't think it should. We can't agree on whether guns should be all banned, or there should be strict gun control, or there should be zero regulations on guns altogether. We can't agree on whether abortions should be fully legal, legal in exceptional cases, or completely illegal. I could go on and on. Denmark doesn't have these problems; neither does Norway, or insert any other small European nation here. Even a big one like Germany doesn't have internal strife approaching what we have.
Yes, the EU is larger, but the public transit is mainly done by the individual member nations, not at the EU level. The EU is basically a confederation, with very little centralized power, so the nations enjoy a lot of sovereignty but agree on matters of trade and currency, and that's about it. There's strife between the EU members however (since their cultures really are very different), but they're not all stuck together voting against each other in a single big government like us. And even so, they're threatening to tear their union apart just because of differences over monetary policy and now immigration laws in the face of a huge wave of refugees. I think they'll probably figure things out (even if they lose a member here or there for a while, or have to "demote" them to returning to their own currency), but it's a good case study in how hard it is to get different cultures to work together and agree on things. It's no wonder places like Iraq simply don't work: there's too many groups fighting each other and completely unable to agree and work together; democracy simply cannot work in a place like that, which is why they either need to be broken up into separate nations, or they need a strong dictator like Saddam to run the place.
The only reason things aren't that bad here is because our regional cultures aren't *that* different, and there's been a lot of homogenization thanks to various things like a largely shared language, TV, and the fact that we grew by expansion and settling rather than a bunch of existing, long-time nations deciding suddenly to try to join forces rather than having constant wars like they did in centuries past. Also, many of our cultural differences are between urban and rural areas more than between different states or regions. People in rural California and rural Virginia both complain about the people in urban California, and would probably get along pretty well together.
No thanks, I'll pass. I hate running for any distance (I can do sprints just great though). If I want cardio exercise, I'll get on my bike; I can go much farther, much faster, and not subject my leg joints to impact-related problems. It doesn't help that I have flat feet either.
But the other thing I was addressing before from the OP's post was the bit about hiking, as while I'm not an endurance runner, I do do a lot of hiking. Hiking in some thin-soled shoe that has no ankle support is just stupid, unless you're hiking on a flat field or something. When you're hiking on mountain trails with tree roots, rocks, or even boulders, you don't want to be "close to the ground", you want footwear which protects you from the ground as much as possible, and also supports your ankle so you don't sprain it. His advice is like telling people to stop wearing winter coats and hats outside because "it's not natural", or to not carry bottled water because "it's not natural". The whole reason humans have dominated this planet is because we've been able to adapt to the conditions far beyond the place we were evolved for, and a big part of that adaptation is our invention of clothing and shoes. We're even adapted now to eat cooked food (like tubers). We're not natural animals any more, and we haven't been for tens of thousands of years or more. We require technology to survive.
but I don't know why middle-class and rich people don't expand to 18-child families to fit their means at the expense of crushing the poor people.
WTF? Are you some kind of religious nut or something? I'm serious, the answer to this question is pretty close to self-evident unless you're one of the Duggars. And have you ever had any kids? Your UID isn't high enough for you to be 20.
It's quite simple: raising kids is a huge financial expense (if you do it right), and it's a giant investment in time and energy (again, if you do it right and aren't a negligent or absentee parent). Middle-class and up people recognize these facts, and limit their procreation accordingly. They still have some kind of urge to procreate like most people, but are better at controlling their impulses (a big problem with criminals and many poor people), so they stick with a small, manageable number of children. Then after they've raised 1-3, they're done. Go talk to any 45-year-old who's had kids: they've had enough. They liked the experience, but it was also a huge amount of work plus a giant limitation on their freedom, so they're really not interested in doing it again. That's why kids are usually had by people in their 20s or 30s; after that age (even if the woman is still fertile), people get used to their comfy middle-class lifestyle and don't want to go to all the trouble, so if they haven't had them by the time they're 40, they're usually not ever going to.
The population figures of every industrialized country prove me right: when people have comfortable lifestyles, they just don't bother having a lot of kids, and frequently don't have any, so you get negative population growth (NPG). A bunch of couple having 2.5 kids doesn't make up bunch of couples not having any. Japan is having this problem now; other countries don't seem to, but it's all because of immigration: their natives (or long-time ethnic groups if you will, since middle class and up white people aren't really "native" in the US though they've been dominant for 300 years) aren't creating enough kids to replace themselves. However, as we see here in the US, it's the poorest groups which make the most kids.
The other factor is access to contraception. Wealthier people have it, plus they have education to know to use it and how to use it properly. Poor people don't.
Over and over, we've seen in country after country, that when the standard of living goes up, the birth rate drops. All this hysteria over overpopulation with reduction of aging is completely irrational.
Now, I could see people having some more kids after a huge break if we really did have immortality (which included continuous female fertility, rather than it ending around age 50). People might wait to 50 to have a kid or two, raise them, then after they're out of the house live a more carefree lifestyle for a while, than around age 100 do it again (perhaps with a different partner that time). But still, people are going to die from other causes, like accidents, crime, or even disease (which hasn't yet been conquered by medicine even after figuring out the aging process). As long as people are religious, we can still look forward to mass murders, as we've seen over and over in the news in the past few weeks.
I cannot imagine a greater hell than having to live forever.
Oh please. People are still going to get killed in all kinds of ways, mainly accidents and murder. Those things are never going to end. No one's going to live forever, they're just not going to get old any more and die of age-related disease. They're still going to get hit by buses, or get shot by deranged religious lunatics.
Oh geez, how stupid. You don't think they'd simply alter the Social Security system to phase it out or change it to deal with the new reality? They'd probably just phase it out and pay out for everyone that's paid in if full immortality were achieved.
And if you're immortal, why *wouldn't* you want to keep working? You wouldn't get tired by old age, so you'd work and save up your money, then take some years off to do something else (like maybe raise a child, without having to juggle family and work), then go back to work for a while, or go back to school for something different, then start out a new career, etc. The whole idea of working to a certain age, then retiring and sitting on your porch waiting to die would go away.
Can you imagine how long the food supply would be adequate if the population were to increase unbounded?
If this happens, you can expect the population to level out pretty quickly. Immortal humans won't feel the need to reproduce very much. And accidents, murder, and war are still killing lots of people.
Do you honestly think you could convince people to stop procreating?
Again, -1 Stupid in the extreme. Have you not noticed that people in first-world countries have already done this voluntarily? We already have NPG except for immigration.
Bicycling isn't high impact (though running is). Bicycling is a good cardiovascular workout, but there's pretty much zero impact since the motion is so smooth.
If someone follows your advice while running on any kind of pavement, they're going to have a really bad time. Humans weren't meant to run on pavement at all; that's why we have modern running shoes. We were evolved to run around in the savannahs of Africa. Unless you happen to live there, then the environment just doesn't match what we're evolved for.
And hiking on craggy rocks without proper hiking boots is idiotic in the extreme.
As Shakespeare wrote, "To be, or not to be" - this is what a robot cannot decide, and never will be able to.
You don't know that. For all we know, it's entirely possible to build machines which can think the way we do.
The problem is: why would we want to do this? The last thing we need to do is make a competing intelligence which then decides we're inferior and needs to be exterminated. The machine intelligence could easily come to that conclusion based on our own actions: we're a horribly flawed race, and for all our talk about human rights and ethics, many of us are horrible about this; just look at ISIS for proof. A race of intelligent machines probably wouldn't have this problem, and would decide that we're obsolete.
Finally, it's not like there's a shortage of us, so why do we want more intelligent beings around? If you want a companion who isn't going to supercede you and will spend all their time adoring you, then just get a dog. (Or get a cat if you can do without the adoration part.) If you want a race of slaves, well that's not likely to go well; intelligent slaves tend to get tired of their masters after a while and rebel.
Yes, either with an e-mail client over IMAP/POP or via a browser addon.
No one except a few nerds wants to use an offline email client with IMAP (or worse, POP) with one of the mainstream webmail services, especially Gmail since no email client understands tagging.
Browser addon? Citation needed. And how does that work when you use a different computer? Oh yeah, it doesn't, negating the usefulness of webmail.
Maybe, but personally I think we should encourage it as much as we can.
People like you already have tried. It's gone nowhere, because you completely fail to understand how people use email these days and what they want out of it. You're still stuck in 1991.
If you really want to change the situation, you need to invent an all-new non-SMTP email standard which has encryption built-in, and does all the things modern email (+webmail) does, without introducing any new limitations. Then you're going to have to figure out how to convince everyone to adopt it. It could be done, and maybe even fairly transparently (existing clients and services could add it in as a new standard alongside the old, perhaps flagging email2.0 messages differently), but you'd have to convince the Big 3 email providers to adopt it or it's going nowhere.
Politicians don't do that, not in this country. It's all based on nepotism, kickbacks, and other forms of corruption.
Anyway, the whole idea of licensing software engineers is utterly and completely stupid. There's no nicer way to say it.
Licensing is important for things where people need to accept liability. It's needed for things like plumbers because they usually work for themselves, so they have to be liable for their workmanship. Software engineers, and in fact most engineers, do not work for themselves, they work for large corporations. Part of the deal is that the corporation accepts the liability. That's why the "industrial exemption" exists. Moreover, engineers these days (since it's no longer 1901) work in teams. No one can possibly be responsible for the entire project. So the corporation as a whole is, and the corporate executives are the ones personally liable for things. That's why they get paid so much. Engineers aren't paid enough to be liable for squat.
Finally, this idea of "experts in the field" is just silly. It works OK for things like civil engineering because not much has changed there in decades, and it works well in something like nursing because there's no technological innovation there, just standards of care and ethics to worry about. If you required everything to pass some sort of "expert review" in software, nothing would ever change, and we'd still be using FORTRAN. We wouldn't have new languages like Rust, Swift, R, or Python because "experts" (read: old-timers) wouldn't see why C, maybe C++, and Perl aren't good enough. It's nearly impossible to get two programmers to even agree on a coding standard; how do you expect to manage a licensing program with such a huge amount of disagreement in the industry?
what I can do is tell them how to set up PGP or S/MIME so that they can use encrypted e-mail. While that's not "one button easy" it's not overly difficult.
And they can do that with Yahoo Mail or GMail?
You're completely overestimating how many people are going to bother if it isn't one-button easy.
The only thing that is intriguing about Hyperlink is that it is capable of providing personalized transportation with High Speed.
SkyTran can do the exact same thing, only on a much smaller scale (like being able to transport you a few miles that way, station-to-station, with stations all over the place in a grid, not a line). However, it's not that fast: maybe 100mph in-city max, and up to 150mph for longer routes. That's a lot faster than a car of course (esp. considering the lack of congestion, stops, etc.), but still not nearly as fast as an airplane. Hyperloop would compete directly with that, and in fact be quite a bit faster than airplanes, plus probably safer too.
But if Government is involved, there is no way that it becomes viable, because there are too many people who will cry about some "unfair" reality that needs to have some SJW involved to make it fair.
It does seem like things are completely broken in this country. I think we should outsource our governance to Denmark. We're just too stupid to do it ourselves.
So you think someone like Chris Christie or Bobby Jindal or GWB is competent to determine who would make a good board member? Since when does ANY politician have any kind of expertise in engineering?
It doesn't have the density to make 19th-century public transportation technology viable. But SkyTran would be perfectly suited for suburban US cities and urban ones not as dense as Manhattan.
I will say however that your lack of confidence in the American government (at every level) is very rational. It does seem that our government would just bungle any kind of transportation technology, Hyperloop, SkyTran, etc. I guess that's why SkyTran is first being built in Tel Aviv, Israel. Maybe after it's deployed across Europe and parts of Asia and finally it's the norm in places like El Salvador, we can get it here in the US.
1. the majority of americans outside a handful of cities still consider public transportation to be a mark of poverty and avoid it at all costs. others cant be bothered to even consider a greyhound to the next state, let alone a train, and once they arrive the local public transit infrastructure based on their destination is either so poor as to be unusable or nonexistent through legislative fiat.
Have you ever taken a Greyhound, or even investigated a ride on one? They're ridiculously impractical; that's why no one uses them except poor ex-cons. The only reason anyone uses Greyhound is because they have some kind of problem (like lack of proper ID) which prevents them from taking a plane, or they're so broke that the meager savings over airfare is worth it to them. Greyhound isn't all that cheap, and worse, it takes forever to get there because they take horribly meandering routes on backroads through every little village they can. It's an awful way of traveling, so only people on the fringes of society bother with it. No one in their right mind wants to spend 24 hours on a bus when they can do the same trip in 3 hours on a plane. And all that is overlooking the kind of company you'll have on the bus....
And local public transit infrastructure sucks mainly because of the laws of physics, and the lack of high density in most American cities. Public transit works pretty decently in very dense places like Manhattan, but other places just don't have the density necessary,
If you want people to use public transit, you need to make public transit systems that actually work well and perform well. The only way you're going to get that is with high-speed, fully-automated PRT (personal rapid transit). Go read about SkyTran. Nothing else will work: light rail and other trains cost an absolute fortune to build and interfere with all the roads, and they only go in a line; buses are too slow and stop too much; and everything goes according to a pre-set schedule so you end up wasting a lot of time waiting on the next ride instead of moving. SkyTran fixes all those problems. The Wikipedia page explains it all.
I think you're missing the problem here: if Yahoo closes up shop soon, that auto-forwarding won't work any more because Yahoo Mail won't exist.
This is one of the big problems with email: it's not really permanent, and only lasts as long as the provider lasts, or as long as the provider allows you to have an account there. That's why so many people have webmail accounts at one of the Big 3 (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft/Live/MSN/outlook.com/whatever they're calling it these days). Lots of idiots use email from their ISP, but then one day they have to move (or they get tired of their ISP's high prices and switch to a competitor) and suddenly that account is gone, along with all their email, and all their contacts are still sending emails to the old address which bounces. You don't have that problem with, for instance, Google's Gmail. But of course that assumes Gmail is going to be around indefinitely. The way things are going now, that's probably a safe assumption, however 15 years ago we could probably have said the same thing about Yahoo Mail, and it's looking now like it might not actually stick around that long. It's hard to say; it might just get sold off and turn into a paid service, it might get swallowed up by a competitor like Gmail, but there's also a chance it'll disappear entirely, which would affect a LOT of people.
I'd rather see him use it like Elon Musk does, to develop technologies which really do improve peoples' lives. If this Hyperloop thing actually works out for instance, imagine how that will improve travel: safer than air travel, far less polluting and energy-using, and faster too. And if we get to commonplace and inexpensive electric vehicles soon, imagine how that will improve things: far less pollution and energy use again, plus no more dependence on fossil fuels (since electricity can be generated by renewable sources, as well as nuclear, not to mention cleaner fossil fuel sources like natgas, plus of course the efficiencies of scale resulting from greater centralization), along with far less maintenance and lower repair costs.
If Zuckerberg wants to do something really useful, he should fund and promote SkyTran. Tens of thousands of lives a year could be saved if people used this for commuting and 1-2 person travel, not to mention the huge energy savings. Giving money to charities is fine and all, but really they frequently don't do that much to improve things; what really improves living standards across the board is science and technology. (Though charities which fund not-so-profitable medical research would be a very, very good investment too: think of clinical trials on unpatentable and inexpensive pharmaceuticals and treatments.) Most charities seem to me to be more of a Band-Aid, trying to help some group or cause which has been left out somehow, whereas improvements in technology (esp. something like medical technology) is like a "tide which lifts all boats".
Slashdot Mirror
If the client application is closed-source and is the only option, then it's not hard for the service to determine if the recipient has read the message yet or not (unless they just leave it open all the time of course, I mean if they're logged off). The client app could even see if the window was minimized or obscured.
I thought all the IM services had changed their protocols so that open-source applications like Pidgin wouldn't work any more.
Surely Yahoo would do this here if they haven't already.
Yeah, but those pictures were real, right? WWN wouldn't bother with anything like that, because they'd rather report about aliens, wolf-men, Satan coming out of an oil well, etc.
How does monolithic culture not have anything to do with anything? It's plainly self-evident that Danish culture, for instance, is far more homogeneous than American culture. It's a small country, roughly 5M people IIRC, about the size of one US state. They all speak the same language and have pretty much the same culture. So politics in a place like that are much easier: everyone's mostly going to agree on things. How many right-wing, "god and guns" Danish are there in Denmark, who hate public transit and don't want to pay taxes for it but are happy to pay taxes for a giant military? Not many, I suspect. So public transit and projects like that have little trouble getting funding there. Here in the US, we don't speak the same language (there's a huge contingent of Spanish speakers), and the culture varies pretty widely from place to place, so we can't even agree on very basic things, like whether the government should have any social services at all. There's a huge contingent of people here who don't think it should. We can't agree on whether guns should be all banned, or there should be strict gun control, or there should be zero regulations on guns altogether. We can't agree on whether abortions should be fully legal, legal in exceptional cases, or completely illegal. I could go on and on. Denmark doesn't have these problems; neither does Norway, or insert any other small European nation here. Even a big one like Germany doesn't have internal strife approaching what we have.
Yes, the EU is larger, but the public transit is mainly done by the individual member nations, not at the EU level. The EU is basically a confederation, with very little centralized power, so the nations enjoy a lot of sovereignty but agree on matters of trade and currency, and that's about it. There's strife between the EU members however (since their cultures really are very different), but they're not all stuck together voting against each other in a single big government like us. And even so, they're threatening to tear their union apart just because of differences over monetary policy and now immigration laws in the face of a huge wave of refugees. I think they'll probably figure things out (even if they lose a member here or there for a while, or have to "demote" them to returning to their own currency), but it's a good case study in how hard it is to get different cultures to work together and agree on things. It's no wonder places like Iraq simply don't work: there's too many groups fighting each other and completely unable to agree and work together; democracy simply cannot work in a place like that, which is why they either need to be broken up into separate nations, or they need a strong dictator like Saddam to run the place.
The only reason things aren't that bad here is because our regional cultures aren't *that* different, and there's been a lot of homogenization thanks to various things like a largely shared language, TV, and the fact that we grew by expansion and settling rather than a bunch of existing, long-time nations deciding suddenly to try to join forces rather than having constant wars like they did in centuries past. Also, many of our cultural differences are between urban and rural areas more than between different states or regions. People in rural California and rural Virginia both complain about the people in urban California, and would probably get along pretty well together.
No thanks, I'll pass. I hate running for any distance (I can do sprints just great though). If I want cardio exercise, I'll get on my bike; I can go much farther, much faster, and not subject my leg joints to impact-related problems. It doesn't help that I have flat feet either.
But the other thing I was addressing before from the OP's post was the bit about hiking, as while I'm not an endurance runner, I do do a lot of hiking. Hiking in some thin-soled shoe that has no ankle support is just stupid, unless you're hiking on a flat field or something. When you're hiking on mountain trails with tree roots, rocks, or even boulders, you don't want to be "close to the ground", you want footwear which protects you from the ground as much as possible, and also supports your ankle so you don't sprain it. His advice is like telling people to stop wearing winter coats and hats outside because "it's not natural", or to not carry bottled water because "it's not natural". The whole reason humans have dominated this planet is because we've been able to adapt to the conditions far beyond the place we were evolved for, and a big part of that adaptation is our invention of clothing and shoes. We're even adapted now to eat cooked food (like tubers). We're not natural animals any more, and we haven't been for tens of thousands of years or more. We require technology to survive.
but I don't know why middle-class and rich people don't expand to 18-child families to fit their means at the expense of crushing the poor people.
WTF? Are you some kind of religious nut or something? I'm serious, the answer to this question is pretty close to self-evident unless you're one of the Duggars. And have you ever had any kids? Your UID isn't high enough for you to be 20.
It's quite simple: raising kids is a huge financial expense (if you do it right), and it's a giant investment in time and energy (again, if you do it right and aren't a negligent or absentee parent). Middle-class and up people recognize these facts, and limit their procreation accordingly. They still have some kind of urge to procreate like most people, but are better at controlling their impulses (a big problem with criminals and many poor people), so they stick with a small, manageable number of children. Then after they've raised 1-3, they're done. Go talk to any 45-year-old who's had kids: they've had enough. They liked the experience, but it was also a huge amount of work plus a giant limitation on their freedom, so they're really not interested in doing it again. That's why kids are usually had by people in their 20s or 30s; after that age (even if the woman is still fertile), people get used to their comfy middle-class lifestyle and don't want to go to all the trouble, so if they haven't had them by the time they're 40, they're usually not ever going to.
The population figures of every industrialized country prove me right: when people have comfortable lifestyles, they just don't bother having a lot of kids, and frequently don't have any, so you get negative population growth (NPG). A bunch of couple having 2.5 kids doesn't make up bunch of couples not having any. Japan is having this problem now; other countries don't seem to, but it's all because of immigration: their natives (or long-time ethnic groups if you will, since middle class and up white people aren't really "native" in the US though they've been dominant for 300 years) aren't creating enough kids to replace themselves. However, as we see here in the US, it's the poorest groups which make the most kids.
The other factor is access to contraception. Wealthier people have it, plus they have education to know to use it and how to use it properly. Poor people don't.
Over and over, we've seen in country after country, that when the standard of living goes up, the birth rate drops. All this hysteria over overpopulation with reduction of aging is completely irrational.
Now, I could see people having some more kids after a huge break if we really did have immortality (which included continuous female fertility, rather than it ending around age 50). People might wait to 50 to have a kid or two, raise them, then after they're out of the house live a more carefree lifestyle for a while, than around age 100 do it again (perhaps with a different partner that time). But still, people are going to die from other causes, like accidents, crime, or even disease (which hasn't yet been conquered by medicine even after figuring out the aging process). As long as people are religious, we can still look forward to mass murders, as we've seen over and over in the news in the past few weeks.
I cannot imagine a greater hell than having to live forever.
Oh please. People are still going to get killed in all kinds of ways, mainly accidents and murder. Those things are never going to end. No one's going to live forever, they're just not going to get old any more and die of age-related disease. They're still going to get hit by buses, or get shot by deranged religious lunatics.
Oh geez, how stupid. You don't think they'd simply alter the Social Security system to phase it out or change it to deal with the new reality? They'd probably just phase it out and pay out for everyone that's paid in if full immortality were achieved.
And if you're immortal, why *wouldn't* you want to keep working? You wouldn't get tired by old age, so you'd work and save up your money, then take some years off to do something else (like maybe raise a child, without having to juggle family and work), then go back to work for a while, or go back to school for something different, then start out a new career, etc. The whole idea of working to a certain age, then retiring and sitting on your porch waiting to die would go away.
-1 Stupid.
Can you imagine how long the food supply would be adequate if the population were to increase unbounded?
If this happens, you can expect the population to level out pretty quickly. Immortal humans won't feel the need to reproduce very much. And accidents, murder, and war are still killing lots of people.
Do you honestly think you could convince people to stop procreating?
Again, -1 Stupid in the extreme. Have you not noticed that people in first-world countries have already done this voluntarily? We already have NPG except for immigration.
Bicycling isn't high impact (though running is). Bicycling is a good cardiovascular workout, but there's pretty much zero impact since the motion is so smooth.
If someone follows your advice while running on any kind of pavement, they're going to have a really bad time. Humans weren't meant to run on pavement at all; that's why we have modern running shoes. We were evolved to run around in the savannahs of Africa. Unless you happen to live there, then the environment just doesn't match what we're evolved for.
And hiking on craggy rocks without proper hiking boots is idiotic in the extreme.
One bank executive confirmed the hack to Farooqui, adding that, "This is blackmail."
No shit, Sherlock!
This bank executive's a real genius; I never would have guessed that this is blackmail. /s
As Shakespeare wrote, "To be, or not to be" - this is what a robot cannot decide, and never will be able to.
You don't know that. For all we know, it's entirely possible to build machines which can think the way we do.
The problem is: why would we want to do this? The last thing we need to do is make a competing intelligence which then decides we're inferior and needs to be exterminated. The machine intelligence could easily come to that conclusion based on our own actions: we're a horribly flawed race, and for all our talk about human rights and ethics, many of us are horrible about this; just look at ISIS for proof. A race of intelligent machines probably wouldn't have this problem, and would decide that we're obsolete.
Finally, it's not like there's a shortage of us, so why do we want more intelligent beings around? If you want a companion who isn't going to supercede you and will spend all their time adoring you, then just get a dog. (Or get a cat if you can do without the adoration part.) If you want a race of slaves, well that's not likely to go well; intelligent slaves tend to get tired of their masters after a while and rebel.
Yes, either with an e-mail client over IMAP/POP or via a browser addon.
No one except a few nerds wants to use an offline email client with IMAP (or worse, POP) with one of the mainstream webmail services, especially Gmail since no email client understands tagging.
Browser addon? Citation needed. And how does that work when you use a different computer? Oh yeah, it doesn't, negating the usefulness of webmail.
Maybe, but personally I think we should encourage it as much as we can.
People like you already have tried. It's gone nowhere, because you completely fail to understand how people use email these days and what they want out of it. You're still stuck in 1991.
If you really want to change the situation, you need to invent an all-new non-SMTP email standard which has encryption built-in, and does all the things modern email (+webmail) does, without introducing any new limitations. Then you're going to have to figure out how to convince everyone to adopt it. It could be done, and maybe even fairly transparently (existing clients and services could add it in as a new standard alongside the old, perhaps flagging email2.0 messages differently), but you'd have to convince the Big 3 email providers to adopt it or it's going nowhere.
Politicians don't do that, not in this country. It's all based on nepotism, kickbacks, and other forms of corruption.
Anyway, the whole idea of licensing software engineers is utterly and completely stupid. There's no nicer way to say it.
Licensing is important for things where people need to accept liability. It's needed for things like plumbers because they usually work for themselves, so they have to be liable for their workmanship. Software engineers, and in fact most engineers, do not work for themselves, they work for large corporations. Part of the deal is that the corporation accepts the liability. That's why the "industrial exemption" exists. Moreover, engineers these days (since it's no longer 1901) work in teams. No one can possibly be responsible for the entire project. So the corporation as a whole is, and the corporate executives are the ones personally liable for things. That's why they get paid so much. Engineers aren't paid enough to be liable for squat.
Finally, this idea of "experts in the field" is just silly. It works OK for things like civil engineering because not much has changed there in decades, and it works well in something like nursing because there's no technological innovation there, just standards of care and ethics to worry about. If you required everything to pass some sort of "expert review" in software, nothing would ever change, and we'd still be using FORTRAN. We wouldn't have new languages like Rust, Swift, R, or Python because "experts" (read: old-timers) wouldn't see why C, maybe C++, and Perl aren't good enough. It's nearly impossible to get two programmers to even agree on a coding standard; how do you expect to manage a licensing program with such a huge amount of disagreement in the industry?
what I can do is tell them how to set up PGP or S/MIME so that they can use encrypted e-mail. While that's not "one button easy" it's not overly difficult.
And they can do that with Yahoo Mail or GMail?
You're completely overestimating how many people are going to bother if it isn't one-button easy.
The only thing that is intriguing about Hyperlink is that it is capable of providing personalized transportation with High Speed.
SkyTran can do the exact same thing, only on a much smaller scale (like being able to transport you a few miles that way, station-to-station, with stations all over the place in a grid, not a line). However, it's not that fast: maybe 100mph in-city max, and up to 150mph for longer routes. That's a lot faster than a car of course (esp. considering the lack of congestion, stops, etc.), but still not nearly as fast as an airplane. Hyperloop would compete directly with that, and in fact be quite a bit faster than airplanes, plus probably safer too.
But if Government is involved, there is no way that it becomes viable, because there are too many people who will cry about some "unfair" reality that needs to have some SJW involved to make it fair.
It does seem like things are completely broken in this country. I think we should outsource our governance to Denmark. We're just too stupid to do it ourselves.
So you think someone like Chris Christie or Bobby Jindal or GWB is competent to determine who would make a good board member? Since when does ANY politician have any kind of expertise in engineering?
My takeaway was don't work with ESR.
That's not hard; when has that guy ever worked at a normal company?
It doesn't have the density to make 19th-century public transportation technology viable. But SkyTran would be perfectly suited for suburban US cities and urban ones not as dense as Manhattan.
I will say however that your lack of confidence in the American government (at every level) is very rational. It does seem that our government would just bungle any kind of transportation technology, Hyperloop, SkyTran, etc. I guess that's why SkyTran is first being built in Tel Aviv, Israel. Maybe after it's deployed across Europe and parts of Asia and finally it's the norm in places like El Salvador, we can get it here in the US.
1. the majority of americans outside a handful of cities still consider public transportation to be a mark of poverty and avoid it at all costs. others cant be bothered to even consider a greyhound to the next state, let alone a train, and once they arrive the local public transit infrastructure based on their destination is either so poor as to be unusable or nonexistent through legislative fiat.
Have you ever taken a Greyhound, or even investigated a ride on one? They're ridiculously impractical; that's why no one uses them except poor ex-cons. The only reason anyone uses Greyhound is because they have some kind of problem (like lack of proper ID) which prevents them from taking a plane, or they're so broke that the meager savings over airfare is worth it to them. Greyhound isn't all that cheap, and worse, it takes forever to get there because they take horribly meandering routes on backroads through every little village they can. It's an awful way of traveling, so only people on the fringes of society bother with it. No one in their right mind wants to spend 24 hours on a bus when they can do the same trip in 3 hours on a plane. And all that is overlooking the kind of company you'll have on the bus....
And local public transit infrastructure sucks mainly because of the laws of physics, and the lack of high density in most American cities. Public transit works pretty decently in very dense places like Manhattan, but other places just don't have the density necessary,
If you want people to use public transit, you need to make public transit systems that actually work well and perform well. The only way you're going to get that is with high-speed, fully-automated PRT (personal rapid transit). Go read about SkyTran. Nothing else will work: light rail and other trains cost an absolute fortune to build and interfere with all the roads, and they only go in a line; buses are too slow and stop too much; and everything goes according to a pre-set schedule so you end up wasting a lot of time waiting on the next ride instead of moving. SkyTran fixes all those problems. The Wikipedia page explains it all.
I think you're missing the problem here: if Yahoo closes up shop soon, that auto-forwarding won't work any more because Yahoo Mail won't exist.
This is one of the big problems with email: it's not really permanent, and only lasts as long as the provider lasts, or as long as the provider allows you to have an account there. That's why so many people have webmail accounts at one of the Big 3 (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft/Live/MSN/outlook.com/whatever they're calling it these days). Lots of idiots use email from their ISP, but then one day they have to move (or they get tired of their ISP's high prices and switch to a competitor) and suddenly that account is gone, along with all their email, and all their contacts are still sending emails to the old address which bounces. You don't have that problem with, for instance, Google's Gmail. But of course that assumes Gmail is going to be around indefinitely. The way things are going now, that's probably a safe assumption, however 15 years ago we could probably have said the same thing about Yahoo Mail, and it's looking now like it might not actually stick around that long. It's hard to say; it might just get sold off and turn into a paid service, it might get swallowed up by a competitor like Gmail, but there's also a chance it'll disappear entirely, which would affect a LOT of people.
I'd rather see him use it like Elon Musk does, to develop technologies which really do improve peoples' lives. If this Hyperloop thing actually works out for instance, imagine how that will improve travel: safer than air travel, far less polluting and energy-using, and faster too. And if we get to commonplace and inexpensive electric vehicles soon, imagine how that will improve things: far less pollution and energy use again, plus no more dependence on fossil fuels (since electricity can be generated by renewable sources, as well as nuclear, not to mention cleaner fossil fuel sources like natgas, plus of course the efficiencies of scale resulting from greater centralization), along with far less maintenance and lower repair costs.
If Zuckerberg wants to do something really useful, he should fund and promote SkyTran. Tens of thousands of lives a year could be saved if people used this for commuting and 1-2 person travel, not to mention the huge energy savings. Giving money to charities is fine and all, but really they frequently don't do that much to improve things; what really improves living standards across the board is science and technology. (Though charities which fund not-so-profitable medical research would be a very, very good investment too: think of clinical trials on unpatentable and inexpensive pharmaceuticals and treatments.) Most charities seem to me to be more of a Band-Aid, trying to help some group or cause which has been left out somehow, whereas improvements in technology (esp. something like medical technology) is like a "tide which lifts all boats".
Is that a paraphrase of an actual quote? I'd love to see the source for that. (Not doubting you either.)