Isn't life going to get pretty boring for the 1% if they let everyone else die off? And who's going to do all the menial work like maintaining and repairing the machines, designing the next generation of machines, etc.? You might not need as many people for all that, but you need some, and the ultra-wealthy aren't going to want to do it.
Here again, I think it's impossible to make a change like that. It's just like my SkyTran pipe-dream: from a technical and engineering point-of-view, it's completely and even easily doable, it just needs some funding and buy-in from local governments to implement it. But it's completely impossible because humans are just too stupid to do things right and overcome decades of inertia. They'll act individually in their best interest and make good changes there (so they'll adopt smartphones, one by one, until everyone has one), but they can't act as a group in the best interest of the group, unless maybe there's some kind of serious competition going on (which led us to the Apollo moon landings, but we haven't been back in 40 years because the competition dried up).
Like what? What exactly do you think you, personally, have the power to do? My contention is that the answer to that question is "nothing".
Your security thing is a bad analogy. A better computer security-related analogy is the following: at home, I can't have perfect security, but I can do a pretty decent job by having a firewall, using WPA2 on my WiFi, using a quality OS (not Windows) on my systems and keeping it up-to-date with security patches, using an ad-blocker, etc. etc. At work, if the IT-provided computer doesn't adhere to best practices, there's precisely *nothing* I can do about it. I'm not the IT Director, and I don't work in IT, so I have no say over IT's shoddy practices. If I don't like it, I can go find another job. Luckily, I'm not personally responsible for the consequences of poor security on my employer's computers, but still, if it bothers me that much, there's nothing I can do other than to opt out. It's exactly the same with the voting process. You as an individual have zero power to change things; these decisions are all in the hands of very powerful and corrupt people who have no desire to change things.
It's like building a Moon base. We could do it right now if we, as a species, really wanted to (it'd take a few years). But we won't. It's like this with any number of worthy projects, whether it's space exploration or building SkyTran or just rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. The problem isn't technical, it's social. There's nothing to be done about that.
Maybe they've already built asteroid-habitats and are bored of that, and want to build something much bigger and fancier. After all, if they've figured out how to eliminate aging and have virtually unlimited lifespans, maybe they have little better to do than come up with fantastic new construction projects. And with no significant death rate, maybe they're having fun breeding as many new baby aliens as they can so they need lots of space for them.
Some other factors: 1) You haven't exactly built thousands of Dyson Spheres, so each one is still a big project and a big risk. Better to do it on some young star without any inhabited planets. 2) Maybe a small, young star represents a lower engineering challenge than a larger star, much like a space elevator is a huge engineering challenge to us on Earth because of the necessary material strength, whereas building one on the Moon would be far, far easier and well within our materials technology.
He "just discovered" trolling? He has a 6-digit UID; he's been around here for a while. He's certainly not a kid in his mom's basement, unless he's one of those 40-year-old virgins who never moved out. The fact that he's still around and prolifically posting while so many other quality posters are long gone just shows this site is on its last legs.
If you mean *we* aren't traveling to other stars any time soon, you're probably right.
It's more likely that *we* aren't *ever* traveling to other stars. With too many members of our species being as stupid and short-sighted as him, we are certainly doomed as a species. Hopefully the ETs are a lot smarter than us reality-TV-watching imbeciles.
If there exists a civilization that has managed to survive and advance for say, a billion years, or maybe even 1/100th of that, they would surely have at least some technologies that would be difficult for us to comprehend. We all walk around with miniature high-powered computers in our pockets, while just a generation ago few people knew what the internet was and less powerful computers occupied a lot of desk space and stayed tethered to walls. Merely two hundred years ago there was no widespread use of electricity
It's worse than that. We have only had any kind of technology for about 2500 years or so; before that we were stacking rocks and that was about it. And about 1000 of those years we regressed and didn't do anything noteworthy technologically (between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance). It's only been in the last 200-300 years we've really made big strides technologically and scientifically.
In short, our civilization is less than 10k years old at most. It's impossible for us to even comprehend a civilization that's been around for 100k years, let alone 1M - 1B, unless that civilization has progressed far, far more slowly than ours. Someone born 1000 years ago, and somehow resurrected today, would barely recognize anything or have any idea how to live in modern society, even if you could get past the language barrier. They'd basically think everything they saw was witchcraft and sorcery.
As for FTL, even at this early stage we do have a bit of an idea how to do it (see the Alcubierre Drive). It just requires negative mass or exotic matter, which doesn't seem to exist, but if one physicist can come up with this based on Einstein's theories, with an improved understanding of physics there's no telling what could be devised in the future. Now, give us another 100K years of development and it's quite possible something would be discovered. If the ETs have had a civilization that long or longer (which is nothing in cosmic timescales), there's no reason to think they wouldn't have come up with something.
What we most urgently need to do is to strengthen the integrity of the voting process, find and fix the flaws and backdoors in machines, trash the un-secureable machines, establish better watchdog protocols, and most of all, make sure that all votes have a verifiable paper trail.
Yeah, but we're not going to do any of that.
Asking for us to do the things you list here is like saying "we need to build some generation ships and send them to Proxima Centauri with in the next 5 years." Sounds nice, but it's completely unrealistic.
You can complain about them all you want, but you're the fucking idiot for continuing to use their crap. Have fun with that. I'll be laughing at you and your misery, and I hope it drives you insane.
You're assuming here that management is smart enough to figure this out and find the best suppliers. They aren't. If they were, HP Enterprise (formerly EDS) would not be in business.
You don't *need* to play games, you *choose* to play games. Apparently, you're willing to live with all the negatives that come with Windows 10 in order to play your precious games. So fuck off yourself and enjoy your enforced restarts in the middle of your games.
And yeah Ford is totally ignoreing the Jeep Wrangler and focusing on the Mustang... except for all those off road cars, SUVs, pickups etc they sell. Especially the Ford Ranger, that is more like a Jeep than most Jeeps these days.
You're either being obtuse or you don't know anything about Jeeps. Rangers are *nothing* like Jeeps. Go look up some pictures of a Jeep Wrangler and then compare it to anything that Ford makes; there's nothing remotely similar. I'm not talking about Grand Cherokees or Patriots or any other Jeep, I'm talking about the Wrangler, which is an iconic vehicle like the Mustang or the Corvette. People who want that only want that, and nothing else, and they're willing to pay huge amounts of money for something that has a crappy, cheap plastic interior and no cargo bed because they don't want carpet or anything like that, they want something that's supposedly purely functional for going off-roading. Personally I think they're stupid and overpriced and a terrible value even for off-roading, but for people who want that kind of vehicle, there's no substitute. A pickup truck is as similar to a Wrangler as a Chevy Sonic is to a BMW 9-series; they're completely different vehicles.
Why would MS get "called on the carpet"? They have all the politicians in their pocket, all government computer systems run on their OS. Personally I think it'd be funny if the EU tried to levy a huge fine against them and in return MS remotely shut down all their computers.
No, not any more, and enterprise customers better get used to it. What are they going to do, switch to another OS? I didn't think so.
The enterprises have done this to themselves by locking themselves into the Microsoft ecosystem. There's no escape now, and MS can treat these customers however it pleases.
Unfortunately, China as a whole seems to be pretty bad at doing anything besides copying stuff, and usually badly. They seem to excel only when some western company comes in and shows them exactly what to do and how to do it; when that happens, they're great at pumping out ridiculous quantities of something. But there seems to be some kind of piece missing where they're unable to use their impressive mass-manufacturing skills to actually make stuff people want without foreign help.
They both include software, but a major component of any modern game is not software code, but rather "digital assets", meaning videos, graphics, etc. A modern game probably needs more digital artists than coders. Applications don't have this at all.
The problem with these dumb-ass vendors is that they can't seem to figure out that the buyers of that particular premium brand aren't going to switch over to another brand no matter how much they try to ape them. Someone who's intent on buying a Jeep Wrangler is not going to buy a Ford no matter how much they try to copy Jeeps, and it'll just piss off all the regular Ford buyers when suddenly all Fords come with gas-guzzling 4WD, terrible ride & handling, and ultra-spartan interiors: they'll just switch to another brand. Luckily, automakers aren't as dumb as phone makers, and realize that a vocal minority of irrational fans willing to pay a huge premium for a particular product or brand isn't something you can easily sway into switching brands, so Ford ignores Jeep Wranglers and its die-hard fans, and instead goes after Ford Mustang fans, who want a product that's entirely different from Wranglers, and Chevy does the same with its Camaro and Corvette. The vast majority of car buyers do not want ultra-spartan 4WD off-road vehicles, or impractical RWD muscle cars, but the automakers are smart enough to service these niches while making plenty of cars that regular people are willing to buy (mostly FWD sedans). But for some odd reason the phonemakers see one ultra-successful cult brand and think they can somehow copy it.
Unfortunately, what you have said has no effect on people who have been effectively locked into using Microsoft products even though there are alternatives.
See, that's where I have to disagree. I think these people need some "tough love": maybe if they get bashed over the head with the idea that this is largely their own dumb fault, and that their only rational course of action is to stop using MS software as soon as feasible (since MS is not going to suddenly turn into a company that cares about its customers' feelings, and is enabled in their behavior by their monopolistic position which was granted to them by all these people willingly using their software). some of them will finally put out the effort to actually switch to something else, even if it causes them some short-term pain. Coddling them and just agreeing with them about how bad and awful MS is isn't going to change the situation or help them in any way.
What is even sadder is the fact that most people can't even see or comprehend that they are being screwed over even when they are told.
No, most can't. But I don't really care about that, as long as a minority finally figures it out, then alternatives will gain more traction, and maybe ISVs will finally start supporting them better. A lot of stuff actually does even support other OSes: a lot of engineering software does run on Linux, for instance, but too many stupid employers still just use Windows because that's the default and that's what their shitty email system runs on and what their dumb MSOffice-using cubicle dwellers use and what their IT departments know. And for these people whining about how their games don't run on Linux, maybe if a lot more of them stopped buying that crap, and wrote letters to these companies telling them they're not buying any more of their games until they make Linux/Mac versions, the game companies would get a clue and start developing for those platforms. There's been some action there with Steam after all, it's not like you can't play *any* commercial game on Linux. The only way there's going to be change is if users demand it.
We don't need a handout or a compromise; we're not the ones who think there's a problem. You can use whatever measurement system you want in your country, we'll use whatever we want in ours. Why do you think you have any right to dictate to other sovereign nations what kind of measurement systems they should use anyway? That's just asinine.
As for long-term, we ARE thinking long-term. We're moving to metric where it makes sense, and at a sensible pace for a highly industrialized nation that has centuries invested into an older system, and an economy that utterly dwarfs those of any European nation. Try buying a new 2016-model American-made car (or any made in the last 10 years for that matter) and see how many English-sized fasteners you can find on it. There aren't any. The stuff you're complaining about is silly and inconsequential.
Actually, this isn't quite true about them not being able to make deals. There is a thing called an "offer-in-compromise" that people who owe back taxes are able to make, and the IRS has the authority to accept or reject such offers. Usually there has to be some kind of hardship case or something, but there have been plenty of cases of people way behind on taxes getting away with paying a fraction of the accrued taxes and penalties.
Of course, they can't change the actual *law*, but I'm quite sure it's written into IRS law that they're able to make deals like this.
My point above with my hypothetical IRS example was that the IRS agent didn't have the authority to make a deal in that case, especially because of the questionable circumstances (which look like a bribe). With Ireland, it's similar: they are not a sovereign nation (like any nation in the EU), and don't have the authority to make deals like this if it's against EU law. Similarly, US states can't make deals inside their borders which go against IRS law. Of course, it's a bit different with the EU since the EU doesn't have an EU-wide "IRS", but it's close enough because EU law trumps national laws. That's part of the deal when your nation joins a confederation. If you want total sovereignty, don't join into any kind of union or confederation; but by not doing so, you miss out on the benefits of such things.
Oh, I agree. I don't really care about FB that much; I don't use it aside from having a place-holder profile. I'm just pointing out the fallacy in the OP's argument about one's hopes in life being hinged on other peoples' failures. Back in WWII, a *lot* of peoples' hopes in life were hinged on someone else's failures: anyone who was victimized by the Nazis or Japanese was very happy when they failed. There's nothing wrong with wishing for other people to fail. When some criminal screws up comically and it results in him being nabbed, why should I not laugh about that?
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Isn't life going to get pretty boring for the 1% if they let everyone else die off? And who's going to do all the menial work like maintaining and repairing the machines, designing the next generation of machines, etc.? You might not need as many people for all that, but you need some, and the ultra-wealthy aren't going to want to do it.
Here again, I think it's impossible to make a change like that. It's just like my SkyTran pipe-dream: from a technical and engineering point-of-view, it's completely and even easily doable, it just needs some funding and buy-in from local governments to implement it. But it's completely impossible because humans are just too stupid to do things right and overcome decades of inertia. They'll act individually in their best interest and make good changes there (so they'll adopt smartphones, one by one, until everyone has one), but they can't act as a group in the best interest of the group, unless maybe there's some kind of serious competition going on (which led us to the Apollo moon landings, but we haven't been back in 40 years because the competition dried up).
Like what? What exactly do you think you, personally, have the power to do? My contention is that the answer to that question is "nothing".
Your security thing is a bad analogy. A better computer security-related analogy is the following: at home, I can't have perfect security, but I can do a pretty decent job by having a firewall, using WPA2 on my WiFi, using a quality OS (not Windows) on my systems and keeping it up-to-date with security patches, using an ad-blocker, etc. etc. At work, if the IT-provided computer doesn't adhere to best practices, there's precisely *nothing* I can do about it. I'm not the IT Director, and I don't work in IT, so I have no say over IT's shoddy practices. If I don't like it, I can go find another job. Luckily, I'm not personally responsible for the consequences of poor security on my employer's computers, but still, if it bothers me that much, there's nothing I can do other than to opt out. It's exactly the same with the voting process. You as an individual have zero power to change things; these decisions are all in the hands of very powerful and corrupt people who have no desire to change things.
Yeah, that was my whole point there.
It's like building a Moon base. We could do it right now if we, as a species, really wanted to (it'd take a few years). But we won't. It's like this with any number of worthy projects, whether it's space exploration or building SkyTran or just rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. The problem isn't technical, it's social. There's nothing to be done about that.
Maybe they've already built asteroid-habitats and are bored of that, and want to build something much bigger and fancier. After all, if they've figured out how to eliminate aging and have virtually unlimited lifespans, maybe they have little better to do than come up with fantastic new construction projects. And with no significant death rate, maybe they're having fun breeding as many new baby aliens as they can so they need lots of space for them.
Some other factors:
1) You haven't exactly built thousands of Dyson Spheres, so each one is still a big project and a big risk. Better to do it on some young star without any inhabited planets.
2) Maybe a small, young star represents a lower engineering challenge than a larger star, much like a space elevator is a huge engineering challenge to us on Earth because of the necessary material strength, whereas building one on the Moon would be far, far easier and well within our materials technology.
He "just discovered" trolling? He has a 6-digit UID; he's been around here for a while. He's certainly not a kid in his mom's basement, unless he's one of those 40-year-old virgins who never moved out. The fact that he's still around and prolifically posting while so many other quality posters are long gone just shows this site is on its last legs.
If you mean *we* aren't traveling to other stars any time soon, you're probably right.
It's more likely that *we* aren't *ever* traveling to other stars. With too many members of our species being as stupid and short-sighted as him, we are certainly doomed as a species. Hopefully the ETs are a lot smarter than us reality-TV-watching imbeciles.
If there exists a civilization that has managed to survive and advance for say, a billion years, or maybe even 1/100th of that, they would surely have at least some technologies that would be difficult for us to comprehend. We all walk around with miniature high-powered computers in our pockets, while just a generation ago few people knew what the internet was and less powerful computers occupied a lot of desk space and stayed tethered to walls. Merely two hundred years ago there was no widespread use of electricity
It's worse than that. We have only had any kind of technology for about 2500 years or so; before that we were stacking rocks and that was about it. And about 1000 of those years we regressed and didn't do anything noteworthy technologically (between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance). It's only been in the last 200-300 years we've really made big strides technologically and scientifically.
In short, our civilization is less than 10k years old at most. It's impossible for us to even comprehend a civilization that's been around for 100k years, let alone 1M - 1B, unless that civilization has progressed far, far more slowly than ours. Someone born 1000 years ago, and somehow resurrected today, would barely recognize anything or have any idea how to live in modern society, even if you could get past the language barrier. They'd basically think everything they saw was witchcraft and sorcery.
As for FTL, even at this early stage we do have a bit of an idea how to do it (see the Alcubierre Drive). It just requires negative mass or exotic matter, which doesn't seem to exist, but if one physicist can come up with this based on Einstein's theories, with an improved understanding of physics there's no telling what could be devised in the future. Now, give us another 100K years of development and it's quite possible something would be discovered. If the ETs have had a civilization that long or longer (which is nothing in cosmic timescales), there's no reason to think they wouldn't have come up with something.
What we most urgently need to do is to strengthen the integrity of the voting process, find and fix the flaws and backdoors in machines, trash the un-secureable machines, establish better watchdog protocols, and most of all, make sure that all votes have a verifiable paper trail.
Yeah, but we're not going to do any of that.
Asking for us to do the things you list here is like saying "we need to build some generation ships and send them to Proxima Centauri with in the next 5 years." Sounds nice, but it's completely unrealistic.
You can complain about them all you want, but you're the fucking idiot for continuing to use their crap. Have fun with that. I'll be laughing at you and your misery, and I hope it drives you insane.
You're assuming here that management is smart enough to figure this out and find the best suppliers. They aren't. If they were, HP Enterprise (formerly EDS) would not be in business.
You don't *need* to play games, you *choose* to play games. Apparently, you're willing to live with all the negatives that come with Windows 10 in order to play your precious games. So fuck off yourself and enjoy your enforced restarts in the middle of your games.
And yeah Ford is totally ignoreing the Jeep Wrangler and focusing on the Mustang... except for all those off road cars, SUVs, pickups etc they sell. Especially the Ford Ranger, that is more like a Jeep than most Jeeps these days.
You're either being obtuse or you don't know anything about Jeeps. Rangers are *nothing* like Jeeps. Go look up some pictures of a Jeep Wrangler and then compare it to anything that Ford makes; there's nothing remotely similar. I'm not talking about Grand Cherokees or Patriots or any other Jeep, I'm talking about the Wrangler, which is an iconic vehicle like the Mustang or the Corvette. People who want that only want that, and nothing else, and they're willing to pay huge amounts of money for something that has a crappy, cheap plastic interior and no cargo bed because they don't want carpet or anything like that, they want something that's supposedly purely functional for going off-roading. Personally I think they're stupid and overpriced and a terrible value even for off-roading, but for people who want that kind of vehicle, there's no substitute. A pickup truck is as similar to a Wrangler as a Chevy Sonic is to a BMW 9-series; they're completely different vehicles.
Why would MS get "called on the carpet"? They have all the politicians in their pocket, all government computer systems run on their OS. Personally I think it'd be funny if the EU tried to levy a huge fine against them and in return MS remotely shut down all their computers.
No, not any more, and enterprise customers better get used to it. What are they going to do, switch to another OS? I didn't think so.
The enterprises have done this to themselves by locking themselves into the Microsoft ecosystem. There's no escape now, and MS can treat these customers however it pleases.
If that assumption is right then I don't understand why such a misleading submission was posted without correction on Slashdot.
You're expecting good editorial control and well-written titles and summaries here? You must be new.
Unfortunately, China as a whole seems to be pretty bad at doing anything besides copying stuff, and usually badly. They seem to excel only when some western company comes in and shows them exactly what to do and how to do it; when that happens, they're great at pumping out ridiculous quantities of something. But there seems to be some kind of piece missing where they're unable to use their impressive mass-manufacturing skills to actually make stuff people want without foreign help.
They both include software, but a major component of any modern game is not software code, but rather "digital assets", meaning videos, graphics, etc. A modern game probably needs more digital artists than coders. Applications don't have this at all.
The problem with these dumb-ass vendors is that they can't seem to figure out that the buyers of that particular premium brand aren't going to switch over to another brand no matter how much they try to ape them. Someone who's intent on buying a Jeep Wrangler is not going to buy a Ford no matter how much they try to copy Jeeps, and it'll just piss off all the regular Ford buyers when suddenly all Fords come with gas-guzzling 4WD, terrible ride & handling, and ultra-spartan interiors: they'll just switch to another brand. Luckily, automakers aren't as dumb as phone makers, and realize that a vocal minority of irrational fans willing to pay a huge premium for a particular product or brand isn't something you can easily sway into switching brands, so Ford ignores Jeep Wranglers and its die-hard fans, and instead goes after Ford Mustang fans, who want a product that's entirely different from Wranglers, and Chevy does the same with its Camaro and Corvette. The vast majority of car buyers do not want ultra-spartan 4WD off-road vehicles, or impractical RWD muscle cars, but the automakers are smart enough to service these niches while making plenty of cars that regular people are willing to buy (mostly FWD sedans). But for some odd reason the phonemakers see one ultra-successful cult brand and think they can somehow copy it.
Unfortunately, what you have said has no effect on people who have been effectively locked into using Microsoft products even though there are alternatives.
See, that's where I have to disagree. I think these people need some "tough love": maybe if they get bashed over the head with the idea that this is largely their own dumb fault, and that their only rational course of action is to stop using MS software as soon as feasible (since MS is not going to suddenly turn into a company that cares about its customers' feelings, and is enabled in their behavior by their monopolistic position which was granted to them by all these people willingly using their software). some of them will finally put out the effort to actually switch to something else, even if it causes them some short-term pain. Coddling them and just agreeing with them about how bad and awful MS is isn't going to change the situation or help them in any way.
What is even sadder is the fact that most people can't even see or comprehend that they are being screwed over even when they are told.
No, most can't. But I don't really care about that, as long as a minority finally figures it out, then alternatives will gain more traction, and maybe ISVs will finally start supporting them better. A lot of stuff actually does even support other OSes: a lot of engineering software does run on Linux, for instance, but too many stupid employers still just use Windows because that's the default and that's what their shitty email system runs on and what their dumb MSOffice-using cubicle dwellers use and what their IT departments know. And for these people whining about how their games don't run on Linux, maybe if a lot more of them stopped buying that crap, and wrote letters to these companies telling them they're not buying any more of their games until they make Linux/Mac versions, the game companies would get a clue and start developing for those platforms. There's been some action there with Steam after all, it's not like you can't play *any* commercial game on Linux. The only way there's going to be change is if users demand it.
We don't need a handout or a compromise; we're not the ones who think there's a problem. You can use whatever measurement system you want in your country, we'll use whatever we want in ours. Why do you think you have any right to dictate to other sovereign nations what kind of measurement systems they should use anyway? That's just asinine.
As for long-term, we ARE thinking long-term. We're moving to metric where it makes sense, and at a sensible pace for a highly industrialized nation that has centuries invested into an older system, and an economy that utterly dwarfs those of any European nation. Try buying a new 2016-model American-made car (or any made in the last 10 years for that matter) and see how many English-sized fasteners you can find on it. There aren't any. The stuff you're complaining about is silly and inconsequential.
Actually, this isn't quite true about them not being able to make deals. There is a thing called an "offer-in-compromise" that people who owe back taxes are able to make, and the IRS has the authority to accept or reject such offers. Usually there has to be some kind of hardship case or something, but there have been plenty of cases of people way behind on taxes getting away with paying a fraction of the accrued taxes and penalties.
Of course, they can't change the actual *law*, but I'm quite sure it's written into IRS law that they're able to make deals like this.
My point above with my hypothetical IRS example was that the IRS agent didn't have the authority to make a deal in that case, especially because of the questionable circumstances (which look like a bribe). With Ireland, it's similar: they are not a sovereign nation (like any nation in the EU), and don't have the authority to make deals like this if it's against EU law. Similarly, US states can't make deals inside their borders which go against IRS law. Of course, it's a bit different with the EU since the EU doesn't have an EU-wide "IRS", but it's close enough because EU law trumps national laws. That's part of the deal when your nation joins a confederation. If you want total sovereignty, don't join into any kind of union or confederation; but by not doing so, you miss out on the benefits of such things.
Excellent! Finally, someone with some sense around here!
Oh, I agree. I don't really care about FB that much; I don't use it aside from having a place-holder profile. I'm just pointing out the fallacy in the OP's argument about one's hopes in life being hinged on other peoples' failures. Back in WWII, a *lot* of peoples' hopes in life were hinged on someone else's failures: anyone who was victimized by the Nazis or Japanese was very happy when they failed. There's nothing wrong with wishing for other people to fail. When some criminal screws up comically and it results in him being nabbed, why should I not laugh about that?