Android, as is, has the reputation of being a resource hog.
RAM is pretty cheap nowadays. I think most people have a hard time filling it up.
If it's going to acquire fundamental desktop OS traits (satisfactory driver support comes to mind), it'll just get worse.
Android is Linux. Android being ported to x86 is the big step which will make Android equivalent to other distros in this regard.
A (reputed) poor evaluation of Google Play apps is unacceptable for most traditional desktop environments.
It is still better than 'random tool downloaded from some software website'. It is also a very solvable and minor issue. If you only install apps from the vetted 'Top developers', nothing bad will happen.
There are plenty of alternatives (Windows, OS X to a lesser extent, Ubuntu and co., Debian, BSD stuff...) that are already more capable than Android will be in the next few years, if ever.
You are forgetting the corporate power that is Google, their legion of Android developers and the legion of private companies and individuals that develop for the biggest (currently mainly mobile) OS in the world. In addition to that, there is a huge absolutely idiot-proof, user- and capitalist-friendly application repository. No other Linux distro can match that or has ever come close to that.
This is a good as useless, as most (I won't say all) apps are designed exclusively for touchscreens, with, at most, imporvised keyboard and mouse controls.
1. Leap Motion 2. It is a matter of time: tablet apps took a while to pop up. (More) keyboard enabled apps will pop up as well. 3. It's not like using your mouse as a finger equivalent is terrible. I know people who have sworn by using mouse gestures for years.
Given a proper x86 version, I'm betting pretty much every 'grandma' PC will be retrofitted with Android x86.
Try copying 100,000 files over a LAN from an XP box to a Win8 drive
I wouldn't even consider using explorer.exe for that. For anything even remotely more complex than a simple move or copy of one file I immediately go to Total Commander.
It's kind of sad, really. After all these years, Microsoft hasn't been able to or has refused to copy one of the most useful ways of managing files on a file system.
Then again, Total Commander is pretty keyboard oriented and who the hell wants to use the keyboard anymore? Keyboards are for nerds. We just want to grunt and point at big colorful pictures.
Well not everybody will have the knowledge to do these things. I understand that, but you can perfectly use something like WebDAV if you know a little bit about Linux/Apache, and when you do you can give your friends access and split the bills for hosting if you like.
For some definitions of 'perfectly'. 1. Start Whatsapp. 2. Open group chat. 3. Send attachment.
Alternatively: 1. Open file 2. (on Android) Share/send to using: Google Drive/Dropbox.
Both methods allow sharing something with multiple receivers and only those receivers, and require almost no effort of the receivers. Let's be honest: the only private alternative that is (almost) as easy for everybody as the above is to roll your own centralised Google Drive/Dropbox alternative like owncloud or using a distributed system like BTSync.
As far as converting YouTube videos to DailyMotion it is really easy to do. Just get any YouTube downloader app from CNET Download.com and just upload the video afterwards. Main issue is copyrights, but DailyMotion has a lot of stuff so it's not like you cannot live without it.
Really? You're suggesting that for the myriad of pages I view that contain YouTube content, I have to use a YouTube downloader that still hands my IP to GoogleTube to download the embedded videos/links?. Even disregarding the folly of reuploading it to DailyMotion, that is probably the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Don't get me wrong, I largely agree with where you're coming from, but I think suggesting things like FTP and DailyMotion is hurting the cause more than benefiting it.
Or you can just use something like [...] French DailyMotion for videos
Sure, now show me the tool that converts all the embedded YouTube videos and YouTube video links to their DailyMotion equivalents.
You can use that system to put files on the "cloud" with old-fashioned FTP.
That is terrible advice. Try sending your technologically challenged friends a file from your phone that only they can open, on their phone, using old-fashioned FTP. Even if you manage to somehow do it, it will be such a huge pain in the ass that you'll probably never do it again. Personally, I see BitTorrent Sync (-like solutions) combined with proper upstream bandwidth going a long way.
I'm not saying one shouldn't look for alternatives, just that it isn't always as doable and easy as you imply.
Slashdot/reddit/4chan could probably make that happen.
How many unique searches for something like 'Jim Hood is an idiot covered in hot grits' would it really take before that shows up in in the autocomplete?
You define whether 'you' die in copy/teleportation thought experiments.
No, Reality does, aka cause & effect. Believe what you will, but that won't change reality.
You misunderstand. The discussion revolves around identity and my claim that it only exists by definition. The reality is the physical existence of a collection of elementary particles and their configuration. Nobody is doubting whether the collection of particles would appear in a recognizable configuration in a teleportation thought experiment.
By your logic some random guy on the street IS you if you are killed and that new guy is brainwashed into thinking he is you.. BS.
I never gave you a single definition, yet you base your argument on one.
Just because you don't truly understand the physical phenomenon of Consciousness, that which experiences reality, doesn't mean you can just wave your hands and say that there is no local consciousness.
I never claimed or implied that.
If you are defining "You" as the abstraction you are experiencing at any particular moment then no wonder you are confused.
I'm not confused.
You are not the fleeting patterns your mind feeds your consciousness, you are that which experiences those patterns. You are a physical, pure droplet of Reality itself interfaced in an amazing way with a system able to modulate you with complex patterns.
There actually are instances in which you are not punished for actions of a previous 'you', at least in some countries. But the crux here is that as a society, we have a definition of the 'things' that can be held accountable and punished, and that that definition is pretty much completely independent from whether or not that thing has consciousness. The latter is, of course, what people care about in copy/teleportation thought experiments.
The legal aspects of how to deal with sufficiently advanced AI / cyborgs / uploaded brains is of course a very interesting (and ultimately unavoidable) debate.
This is the only truly insightful comment in this thread.
Everybody is so hung up on the pervasive illusion of a spatiotemporally continuous consciousness that they forget that nothing on any reasonable macro level even exists without a definition.
For some definitions of 'you', you didn't exist a minute ago. For others, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that there are multiple instances of 'you'. It just happens that those definitions are not as useful to work with in daily life. It is more effective for an organism to have any instance of consciousness feel responsible for the next one that may arise in it and the ones that previously arose in it. We can't prove that our current consciousness is 'the same' as it was yesterday. We can only define that it is.
Which leads to the only reasonable conclusion: You define whether 'you' die in copy/teleportation thought experiments.
I was going for a kind of worst case scenario (apart from using the average household), so yes: going completely off-grid using only solar is very doable (in Western countries) today. - Most European households consume at most half the power of US households. - The figures I quoted for Li-Ion batteries were on the low end (low power / USD and low power / liter). - Nighttime+evening power consumption is only part of the quoted daily power consumption. - Wind power and other renewable sources of power were ignored (although this means being on-grid). - Efficiency of power generation during the daytime also increases by using batteries as a local buffer (vs transferring excess power to the grid or worse, discarding it)
These oversights with positive influence are of course partly mitigated by these: - To retain current convenience levels, the batteries and power production must support the worst case. Being left without heating in cloudy winters is not an option. - The cost of the system regulating the interaction between appliances, solar panels and batteries was omitted.
All in all, though, it seems pretty clear that technically and economically, a society almost completely powered by renewable energy (and specifically solar) is very realistic.
Of course, demand response is an issue. Solving peak demand during the day is easy: have installed capacity equal or surpass peak demand. Turning solar panel power production on and off should be pretty much instant.
Nights are the obvious real (technical) issue for solar. Probably the most viable solution is introducing buffers of batteries, hydrogen or carbohydrates.
Let's look at the matter from a household perspective. According to what I can find, the average US household uses about 15,000 kWh annually. Let's go naive and assume those are evenly spread across the year: 15000/365 =~ 41kWh/day. Current Lithium-Ion cells are about 250Wh/liter and about 2.5Wh/USD. That means that the volume of cells required to store a day of electricity usage in the average US household is about 41000/250 = 164 liters (dm^3). Stacking these blocks one high, we end up with a volume of roughly 1.3m x 1.3m x 0.1m (which is obviously negligible). The naively calculated cost of such a storage unit would be 16.400 USD.
Now the above is based on current day technology, supply and demand. I'm pretty sure technological progress will make the above economically even more viable.
Yes. As is visible in the video, the amount of control the user actually has is deplorable. The whole obstacle course looks nice, but the copter is never actually shown to do anything in it for more than 0.5s. And that is with a thoroughly trained system.
The problem is that different graphics cards give different output for the same input. So a pixel that would be white when calculated by an Nvidia shader, is black when calculated by the Intel integrated graphics shader, resulting in an infinite death cycle at an early stage of the game.
You'll probably agree with me that that doesn't sound like a very robust game engine.
The Skyrim glitches are an odd case. In a sense, they're unforgivable. But in another sense, the scope of that game is so huge, if they polished it all, they'd never finish.
I'm pretty sure Skyrim isn't the only game released on consoles that required patching: http://www.xbuc.net/ (Xbox game patches site) Of course the point stands that developing for a single target hardware platform is easier than for the multitude of PC configurations out there.
Although your point is kind of valid, Closure looks like it could run on a fist-generation Pentium with a 2MB ATi VLB card. Apparently their programmers are just terrible.
What would help for PC gaming is if all game programmers could rely on some set of metrics provided by a unified benchmarking application. Creating settings profiles that would 'just work' and even predicting whether a game would run (well) on your system would become fairly trivial.
I think the value of practical experiments is that you can mess with them and see what happens.
My understanding of QM and the practical setup of the experiment is too limited to be able to come up with a way to try and tease out some unexpected results, but I hope the people working on this experiment can.
I have a theory: playing football outside trains your peripheral motion perception (1) and reading trains your foveal motion perception. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how these activities might correlate with intelligence.
Nothing about Gmail (which allows IMAP) prevents you from doing your own encryption of the messages.
No shit. That's why I never implied that such was the case.
The point is that it could have been ridiculously easy by now and that Google could have pushed to make it that way, but they have an incentive not to do so.
Because major webmail providers don't really want email to be encrypted. Google/Gmail could easily push it and make it happen, but they would just be throwing money away by not being able to profile their users anymore.
If everybody were still using Outlook Express and/or Thunderbird and ISP provided email accounts, there would have been loads of easy install plugins that would allow cross-client encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
Seen from Europe, this article and pretty much every comment here induces a very big WTF.
Android, as is, has the reputation of being a resource hog.
RAM is pretty cheap nowadays. I think most people have a hard time filling it up.
If it's going to acquire fundamental desktop OS traits (satisfactory driver support comes to mind), it'll just get worse.
Android is Linux. Android being ported to x86 is the big step which will make Android equivalent to other distros in this regard.
A (reputed) poor evaluation of Google Play apps is unacceptable for most traditional desktop environments.
It is still better than 'random tool downloaded from some software website'. It is also a very solvable and minor issue. If you only install apps from the vetted 'Top developers', nothing bad will happen.
There are plenty of alternatives (Windows, OS X to a lesser extent, Ubuntu and co., Debian, BSD stuff...) that are already more capable than Android will be in the next few years, if ever.
You are forgetting the corporate power that is Google, their legion of Android developers and the legion of private companies and individuals that develop for the biggest (currently mainly mobile) OS in the world. In addition to that, there is a huge absolutely idiot-proof, user- and capitalist-friendly application repository. No other Linux distro can match that or has ever come close to that.
This is a good as useless, as most (I won't say all) apps are designed exclusively for touchscreens, with, at most, imporvised keyboard and mouse controls.
1. Leap Motion
2. It is a matter of time: tablet apps took a while to pop up. (More) keyboard enabled apps will pop up as well.
3. It's not like using your mouse as a finger equivalent is terrible. I know people who have sworn by using mouse gestures for years.
Given a proper x86 version, I'm betting pretty much every 'grandma' PC will be retrofitted with Android x86.
Try copying 100,000 files over a LAN from an XP box to a Win8 drive
I wouldn't even consider using explorer.exe for that. For anything even remotely more complex than a simple move or copy of one file I immediately go to Total Commander.
It's kind of sad, really. After all these years, Microsoft hasn't been able to or has refused to copy one of the most useful ways of managing files on a file system.
Then again, Total Commander is pretty keyboard oriented and who the hell wants to use the keyboard anymore? Keyboards are for nerds. We just want to grunt and point at big colorful pictures.
Well not everybody will have the knowledge to do these things. I understand that, but you can perfectly use something like WebDAV if you know a little bit about Linux/Apache, and when you do you can give your friends access and split the bills for hosting if you like.
For some definitions of 'perfectly'.
1. Start Whatsapp.
2. Open group chat.
3. Send attachment.
Alternatively:
1. Open file
2. (on Android) Share/send to using: Google Drive/Dropbox.
Both methods allow sharing something with multiple receivers and only those receivers, and require almost no effort of the receivers.
Let's be honest: the only private alternative that is (almost) as easy for everybody as the above is to roll your own centralised Google Drive/Dropbox alternative like owncloud or using a distributed system like BTSync.
As far as converting YouTube videos to DailyMotion it is really easy to do. Just get any YouTube downloader app from CNET Download.com and just upload the video afterwards. Main issue is copyrights, but DailyMotion has a lot of stuff so it's not like you cannot live without it.
Really? You're suggesting that for the myriad of pages I view that contain YouTube content, I have to use a YouTube downloader that still hands my IP to GoogleTube to download the embedded videos/links?. Even disregarding the folly of reuploading it to DailyMotion, that is probably the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Don't get me wrong, I largely agree with where you're coming from, but I think suggesting things like FTP and DailyMotion is hurting the cause more than benefiting it.
Or you can just use something like [...] French DailyMotion for videos
Sure, now show me the tool that converts all the embedded YouTube videos and YouTube video links to their DailyMotion equivalents.
You can use that system to put files on the "cloud" with old-fashioned FTP.
That is terrible advice. Try sending your technologically challenged friends a file from your phone that only they can open, on their phone, using old-fashioned FTP. Even if you manage to somehow do it, it will be such a huge pain in the ass that you'll probably never do it again.
Personally, I see BitTorrent Sync (-like solutions) combined with proper upstream bandwidth going a long way.
I'm not saying one shouldn't look for alternatives, just that it isn't always as doable and easy as you imply.
Slashdot/reddit/4chan could probably make that happen.
How many unique searches for something like 'Jim Hood is an idiot covered in hot grits' would it really take before that shows up in in the autocomplete?
You feed your schoolkids?
We let their parents take care of that.
Populist fool.
Most of the early results show that, while VP9 isn't better than h265, it's within a percentage point or two. That's not its problem.
Bull. Percentage points mean diddly squat when comparing different video codecs. Visually, VP9 doesn't even come close to h.265 (HEVC).
Convince yourself: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1620230#post1620230
I said Brits. You know, the English.
You just admitted that you're clueless on this subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain
Or balloon based WiFi:
http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/google-floats-balloons-for-free-wifi-20130615-2oamm.html
Fucking clickbait.
You define whether 'you' die in copy/teleportation thought experiments.
No, Reality does, aka cause & effect. Believe what you will, but that won't change reality.
You misunderstand. The discussion revolves around identity and my claim that it only exists by definition. The reality is the physical existence of a collection of elementary particles and their configuration. Nobody is doubting whether the collection of particles would appear in a recognizable configuration in a teleportation thought experiment.
By your logic some random guy on the street IS you if you are killed and that new guy is brainwashed into thinking he is you.. BS.
I never gave you a single definition, yet you base your argument on one.
Just because you don't truly understand the physical phenomenon of Consciousness, that which experiences reality, doesn't mean you can just wave your hands and say that there is no local consciousness.
I never claimed or implied that.
If you are defining "You" as the abstraction you are experiencing at any particular moment then no wonder you are confused.
I'm not confused.
You are not the fleeting patterns your mind feeds your consciousness, you are that which experiences those patterns. You are a physical, pure droplet of Reality itself interfaced in an amazing way with a system able to modulate you with complex patterns.
Poetic writing does not an argument make.
It's a great defense in court, too
There actually are instances in which you are not punished for actions of a previous 'you', at least in some countries. But the crux here is that as a society, we have a definition of the 'things' that can be held accountable and punished, and that that definition is pretty much completely independent from whether or not that thing has consciousness. The latter is, of course, what people care about in copy/teleportation thought experiments.
The legal aspects of how to deal with sufficiently advanced AI / cyborgs / uploaded brains is of course a very interesting (and ultimately unavoidable) debate.
This is the only truly insightful comment in this thread.
Everybody is so hung up on the pervasive illusion of a spatiotemporally continuous consciousness that they forget that nothing on any reasonable macro level even exists without a definition.
For some definitions of 'you', you didn't exist a minute ago. For others, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that there are multiple instances of 'you'. It just happens that those definitions are not as useful to work with in daily life. It is more effective for an organism to have any instance of consciousness feel responsible for the next one that may arise in it and the ones that previously arose in it. We can't prove that our current consciousness is 'the same' as it was yesterday. We can only define that it is.
Which leads to the only reasonable conclusion: You define whether 'you' die in copy/teleportation thought experiments.
I was going for a kind of worst case scenario (apart from using the average household), so yes: going completely off-grid using only solar is very doable (in Western countries) today.
- Most European households consume at most half the power of US households.
- The figures I quoted for Li-Ion batteries were on the low end (low power / USD and low power / liter).
- Nighttime+evening power consumption is only part of the quoted daily power consumption.
- Wind power and other renewable sources of power were ignored (although this means being on-grid).
- Efficiency of power generation during the daytime also increases by using batteries as a local buffer (vs transferring excess power to the grid or worse, discarding it)
These oversights with positive influence are of course partly mitigated by these:
- To retain current convenience levels, the batteries and power production must support the worst case. Being left without heating in cloudy winters is not an option.
- The cost of the system regulating the interaction between appliances, solar panels and batteries was omitted.
All in all, though, it seems pretty clear that technically and economically, a society almost completely powered by renewable energy (and specifically solar) is very realistic.
Wind, solar and geothermal can't ramp up fast enough to meet power demand, AFAIK.
When considering total power demand, that is probably wrong (2027 is probably a bit optimistic):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
Of course, demand response is an issue.
Solving peak demand during the day is easy: have installed capacity equal or surpass peak demand. Turning solar panel power production on and off should be pretty much instant.
Nights are the obvious real (technical) issue for solar. Probably the most viable solution is introducing buffers of batteries, hydrogen or carbohydrates.
Let's look at the matter from a household perspective. According to what I can find, the average US household uses about 15,000 kWh annually. Let's go naive and assume those are evenly spread across the year: 15000/365 =~ 41kWh/day.
Current Lithium-Ion cells are about 250Wh/liter and about 2.5Wh/USD. That means that the volume of cells required to store a day of electricity usage in the average US household is about 41000/250 = 164 liters (dm^3). Stacking these blocks one high, we end up with a volume of roughly 1.3m x 1.3m x 0.1m (which is obviously negligible). The naively calculated cost of such a storage unit would be 16.400 USD.
My calculation seems to be fairly accurate: http://www.wholesalesolar.com/battery-banks.html
Now the above is based on current day technology, supply and demand. I'm pretty sure technological progress will make the above economically even more viable.
20 hours?
I have bad news for you: your business partner may be mentally retarded.
Yes. As is visible in the video, the amount of control the user actually has is deplorable.
The whole obstacle course looks nice, but the copter is never actually shown to do anything in it for more than 0.5s. And that is with a thoroughly trained system.
This is as much a vending machine as the printers at the repro desk are.
I'd be fine with calling it this, if the newsworthyness wasn't solely based on the alledged 'vending machine'-ness.
The problem is that different graphics cards give different output for the same input. So a pixel that would be white when calculated by an Nvidia shader, is black when calculated by the Intel integrated graphics shader, resulting in an infinite death cycle at an early stage of the game.
You'll probably agree with me that that doesn't sound like a very robust game engine.
The Skyrim glitches are an odd case. In a sense, they're unforgivable. But in another sense, the scope of that game is so huge, if they polished it all, they'd never finish.
I'm pretty sure Skyrim isn't the only game released on consoles that required patching: http://www.xbuc.net/ (Xbox game patches site)
Of course the point stands that developing for a single target hardware platform is easier than for the multitude of PC configurations out there.
Although your point is kind of valid, Closure looks like it could run on a fist-generation Pentium with a 2MB ATi VLB card. Apparently their programmers are just terrible.
Terrible programming generally fails on consoles too:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120408105239AA6tkkR
What would help for PC gaming is if all game programmers could rely on some set of metrics provided by a unified benchmarking application. Creating settings profiles that would 'just work' and even predicting whether a game would run (well) on your system would become fairly trivial.
More commonly known as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique
Although one could wonder to what extent feelings of guilt and the drive to reciprocate are applicable in this situation.
I think the value of practical experiments is that you can mess with them and see what happens.
My understanding of QM and the practical setup of the experiment is too limited to be able to come up with a way to try and tease out some unexpected results, but I hope the people working on this experiment can.
I have a theory: playing football outside trains your peripheral motion perception (1) and reading trains your foveal motion perception. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how these activities might correlate with intelligence.
Full text, btw: http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/Duje/papers/13_Melnick_IQ_CB.pdf
Nothing about Gmail (which allows IMAP) prevents you from doing your own encryption of the messages.
No shit. That's why I never implied that such was the case.
The point is that it could have been ridiculously easy by now and that Google could have pushed to make it that way, but they have an incentive not to do so.
Because major webmail providers don't really want email to be encrypted.
Google/Gmail could easily push it and make it happen, but they would just be throwing money away by not being able to profile their users anymore.
If everybody were still using Outlook Express and/or Thunderbird and ISP provided email accounts, there would have been loads of easy install plugins that would allow cross-client encryption.