Crossing the quickly rotating event horizon of two colliding black holes at the same time. Hmmm... makes me want to create an urban legend about it, so that the Mythbusters will be forced to recreate it someday.
If the companies are simply providing a service to write arbitrary bytes to a customers' hard drive, not selling a market good, then they shouldn't get copyright protection on those bytes being written either. After all, those bytes aren't a sold good, but are merely a byproduct of the service provided.
Sounds like somebody is tired of paying developers to make 40 hour games, and has decided to select the evidence they want to promote the idea of 3-5 hour games being the new standard.
I DO want more of a game I like. I don't tend to buy games that promise sub-10 hour gameplay.
If that's his argument, then how does he argue that movies are art? They're just a container for art, writing, stageplay, and audio. It could be strongly argued that camera movements (cinematography) are just mechanics placed on art, not art itself.
Arguing that game rules applied to art isn't art is just as absurd a line of argument - it doesn't matter if it's a game, if the content is art, the product itself is artistic.
Are games themselves generally composed of art? Yes.
Does applying rules of games to the art in games negate the artistry? No.
Is Ebert being a curmudgeon again? Yeah.
The average first-rate game contain a good book worth of creative written material, galleries of fascinating and provocative artistic images, and a couple albums worth of creative sound. These things are art - they give the game rules context that creates a story the player enacts... they are a play with a branching script, performed with audience participation.
The pre-loaded movies come with a Windows-based digital rights management system that prevents file sharing. They take up about 50 GB of the drive itself.
This means the drive is filled with extra useless crap wasting space before a format. It'd be a sad thing to discover you paid extra for this, only to not be able to actually use the movies as you would any other file, or even DVD. Hardly a "promotion", more like a way to gamble and write off a loss on old stock.
Sophophora was Drosophila Now it's Sophophora, not Drosophila Not been a long time gone, Drosophila Now it's bug filled time on a moonlit night Every fly that was Drosophila Lives in Sophophora, not Drosophila So if you had a fly in Drosophila It'll be waiting in Sophophora Even old pluto, was once a planet Why they changed it I can't say People didn't like it better that way So take me back to Drosophila No, you can't go back to Drosophila Been a long time gone, Drosophila Why did Drosophila get the works? That's nobody's business but the Scientists Sophophora (Sophophora) Sophophora (Sophophora) Even old pluto, was once a planet Why they changed it I can't say People didn't like it better that way Sophophora was Drosophila Now it's Sophophora, not Drosophila Not been a long time gone, Drosophila Why did Drosophila get the works? That's nobody's business but the Scientists So take me back to Drosophila No, you can't go back to Drosophila Been a long time gone, Drosophila Why did Drosophila get the works? That's nobody's business but the scientists Sophophora
The basic story here is the same with insurance company representatives commenting about the state of US healthcare...
It's all about finding a very small selected slice of data that shows "We're #1 in the world!!!1!!ONE!", in this case about internet access (thanks to legacy phone modems), then pretend that misrepresented data represents the entire market.
But the bullshit only starts there - the REAL problem, it is asserted, are the people who "exploit" the service provided to them, in order to actually ask that full service advertised be provided to them. You know, like insurance customers who actually get sick and need financial support promised to them - those folks, and people who watch too many videos are the REAL problem with the system!
So, serving the interests of the real valued customer, the stockholder, they proclaim a holy jihad against the users of their service who don't give them good enough return in terms of contracted usage of service. Same scam, different sector.
Most unique, perhaps, is that the surface of the card is actually part of the heatsink, above the fin array. Normally, this would be a part of the card you could grab onto when pulling it out of a system. But when I burnt my hand on it, I thought a temperature reading would be interesting. Turns out that, during normal game play (running Crysis, not something like FurMark), the exposed metal exceeds 71 degrees C (or about 160 degrees F).
...So, are any third party manufacturers planning on making an easy-bake oven attachment for this thing? At least have that thing creating some gaming snacks with some of that extra heat.
Make your own ketchup - it's REALLY easy, actually - just google for recipes. It's pretty much just tomato, vinegar, onion powder, and sugar (salt and oil optional), plus perhaps a little starch to get the right texture. Buy canned tomatoes in bulk, throw a can or so of them into a blender with everything else, cook and stir until smooth and even, then put it into a container in the fridge. Cleanup is just running water over everything. 15 minutes work for as much as you want to make. Incidentally, a little more sugar/oil/vinegar makes it into french dressing.
Following the developmental path of mammals back in evolutionary time, back past chordates, the basic design behind mammals and similar animals is a hypothetical creature that is simply a mouth and a digestive system, expelling waste at the other end. Essentially, a torus. When mammal embryos are developing, one of the stages is essentially just that. It's the basic core of mammalian structure.
Really though - make a fund to fund the development of a janitor robot. Something small, light and cheap that can attach to junk, then lob it at other junk to destabilize the junk orbit while maintaining its own orbit. The folks working on "Star Wars" projects would already be there on several aspects.
Security is almost by definition an illusion - by making information accessible to someone, you make it potentially available to anyone. Completely enforcing security ideals to a logical extreme would result in complete paralysis, depleting enormous resources along the way (see: the cold war). If you want to keep anything secret, you have to limit its use, and limit the amount of things you keep secret - otherwise the cost of maintaining that secret status becomes prohibitive and unrealistic.
It's the same thing with 'virtual borders' as it is with real borders - you can't keep eyes, or even cameras, or even CPU cycles going on all potential borders. It just won't work - you have to observe effects and target responses, use honeypots and similar tactics, and marshal your resources to minimize the effects of breaches. Better yet, improve relations and economies on both sides of the border, and make such breaches meaningless while still enforcing your limited security goals - you'll be serving all your underlying motivations at the same time.
Then again - security always seems to be a 'temporary' thing, that happens to almost always be escalating. Don't you love your family enough to own the latest and greatest killing machine? Inside most real life monsters lies the desire for securing safety for one's interests - with the lines of priorities drawn right through the property/face of someone else. That's not something we're likely to be getting over anytime soon, conflicting interests, and aggressive 'defense'.
Artificial intelligences will certainly be capable of doing a lot of work, and indeed managing those tasks to accomplish greater tasks. Let's make a giant assumption that we find a way out of the current science fiction conundrums of control and cooperation with guided artificial intelligences... what is our role as human beings in this mostly-jobless world?
The role of the economy is to exchange the goods needed to survive and accomplish things. When everyone can have an autofarm and manufacturing fabricator, there really wouldn't be room for a traditional economy. A craiglist-style trading system would be about all that would be theoretically needed - most services would be interchangeable and not individually valuable.
What role will humanity play in such a system? We'd still have personality, and our own perspective that couldn't be had by live-by-copy intelligent digital software (until true brain scans become possible). We'd be able to write, have time to create elaborate simulations (with ever-improving toolsets), and expand the human exploration of experience in general.
As humans, the way we best grow is by making mistakes, and finding a way to use that. It's how we write better software, solve difficult problems, create great art, and even generate industries. It's our hidden talent. Games are our way of making such mistakes safe, and even more fun - and I see games and stories as increasingly big parts of our exploration of the reality we control.
Optimized software can also learn from its mistakes in a way - but it takes the accumulated mistakes on a scale only a human can make to get something really interesting. We simply wouldn't trust software to make that many mistakes.
That's crazy. I can sort of understand wanting compensation for something your government created, to recompense taxpayer expense... but to ask recompense for an artistic STYLE your nation was built upon the dead remains of is WAY beyond my usual expectations of baseless money-grabbing.
If there was a copyright on the creation, it has expired. By a few thousand years. There is certainly no derivative works clause you can pull out at this point.
Even if you want to stake some claim on government effort in excavation, the only efforts you can claim ownership of would be individual performances/creations you have based on the original works - anyone else can just base their works on the original and avoid any derivative claims.
Still, my guess is that this isn't really about making a serious claim - it's about getting settlements - about casting nets and seeing what comes back. The governmental version of SCO-style license trolling.
One of the first tags on this story was "fixtheeconomyfirst"... but the core problem in our economy is that the dichotomy between wealthy investors and owner calss, and the mass of stagnant income earner class who mostly provide service to eachother and the wealthy. Flashy inefficient technology like these are about all we can do at this point to get anything out of the currently rather sheepish investors/owners. Our political system will NOT be fixing this situation anytime soon - not when money spent on campaigns is considered "political speech", and corporations are counted as people for those related rights.
Still, if most golden-parachute equipped managers can be convinced to sign a bankruptcy inducing contract just because one of these things are SO flying-car-smexy, and they can only get it through these government channels fully equipped to extract that money - then there's a chance to reduce their political power. And that WOULD fix the economy, in a roundabout way.
Not going to happen - but like with cheap flying cars, one can always dream.
If problems occur as you postulate elaborate hypothesis, then stop piling up the elaborate hypothesis! But be sure and still make available your existing (complex) hypothesis, methodology and unexpected data - preventing others from going down the same path with the same methodology is still highly valuable!
Let's say you're looking at a production and consumption cycle involving neurotransmitters and neuroreceptors of some sort, and the various channels of input and output involved. Your starting presumption you base your hypothesis on is that there is a buildup which triggers an electrical signal to stop consumption and clear the channel. The only evidence you can realistically gather for now is protein density at a certain output channel - but others have worked to ensure this is a reliable approach specifically under these circumstances.
So, you do the specific experiment, trigger the signal, but you get a wildly different result - the stop in consumption occurs, but the protein density does not change at all in the output channel. What actually happened is still unknown, only you haven't verified any correlation with your hypothesis. You still have valuable data, but no mechanism to verify under the circumstances. Either your methodology failed, or you misunderstood what was happening - and the world of knowledge is made larger by either... even if your paymasters won't get happy about the result.
Science is often like throwing pebbles in complete darkness - it takes a lot of stones and close listening to make out a mental picture of the scene - especially when there's a lot of noise already around. Everyone would love it if we could just flip the lights on - but we have yet to invent a light that can see into the inner workings of the functioning brain very well. Gotta keep throwing those pebbles for now.
We've completed the circle - various "automated systems" have been blamed for various market failures in recent years, as companies and small traders have used algorithms on computers to "keep up with the speed of the market". Of course, the actual failure was almost always in the design, such as allowing a computer to make blind decisions with large amounts of money faster than you could keep track of.
But here, we have a stronger case for a machine-driven market failure - automated news algorithms. Misunderstanding generated at the speed of the market. I've worked on AI professionally in games, studied it in the contexts of linguistics, nervous system simulation, and such - AI even in its most exaggerated modern state is not going to even know how to figure out how to extract a good quote with human guidance, much less report on a news release. If you thought computer generated music was entertainingly bad - wait until you see some of the awful things produced by automated news misunderstandings... random context switches mixed with "neutral language" bits, it'll be like Fox news switched its agenda to Cthulu-level madness of confusion rather than the usual rage agenda.
And since the market makes its decisions on the basis of news, rumors, and insider trading - and people get the three confused as they hear them, mixing this into the information stream seems a virtual guarantee of another market crash.
That's what I call another serious negative externality for the news business taking the cheaper road to reporting business news.
At the current rate of progress, so to speak, no one will be able to afford a computer that runs 10^16 times faster than current systems. Even as a gamer, I'm already leery of buying any of the newer video cards and CPU setups, after reviewing the cost in electricity needed to run them for a year compared to my existing system - they use somewhere around 4 times the electricity!
I can understand fitting more transistors onto a chipset, and more chipsets onto a system, but even with nanotech and similar technologies, I don't see much chance for each transistor to use proportionally less electricity to allow 10^16 more of them to be running at once. You'd have to run a conductance cable to the sun to get that kind of power.
Your outrage is a little misplaced here. You're still going to be paying way less for fuel thanks to increased efficiency. Even the gas-guzzlers will partially benefit when general demand is reduced. Taxes are a small percentage of the cost of fuel - basically, what this gas-tax increase would do is makes it so everyone pays roughly the same in amount of taxes as they did before, but still way less in total thanks to using less fuel.
That's not to say your outrage is not correct - but the more correct place for that outrage is that we fund so many important things by way of fuel taxes. Consumption taxes hit the poor and working classes, dollar-per-dollar, much harder than the richer classes - and that includes fuel taxes. It also creates crisis scenarios whenever the consumption rate is reduced - which is a dumb way to fund the things an entire society depends upon so deeply.
A better tax base would be a wealth tax, progressively affecting those who benefit most from the fruits of society - those who are able to earn the most and control the most of the economy paying society back in part for the power they have been given thanks to the usually invisible effort of so many.
The state legislatures are getting in a lather over the idea that gas-electric hybrids will reduce their gas-tax-based state income. It's all rather reminiscent of the year 2000 panic over computer glitches - based in a sliver of truth, but WAAAAY overestimated. They're looking to use these mileage-based taxes as a way to future-proof, but as you mentioned, the better solution is to just increase gas taxes proportionally with the fraction of gas being used thanks to improved technology, so revenue can keep up with increased expenses, while keeping the burden on those who do the most practical use, rather than taxing a hybrid the same as a cement truck.
"Sir, we've learned that the government is PAYING our customers to get these solar panels, and then we have to pay them for the electricity that is generated. Some may actually see a net profit from this. We even get cheaper electricity out of the deal, without having to pay for the equipment."
"What? What?! No - absolutely not - we cannot allow this to continue unchallenged. Why, if everybody did that, then what would we be?"
"Well, sir, we'd be the company that provides power when the sun isn't providing it. We wouldn't have to pay for power we aren't using from them. We could even start reselling expensive solar equipment and batteries."
"Oh, so it wouldn't have to absolutely destroy us... oh, but damn, the shareholders!"
"The shareholders?"
"Yes, they'll go apeshit if they learn we aren't maximizing profits. Damnit, we'll have to do something to convince the shareholders that we're not letting an opportunity for shortterm profit fall away. I know - start charging a ridiculous fee for connecting, then using these solar systems, then they'll be another companies problem."
"Customers willing to provide cheap electricity are a problem?"
"No, shareholder expectations about making money from them are a problem. Losing customers for 'overzealous' charges we can explain, but losing profit margins from existing customers we get a shitstorm for. Commence the charges!"
Not reported are those deaths caused by folks either watching or cringing away from the image of a giant boy bleeding out his nostrils and eyebrows....followed by a sign that said...burma shave.
Except this time, folks DO need the job, and their co-workers are contorting their own faces in ways that may show up in archeological remains. Remember folks - competition doesn't always result in absolutely productive pressures, just selective ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Crossing the quickly rotating event horizon of two colliding black holes at the same time. Hmmm... makes me want to create an urban legend about it, so that the Mythbusters will be forced to recreate it someday.
Hollywood, get on it!
Ryan Fenton
If the companies are simply providing a service to write arbitrary bytes to a customers' hard drive, not selling a market good, then they shouldn't get copyright protection on those bytes being written either. After all, those bytes aren't a sold good, but are merely a byproduct of the service provided.
Ryan Fenton
Sounds like somebody is tired of paying developers to make 40 hour games, and has decided to select the evidence they want to promote the idea of 3-5 hour games being the new standard.
I DO want more of a game I like. I don't tend to buy games that promise sub-10 hour gameplay.
Ryan Fenton
On a closely related note, here's another video of a tool-assisted playing of Tetris, with an interesting mystery to it:
Clicky
It won't make sense at first, but once you get it, you'll see a little more art in the art of video games.
Ryan Fenton
If that's his argument, then how does he argue that movies are art? They're just a container for art, writing, stageplay, and audio. It could be strongly argued that camera movements (cinematography) are just mechanics placed on art, not art itself.
Arguing that game rules applied to art isn't art is just as absurd a line of argument - it doesn't matter if it's a game, if the content is art, the product itself is artistic.
Ryan Fenton
Are the rules of games art? Perhaps not.
Are games themselves generally composed of art? Yes.
Does applying rules of games to the art in games negate the artistry? No.
Is Ebert being a curmudgeon again? Yeah.
The average first-rate game contain a good book worth of creative written material, galleries of fascinating and provocative artistic images, and a couple albums worth of creative sound. These things are art - they give the game rules context that creates a story the player enacts... they are a play with a branching script, performed with audience participation.
If that's not art, your definition is flawed.
Ryan Fenton
This means the drive is filled with extra useless crap wasting space before a format. It'd be a sad thing to discover you paid extra for this, only to not be able to actually use the movies as you would any other file, or even DVD. Hardly a "promotion", more like a way to gamble and write off a loss on old stock.
Ryan Fenton
Sophophora was Drosophila
Now it's Sophophora, not Drosophila
Not been a long time gone, Drosophila
Now it's bug filled time on a moonlit night
Every fly that was Drosophila
Lives in Sophophora, not Drosophila
So if you had a fly in Drosophila
It'll be waiting in Sophophora
Even old pluto, was once a planet
Why they changed it I can't say
People didn't like it better that way
So take me back to Drosophila
No, you can't go back to Drosophila
Been a long time gone, Drosophila
Why did Drosophila get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Scientists
Sophophora (Sophophora)
Sophophora (Sophophora)
Even old pluto, was once a planet
Why they changed it I can't say
People didn't like it better that way
Sophophora was Drosophila
Now it's Sophophora, not Drosophila
Not been a long time gone, Drosophila
Why did Drosophila get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Scientists
So take me back to Drosophila
No, you can't go back to Drosophila
Been a long time gone, Drosophila
Why did Drosophila get the works?
That's nobody's business but the scientists
Sophophora
(with apologies to They Might Be Giants)
---
Ryan Fenton
The basic story here is the same with insurance company representatives commenting about the state of US healthcare...
It's all about finding a very small selected slice of data that shows "We're #1 in the world!!!1!!ONE!", in this case about internet access (thanks to legacy phone modems), then pretend that misrepresented data represents the entire market.
But the bullshit only starts there - the REAL problem, it is asserted, are the people who "exploit" the service provided to them, in order to actually ask that full service advertised be provided to them. You know, like insurance customers who actually get sick and need financial support promised to them - those folks, and people who watch too many videos are the REAL problem with the system!
So, serving the interests of the real valued customer, the stockholder, they proclaim a holy jihad against the users of their service who don't give them good enough return in terms of contracted usage of service. Same scam, different sector.
Ryan Fenton
Ryan Fenton
Make your own ketchup - it's REALLY easy, actually - just google for recipes. It's pretty much just tomato, vinegar, onion powder, and sugar (salt and oil optional), plus perhaps a little starch to get the right texture. Buy canned tomatoes in bulk, throw a can or so of them into a blender with everything else, cook and stir until smooth and even, then put it into a container in the fridge. Cleanup is just running water over everything. 15 minutes work for as much as you want to make. Incidentally, a little more sugar/oil/vinegar makes it into french dressing.
There you go - good ketchup without HFCS.
Ryan Fenton
Following the developmental path of mammals back in evolutionary time, back past chordates, the basic design behind mammals and similar animals is a hypothetical creature that is simply a mouth and a digestive system, expelling waste at the other end. Essentially, a torus. When mammal embryos are developing, one of the stages is essentially just that. It's the basic core of mammalian structure.
Ryan Fenton
Roger Wilco, SPAAAAACE JANITOR!
Really though - make a fund to fund the development of a janitor robot. Something small, light and cheap that can attach to junk, then lob it at other junk to destabilize the junk orbit while maintaining its own orbit. The folks working on "Star Wars" projects would already be there on several aspects.
Ryan Fenton
Security is almost by definition an illusion - by making information accessible to someone, you make it potentially available to anyone. Completely enforcing security ideals to a logical extreme would result in complete paralysis, depleting enormous resources along the way (see: the cold war). If you want to keep anything secret, you have to limit its use, and limit the amount of things you keep secret - otherwise the cost of maintaining that secret status becomes prohibitive and unrealistic.
It's the same thing with 'virtual borders' as it is with real borders - you can't keep eyes, or even cameras, or even CPU cycles going on all potential borders. It just won't work - you have to observe effects and target responses, use honeypots and similar tactics, and marshal your resources to minimize the effects of breaches. Better yet, improve relations and economies on both sides of the border, and make such breaches meaningless while still enforcing your limited security goals - you'll be serving all your underlying motivations at the same time.
Then again - security always seems to be a 'temporary' thing, that happens to almost always be escalating. Don't you love your family enough to own the latest and greatest killing machine? Inside most real life monsters lies the desire for securing safety for one's interests - with the lines of priorities drawn right through the property/face of someone else. That's not something we're likely to be getting over anytime soon, conflicting interests, and aggressive 'defense'.
Ryan Fenton
Artificial intelligences will certainly be capable of doing a lot of work, and indeed managing those tasks to accomplish greater tasks. Let's make a giant assumption that we find a way out of the current science fiction conundrums of control and cooperation with guided artificial intelligences... what is our role as human beings in this mostly-jobless world?
The role of the economy is to exchange the goods needed to survive and accomplish things. When everyone can have an autofarm and manufacturing fabricator, there really wouldn't be room for a traditional economy. A craiglist-style trading system would be about all that would be theoretically needed - most services would be interchangeable and not individually valuable.
What role will humanity play in such a system? We'd still have personality, and our own perspective that couldn't be had by live-by-copy intelligent digital software (until true brain scans become possible). We'd be able to write, have time to create elaborate simulations (with ever-improving toolsets), and expand the human exploration of experience in general.
As humans, the way we best grow is by making mistakes, and finding a way to use that. It's how we write better software, solve difficult problems, create great art, and even generate industries. It's our hidden talent. Games are our way of making such mistakes safe, and even more fun - and I see games and stories as increasingly big parts of our exploration of the reality we control.
Optimized software can also learn from its mistakes in a way - but it takes the accumulated mistakes on a scale only a human can make to get something really interesting. We simply wouldn't trust software to make that many mistakes.
Ryan Fenton
What...
That's crazy. I can sort of understand wanting compensation for something your government created, to recompense taxpayer expense... but to ask recompense for an artistic STYLE your nation was built upon the dead remains of is WAY beyond my usual expectations of baseless money-grabbing.
If there was a copyright on the creation, it has expired. By a few thousand years. There is certainly no derivative works clause you can pull out at this point.
Even if you want to stake some claim on government effort in excavation, the only efforts you can claim ownership of would be individual performances/creations you have based on the original works - anyone else can just base their works on the original and avoid any derivative claims.
Still, my guess is that this isn't really about making a serious claim - it's about getting settlements - about casting nets and seeing what comes back. The governmental version of SCO-style license trolling.
Ryan Fenton
One of the first tags on this story was "fixtheeconomyfirst"... but the core problem in our economy is that the dichotomy between wealthy investors and owner calss, and the mass of stagnant income earner class who mostly provide service to eachother and the wealthy. Flashy inefficient technology like these are about all we can do at this point to get anything out of the currently rather sheepish investors/owners. Our political system will NOT be fixing this situation anytime soon - not when money spent on campaigns is considered "political speech", and corporations are counted as people for those related rights.
Still, if most golden-parachute equipped managers can be convinced to sign a bankruptcy inducing contract just because one of these things are SO flying-car-smexy, and they can only get it through these government channels fully equipped to extract that money - then there's a chance to reduce their political power. And that WOULD fix the economy, in a roundabout way.
Not going to happen - but like with cheap flying cars, one can always dream.
Ryan Fenton
If problems occur as you postulate elaborate hypothesis, then stop piling up the elaborate hypothesis! But be sure and still make available your existing (complex) hypothesis, methodology and unexpected data - preventing others from going down the same path with the same methodology is still highly valuable!
Let's say you're looking at a production and consumption cycle involving neurotransmitters and neuroreceptors of some sort, and the various channels of input and output involved. Your starting presumption you base your hypothesis on is that there is a buildup which triggers an electrical signal to stop consumption and clear the channel. The only evidence you can realistically gather for now is protein density at a certain output channel - but others have worked to ensure this is a reliable approach specifically under these circumstances.
So, you do the specific experiment, trigger the signal, but you get a wildly different result - the stop in consumption occurs, but the protein density does not change at all in the output channel. What actually happened is still unknown, only you haven't verified any correlation with your hypothesis. You still have valuable data, but no mechanism to verify under the circumstances. Either your methodology failed, or you misunderstood what was happening - and the world of knowledge is made larger by either... even if your paymasters won't get happy about the result.
Science is often like throwing pebbles in complete darkness - it takes a lot of stones and close listening to make out a mental picture of the scene - especially when there's a lot of noise already around. Everyone would love it if we could just flip the lights on - but we have yet to invent a light that can see into the inner workings of the functioning brain very well. Gotta keep throwing those pebbles for now.
Ryan Fenton
We've completed the circle - various "automated systems" have been blamed for various market failures in recent years, as companies and small traders have used algorithms on computers to "keep up with the speed of the market". Of course, the actual failure was almost always in the design, such as allowing a computer to make blind decisions with large amounts of money faster than you could keep track of.
But here, we have a stronger case for a machine-driven market failure - automated news algorithms. Misunderstanding generated at the speed of the market. I've worked on AI professionally in games, studied it in the contexts of linguistics, nervous system simulation, and such - AI even in its most exaggerated modern state is not going to even know how to figure out how to extract a good quote with human guidance, much less report on a news release. If you thought computer generated music was entertainingly bad - wait until you see some of the awful things produced by automated news misunderstandings... random context switches mixed with "neutral language" bits, it'll be like Fox news switched its agenda to Cthulu-level madness of confusion rather than the usual rage agenda.
And since the market makes its decisions on the basis of news, rumors, and insider trading - and people get the three confused as they hear them, mixing this into the information stream seems a virtual guarantee of another market crash.
That's what I call another serious negative externality for the news business taking the cheaper road to reporting business news.
Ryan Fenton
At the current rate of progress, so to speak, no one will be able to afford a computer that runs 10^16 times faster than current systems. Even as a gamer, I'm already leery of buying any of the newer video cards and CPU setups, after reviewing the cost in electricity needed to run them for a year compared to my existing system - they use somewhere around 4 times the electricity!
I can understand fitting more transistors onto a chipset, and more chipsets onto a system, but even with nanotech and similar technologies, I don't see much chance for each transistor to use proportionally less electricity to allow 10^16 more of them to be running at once. You'd have to run a conductance cable to the sun to get that kind of power.
Ryan Fenton
Your outrage is a little misplaced here. You're still going to be paying way less for fuel thanks to increased efficiency. Even the gas-guzzlers will partially benefit when general demand is reduced. Taxes are a small percentage of the cost of fuel - basically, what this gas-tax increase would do is makes it so everyone pays roughly the same in amount of taxes as they did before, but still way less in total thanks to using less fuel.
That's not to say your outrage is not correct - but the more correct place for that outrage is that we fund so many important things by way of fuel taxes. Consumption taxes hit the poor and working classes, dollar-per-dollar, much harder than the richer classes - and that includes fuel taxes. It also creates crisis scenarios whenever the consumption rate is reduced - which is a dumb way to fund the things an entire society depends upon so deeply.
A better tax base would be a wealth tax, progressively affecting those who benefit most from the fruits of society - those who are able to earn the most and control the most of the economy paying society back in part for the power they have been given thanks to the usually invisible effort of so many.
Ryan Fenton
The state legislatures are getting in a lather over the idea that gas-electric hybrids will reduce their gas-tax-based state income. It's all rather reminiscent of the year 2000 panic over computer glitches - based in a sliver of truth, but WAAAAY overestimated. They're looking to use these mileage-based taxes as a way to future-proof, but as you mentioned, the better solution is to just increase gas taxes proportionally with the fraction of gas being used thanks to improved technology, so revenue can keep up with increased expenses, while keeping the burden on those who do the most practical use, rather than taxing a hybrid the same as a cement truck.
Ryan Fenton
"Sir, we've learned that the government is PAYING our customers to get these solar panels, and then we have to pay them for the electricity that is generated. Some may actually see a net profit from this. We even get cheaper electricity out of the deal, without having to pay for the equipment."
"What? What?! No - absolutely not - we cannot allow this to continue unchallenged. Why, if everybody did that, then what would we be?"
"Well, sir, we'd be the company that provides power when the sun isn't providing it. We wouldn't have to pay for power we aren't using from them. We could even start reselling expensive solar equipment and batteries."
"Oh, so it wouldn't have to absolutely destroy us... oh, but damn, the shareholders!"
"The shareholders?"
"Yes, they'll go apeshit if they learn we aren't maximizing profits. Damnit, we'll have to do something to convince the shareholders that we're not letting an opportunity for shortterm profit fall away. I know - start charging a ridiculous fee for connecting, then using these solar systems, then they'll be another companies problem."
"Customers willing to provide cheap electricity are a problem?"
"No, shareholder expectations about making money from them are a problem. Losing customers for 'overzealous' charges we can explain, but losing profit margins from existing customers we get a shitstorm for. Commence the charges!"
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Ryan Fenton
Not reported are those deaths caused by folks either watching or cringing away from the image of a giant boy bleeding out his nostrils and eyebrows. ...followed by a sign that said...burma shave.
Ryan Fenton
Here's the Obligitory link to the Office Space 'Chochkies' scene
Except this time, folks DO need the job, and their co-workers are contorting their own faces in ways that may show up in archeological remains. Remember folks - competition doesn't always result in absolutely productive pressures, just selective ones.
Ryan Fenton