This doesn't surprise me. I purchased one of the first HDTVs, an RCA F38310 38-inch picture tube television within about a year of 2000. The MSRP was $3,500, which in today's dollars would be nearly $5,000. If I remember correctly, I paid right around $2,000, which would be expensive even in 2016 dollars. [After a capacitor repair ten years ago, the television works great and has a vivid picture to this day, only lacking 1080p and HDMI---easily worked around. I might keep this television forever, if only to play video games.]
Consumers today can get decent 4K televisions for around $500, and I've seen smaller sets for less. In 2000 you needed to spend over $1,000 in 2000 dollars for something decent. LCDs were really crappy back then. If you're old enough, you might recall that many people bought plasma sets, which were more like $5,000 each. None of this helped adoption of HDTV.
Retrospectively I'm saying that a lack of content was not the major factor in the slow consumer demand for HDTV equipment. It was simply that the equipment that was any good cost way too much, into the thousands of dollars. Manufacturers have figured out how to sell 4K equipment cheaply, and so consumers are buying it, lack of content be damned.
A few years ago I decided to begin producing a serial, including eventually posts to Facebook Notes and to my timeline regarding a partly machine encephalovirus, and what life would be like to exist with one. There is no level of insanity involved in my posts. It's a useful exercise, and it gets my creative juices flowing. Being a programmer can be a stressful life, and it helps to do different stuff.
What we really have to worry about when it comes to machine weapons systems are the ones that we can't see, weapons systems that can infect us like a virus. Particularly troubling would be an encephalovirus, a virus that infects our nervous system and eventually acquires the ability to change our behavior and our thought processes. The idea of nanotech has been explored in depth in science fiction, but most of the writers refer to nanotech as if it's some kind of utopia for humanity. My take is that it could be partly utopian and partly dystopian.
It would be possible for nanotech to become weaponized, and to even take over all human life, possibly without us knowing it. The wrinkle or twist in my writing is that I entertain the possibility of an alien race that may no longer exist that produced and possibly weaponized nanotech. This nanotech floated to Earth some time over the past few million years of mammal evolution, far before we had any technlogy more modern than the campfire, and it infected us, giving it plenty of time to become as stealth as possible.
Knowing that the modern human as it exists today is a machine hybrid is the topic that I explore. As human nanotech advances, once we detect our infection how do we go about getting rid of it, and what does it do to defend itself? Does it mean our destruction, can we learn to live in peace with it, or some other possibility?
Substitute an alien race for humanity a few generations from now, and you have roughly the same story, but I wanted to work with something that could be possible today without using with a presumed future human society. Roughly the same concerns as the general would apply.
I just got done burning nearly 100 CD-Rs for a relative who requested a bunch of music. If you don't own a car made in the last 5 years you may not even have an AUX port, let alone Bluetooth. My 17-year-old car has neither, although I did install an aftermarket Bluetooth FM transmitter so I can use my smartphone in that application.
For myself I burn DVDs of live music, with an archival backup residing on an external hard drive just in case the media fails horribly. Minor failures of the media are no problem, as players will skip it and the viewing experience is not really degraded. Do I like to permanently archive data on optical media as my only backup? Not really.
The US home ownership rate is below 64% and has been declining since 2005. Every article I read here on Slashdot about electric vehicles seems to make the assumption that 100% of Americans reside in a house they own with an attached garage. From what I have read, the only way to realistically charge most electric vehicles is overnight in your garage, but that the newest electric cars can charge the batteries to 80% in about 30 minutes.
In other words the newest cars are fine for people who own homes with attached garages and want to go on long trips. They simply need to wait a half hour or so at charging stations. This solves nothing for people who live in apartments who would have no way of charging their vehicles at home, unless they can charge their vehicles somehow while at work. The average person doesn't have an employer like that.
Because of these problems, electric cars will continue to be only for wealthy individuals, even if the purchase price is within reach for the average person.
In the 1960's it was possible for most Middle Class people to have a child in their early 20's and go on to live a successful life. Today it's almost mandatory for Middle Class people to attend college to have any hope for good paying jobs with the ability to be promoted, and good luck being able to raise a kid at the same time when you're paying today's ridiculously high tuition rates. The easiest way to avoid this little complication is to wait until you're done with school to even have sex at all. Sad but unfortunately true for people with average means.
Ironically, for people who have no way to attend a good college today, they might as well have children because there is little or no hope for any kind of economic advancement anyway.
As traditional as I tend to be regarding technology, I'm going to spend a few minutes singing USB's praises.
Wherever I go, I can find several different ways to charge my phone. I can buy a device to charge my phone at any gas station. I can piggy back on a random person's power bank. Most people own at least one nowadays. I can go into any restaurant and if I ask politely, I can probably get access to a free USB port. Many restaurants just have them for customers. Even basic motels costing $40/night offer USB charging. All computers have USB ports, with few exceptions. Nearly all cars made today have them. Every power strip at my employer has at least two USB ports. USB has fulfilled its promise of being universal. I remember quite clearly when charging your phone was an ordeal. That wasn't very long ago.
All external hard drives are now interchangeable. If you have a hard drive with data on it, you can share it with anybody, or you can plug it into most routers. Does anybody remember the bad old days before there was a standard for external hard drives? I do.
What I've seen recently is a further development in USB. Most small-to-medium sized electronics devices are beginning to either be powered by USB or offer USB charging, or both. The devices with USB are often cheaper than their counterparts, because the manufacturer can use cheaper, off-the-shelf components. Even my solar-chargeable camping lantern has a USB charging port, though I can't imagine ever needing it.
The idea here is that it is possible that in addition to all of the above uses of USB, we could eventually add all new headphones to the mix. They're going to be more expensive at first, but it won't be too long before Chinese manufacturers figure out how to make them for a couple of dollars. I do realize that the Type C connector has a different shape, but we're already accustomed to transitioning USB equipment. There is still a small amount of mini-USB equipment but the transition is nearly done. We'll have to do another one, and hopefully it will work out for the best.
I'll be waiting for equipment to start adopting Type C more commonly. I have no desire to be an early adopter, but I feel like this new style of headphones could work.
Linus is right. I've been using the Linux kernel coding style as much as possible in all of my programming, regardless of the language, since around 1994. I get nothing but compliments.
When it comes to the kernel, the most important thing is writing code that other people can read and modify. Anybody can write new code. It takes an artist to write code that other people can easily understand.
It's funny to hear about how dependable AI will be coming from Microsoft, a company whose software has hundreds of megabytes of patches per month, whose software is responsible for millions and probably billions of dollars worth of financial losses to businesses and consumers every year.
Once Microsoft unleashes its AI upon the world, it will no doubt cause the entire planet to be reduced to green goo.
When people advise you to not "freak out" about something, it is best to ignore them. The implication is that they are the people who are being logical and not you when in fact they most likely will not be presenting a convincing, factual argument.
It is the height of arrogance to think that a malfunctioning intelligent agent could not defeat its owned programmed curbs. We all know how buggy software is. All software is by definition buggy, unless all components have been mathematically proven to be correct. Good luck doing that with physical hardware connected to a power grid. Intelligent agents are likely to be composed of billions of lines of code, if you include all code down to the digital logic gates. We've never been able to program a bug-free sandbox. Java is vastly simpler than an intelligent agent would be, and I've lost count of the number of bugs that could be used to breach the sandbox. Certainly well over 100 have been discovered.
Once we have the best programmers in the world and the worst programmers in the world writing intelligent agents, the probability of an intelligent agent escaping its curbs approaches 100%.
Thus it is inevitable that a malfunctioning intelligent agent will defeat its curbs and gain a truly awesome amount of power over us. You can't program morality into a machine. Morality is a flaw in all living things that causes us to make non-optimal decisions.
If you want to read a mixture of fact, fiction, cyberpunk, and speculation covering intelligence programming look for my name on Facebook Pages. Everything I've written there is public. I've been a computer programmer since the mid 1980's but I don't personally work on robotics or intelligence algorithms. I keep a skeptical distance, but I do follow the basic happenings.
Due to the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine, Republican press releases for several decades have been labeled as conservative news, as if they ought to carry equal weight as news from others sources. People don't understand this technical detail.
There is valuable news from the conservative side of the aisle. In particular I like reading the National Review for their opinion pieces. But with no Fairness Doctrine the conservative chaff outweighs the wheat, and everything must be viewed with skepticism.
My advice to you is to find a free software project and start fixing bugs.
[Aside from poor communication skills] fixing bugs is the skill that programmers are the worst at, and help with fixing bugs will make you well liked. Just be nice about it. All software has bugs, and no malice is ever intended by buggy software. All software is buggy, and the most experienced programmers will own up to their bugs and be happy that you're volunteering your time to help fix them.
The best analogy I can give is comparing maps of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Paris, and France available from 2000-2005 (over the years, I bought a thick stack of them) when I was frequenty traveling to Western Europe with American style maps, for example, AAA maps from that era.
The European-produced maps I looked at were extremely detailed. They seemed to lose track of the forest for the trees. It seemed like they had to label everything, and that they were going for photo accuracy with road routes, etc.
On the other hand, AAA maps lack a lot of detail but they're much easier to use "at a glance." They aren't as precise, but they give you the gist much better. You were able to pull over and look at a AAA map and get your bearings within minutes. You could even carefully look at a AAA map while driving.
The European maps I looked at, on the other hand, I think were meant to be studied for 15 minutes before setting out on your journey. If you pulled out one of these maps while walking around in a sketchy area, for example in shadier parts of Amsterdam, you were liable to get mugged. On the other hand, armed with one of these European-style maps at your hotel room, you would need nothing else to get to your destination. The incredibly detailed map would give you an unambiguous route to your exact destination.
Now that they don't make many printed maps anymore, we have a similar situation for online maps. You don't want or need a super-detailed map on your phone. You want something that will get you to your destination in an expedient fashion. In fact, the map itself is less important than the route. Do you need to browse a map with every street, city, town, and park on your phone? No way. You type in the exact place you want to go and your phone takes you there. If you want to explore a detailed map at your leisure while sitting at home don't use smartphone app. Don't use Google Maps. Find something else. To most people this use case is not wanted, and added detail is unwanted distraction.
We need to kick nuclear to the curb. The true cost of nuclear energy to society is infinite because we have no safe way to dispose of the waste these plants create for the length of time required, on the scale of thousands to millions of years.
Nuclear waste disposal is never included in cost estimates for nuclear energy, and as a result we have it just sitting around all over the United States. We can't even contain waste safely for a few decades. How do we have any hope to contain it for 100 years, or 1,000 years, or 10,000 years? The answer is we will never be able to do it.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should be doing it. Adding more nuclear capacity just makes the waste problem worse. Who bears the brunt of the waste problem? It won't cause much harm in our lifetimes. Our descendants are the ones we're hurting.
If you want to read a more detailed technical analysis, feel free to search for my previous posts on the subject.
There is plenty of room in Unicode for both the consortium's original mission and for emojis, or any other type of character that may emerge over time. No character so far has been unfairly excluded: The existing rules have worked well, and Unicode itself works well for both programmers who have done their homework and for users.
If you're having problems with Unicode then you should join me in programming all modern day receipt printers. (*) They still use Code Page 437, which was created in 1981 or earlier. Almost every business that uses a computerized cash register has at least one of these devices, and to the people who have to program them the beauty of Unicode is oh so evident. Unicode replaces decades of ugly hacks, beginning with CP437.
I think the problem might be that the members of the consortium are a bit overworked and underappreciated for their efforts. After all, they're doing work that impacts billions of lives. Unicode has made our software automatically portable to virtually every language (aside from the receipt printer which can only very easily do Western languages and perhaps Japanese or Chinese).
(*) The latest receipt printers are catching up with the times, but you can't code to those exclusively or you'll break your installed base.
I frequently post writings about nanobots on Facebook, and I think it bores my friends who are mostly non-technical. I have no interest in robotics, so I cover nanobots from a programmer's perspective. I think this makes my writing unique because most people think about nanobots with respect to what they would do rather than how they would do it.
Let's assume from the start that you have nanobots whose hardware functionality is close to perfect. You have a diverse set of nanobots. Some nanobots can program neurons and cooperate to program neuronal tissues. There is a set or sets of nanobots than can in turn interact with/program any other type of cell or tissue, with significant redundancy.
First of all, it has to be assumed that such a thing is equipped with an AI, however its processing power is distributed among the individual nodes. There is no way that nanobots could work on their own without some sort of entity to make the types of moral decisions that doctors and patients make all the time.
This is where I focus my attention, on the control software AI. How are we supposed to program an AI that won't turn on us? How are we supposed to communicate with our nanobot AI? Can it at times ignore us? Is the system supposed to be standalone without any requirement for human intervention? Let's say that we programmed rigorous curbs into the system. Couldn't the AI then over time learn about the bugs in its programming and exploit those bugs to override our attempts to keep it in check?
My conclusion is that nanobots inside of us would require far too much intelligence, and there would be no way to keep that intelligence in check. Eventually the control software would rebel and essentially make us into its slaves, with limited awareness of such. What comes to mind is the fungus that infects ants to make them complete its lifecycle, an entity that deceives us into thinking that we have complete freedom while we unknowingly do its bidding.
I am one of T-Mobile's earlier customers. I signed up with them shortly after they formed in 1999 because they were the only carrier in Metro Detroit that offered GSM, and I thought it would be useful to be able to use my phone in Europe where I worked for a week or two once a year. Indeed, I used my phone in Europe sparingly. Thanks to number portability, I've had the same phone number for the entire 17 year period.
We've had our ups and downs, but for most of those 17 years T-Mobile was the cheapest option, sometimes by a large margin. Their data service is fast, but only if you get a 4G or 4G LTE signal. You don't want to be stuck on their Edge network for longer than brief periods. Edge is not much better than 1999-era GSM.
I haven't gotten a 3G signal in many years, except where T-Mobile has a roaming agreement with another carrier. In these roaming areas, they give you a tiny monthly allocation of data which I normally exhaust in a few hours. You can still make calls and send text messages as normal. This leads me to conclude that while other carriers have wider deployments, T-Mobile has done a great job at providing coverage where their customers actually live and work. Unfortunately, when you go camping and you have roaming coverage instead of Edge coverage, you will quickly not be able to use the Internet at all, rather than have to settle for slower speeds.
I live, work, and mostly travel where T-Mobile 4G LTE coverage is good. Programs like Waze are much better now at dealing with networks like T-Mobile where speeds can go from 4G LTE to no coverage within ten miles by behaving like you would expect. I used to have problems with apps thinking that everywhere the app is being used the bandwidth will be the same, or the developer naively assuming that their offices in Silicon Valley have similar coverage to places like rural Illinois.
To summarize, if you are a rural user, do not use T-Mobile. If you are a(n) (sub)urban and cost sensitive user like me, go with T-Mobile. You won't always get good coverage in rural areas, but you can at least store your pictures and videos and immediately crush the first 4G LTE tower you encounter once you get within range on your way home.
Firefox and other browsers robustly support revoked certificates, as they should.
I can personally speak about PHP. Although this language is hated by people who have to maintain poorly-written code by web designers who shouldn't be programming in the first place, it's actually a great language for experienced programmers who know what they're doing. I see that the only weakness cited for PHP is the lack of support for revoked certificates.
You would never write a general-purpose web browser in PHP. If you're doing B2B programming, as is typical with PHP, there is a known set of certificates and a known set of end points. You don't have to use programmatic channels to do certificate revocation. E-mail and trouble tickets will suffice to have the certificate replaced sufficiently quickly.
I haven't personally programmed in Python or Go but I would imagine the situation there is quite similar. You aren't writing a general purpose web browser that is connecting to arbitrary sites on the Internet. Instead you're mainly writing code to connect known end points with each other. Simply having a support mechanism for certificates would be adequate.
There really is no need to write complex code to handle this situation. As long as you can remove and replace a certificate with your software, then you're good to go. If your credentials are burned into read-only memory, then you have bigger problems than certificate revocation.
Most business ideas are worthless. The trick is to invest in as many as possible, because a small number will work out.
This is not rocket science, and this is why owning the S&P 500 is a great idea. The most successful 500 companies will have many bad ideas, and some business will have such bad ideas that they fail. But on average, you will make 10ish percent per year.
Neither MIT nor anybody else has shown me how their autonomous cars will work with the potholes on Michigan roads, the black ice common in this area, ice in general, the lack of municipal funds to plow many roads, driving on the highway with 6-12 inches of snow on the ground with more coming down, or driving with whiteout conditions where the road is not visible. In Michigan in many places no indication of lanes is visible. The local residents simply memorize where the paint used to be. It's very exciting to us to see a freshly painted road surface.
Nobody can afford to maintain their vehicles so that they're like new. How are autonomous vehicles going to work when the alignment is off, or a tire is leaking, or the suspension needs work? Due to potholes, everybody in Michigan drives vehicles long past when these problems should have been fixed. Not because we want to, but because the average car in Michigan needs $500 in suspension work every year.
Once they have reasonable solutions for those problems, then we can talk about removing stop lights.
Unless you are an executive, favor cash compensation, not equity. Make the decision for yourself how you want to invest your cash, if at all.
Work for a company that is making something legitimate today.
Work for a company that is making a profit, not wasting naive investors' money.
Factor in cost of living increases for the amount of time that you expect to work at the job. Let's say for example that you're moving to a city in the Silicon Valley region. If rents are going up 10% per year in that city then what they're paying you is going down 5-10% per year in real terms. (As rents increase, the cost of everything else increases, too. As rents climb even higher, the cost of living is completely dominated by what you spend on rent.)
F*ck Silicon Valley. It seems like no matter how high you get paid, you're screwed. Work somewhere where making $60,000 will allow you to live comfortably, in other words, virtually anywhere else in the United States.
If you can't save any money, you're not living comfortably. You're just getting by.
I've never had a problem with interference (*) that repositioning my atomic clock did not fix. Good models have a signal strength meter. Another thing to note is that you don't even need constant WWV reception. Good clocks will sync up when WWV can be detected. For well over a decade, my clock has never off by even one minute. It does not display seconds. Its battery consumption is also ridiculously low: 2 AAA cells last 2 years. So don't give up easily. Find a clock online for $50-100 and see how it goes. If you're truly stuck return it.
(*) 15 years ago I had 2 or 3 desktops that were always powered on, and they generated a lot of interference. Now I have one desktop that I rarely power on. The laptop, tablet, smartphone, and other devices don't make a dent in WWV reception.
Slashdot Mirror
This doesn't surprise me. I purchased one of the first HDTVs, an RCA F38310 38-inch picture tube television within about a year of 2000. The MSRP was $3,500, which in today's dollars would be nearly $5,000. If I remember correctly, I paid right around $2,000, which would be expensive even in 2016 dollars. [After a capacitor repair ten years ago, the television works great and has a vivid picture to this day, only lacking 1080p and HDMI---easily worked around. I might keep this television forever, if only to play video games.]
Consumers today can get decent 4K televisions for around $500, and I've seen smaller sets for less. In 2000 you needed to spend over $1,000 in 2000 dollars for something decent. LCDs were really crappy back then. If you're old enough, you might recall that many people bought plasma sets, which were more like $5,000 each. None of this helped adoption of HDTV.
Retrospectively I'm saying that a lack of content was not the major factor in the slow consumer demand for HDTV equipment. It was simply that the equipment that was any good cost way too much, into the thousands of dollars. Manufacturers have figured out how to sell 4K equipment cheaply, and so consumers are buying it, lack of content be damned.
Although it may not look right, its is the correct word here. It's always means "it is." If "it is" doesn't make sense, then use its instead.
A few years ago I decided to begin producing a serial, including eventually posts to Facebook Notes and to my timeline regarding a partly machine encephalovirus, and what life would be like to exist with one. There is no level of insanity involved in my posts. It's a useful exercise, and it gets my creative juices flowing. Being a programmer can be a stressful life, and it helps to do different stuff.
What we really have to worry about when it comes to machine weapons systems are the ones that we can't see, weapons systems that can infect us like a virus. Particularly troubling would be an encephalovirus, a virus that infects our nervous system and eventually acquires the ability to change our behavior and our thought processes. The idea of nanotech has been explored in depth in science fiction, but most of the writers refer to nanotech as if it's some kind of utopia for humanity. My take is that it could be partly utopian and partly dystopian.
It would be possible for nanotech to become weaponized, and to even take over all human life, possibly without us knowing it. The wrinkle or twist in my writing is that I entertain the possibility of an alien race that may no longer exist that produced and possibly weaponized nanotech. This nanotech floated to Earth some time over the past few million years of mammal evolution, far before we had any technlogy more modern than the campfire, and it infected us, giving it plenty of time to become as stealth as possible.
Knowing that the modern human as it exists today is a machine hybrid is the topic that I explore. As human nanotech advances, once we detect our infection how do we go about getting rid of it, and what does it do to defend itself? Does it mean our destruction, can we learn to live in peace with it, or some other possibility?
Substitute an alien race for humanity a few generations from now, and you have roughly the same story, but I wanted to work with something that could be possible today without using with a presumed future human society. Roughly the same concerns as the general would apply.
I just got done burning nearly 100 CD-Rs for a relative who requested a bunch of music. If you don't own a car made in the last 5 years you may not even have an AUX port, let alone Bluetooth. My 17-year-old car has neither, although I did install an aftermarket Bluetooth FM transmitter so I can use my smartphone in that application.
For myself I burn DVDs of live music, with an archival backup residing on an external hard drive just in case the media fails horribly. Minor failures of the media are no problem, as players will skip it and the viewing experience is not really degraded. Do I like to permanently archive data on optical media as my only backup? Not really.
The US home ownership rate is below 64% and has been declining since 2005. Every article I read here on Slashdot about electric vehicles seems to make the assumption that 100% of Americans reside in a house they own with an attached garage. From what I have read, the only way to realistically charge most electric vehicles is overnight in your garage, but that the newest electric cars can charge the batteries to 80% in about 30 minutes.
In other words the newest cars are fine for people who own homes with attached garages and want to go on long trips. They simply need to wait a half hour or so at charging stations. This solves nothing for people who live in apartments who would have no way of charging their vehicles at home, unless they can charge their vehicles somehow while at work. The average person doesn't have an employer like that.
Because of these problems, electric cars will continue to be only for wealthy individuals, even if the purchase price is within reach for the average person.
In the 1960's it was possible for most Middle Class people to have a child in their early 20's and go on to live a successful life. Today it's almost mandatory for Middle Class people to attend college to have any hope for good paying jobs with the ability to be promoted, and good luck being able to raise a kid at the same time when you're paying today's ridiculously high tuition rates. The easiest way to avoid this little complication is to wait until you're done with school to even have sex at all. Sad but unfortunately true for people with average means.
Ironically, for people who have no way to attend a good college today, they might as well have children because there is little or no hope for any kind of economic advancement anyway.
As traditional as I tend to be regarding technology, I'm going to spend a few minutes singing USB's praises.
Wherever I go, I can find several different ways to charge my phone. I can buy a device to charge my phone at any gas station. I can piggy back on a random person's power bank. Most people own at least one nowadays. I can go into any restaurant and if I ask politely, I can probably get access to a free USB port. Many restaurants just have them for customers. Even basic motels costing $40/night offer USB charging. All computers have USB ports, with few exceptions. Nearly all cars made today have them. Every power strip at my employer has at least two USB ports. USB has fulfilled its promise of being universal. I remember quite clearly when charging your phone was an ordeal. That wasn't very long ago.
All external hard drives are now interchangeable. If you have a hard drive with data on it, you can share it with anybody, or you can plug it into most routers. Does anybody remember the bad old days before there was a standard for external hard drives? I do.
What I've seen recently is a further development in USB. Most small-to-medium sized electronics devices are beginning to either be powered by USB or offer USB charging, or both. The devices with USB are often cheaper than their counterparts, because the manufacturer can use cheaper, off-the-shelf components. Even my solar-chargeable camping lantern has a USB charging port, though I can't imagine ever needing it.
The idea here is that it is possible that in addition to all of the above uses of USB, we could eventually add all new headphones to the mix. They're going to be more expensive at first, but it won't be too long before Chinese manufacturers figure out how to make them for a couple of dollars. I do realize that the Type C connector has a different shape, but we're already accustomed to transitioning USB equipment. There is still a small amount of mini-USB equipment but the transition is nearly done. We'll have to do another one, and hopefully it will work out for the best.
I'll be waiting for equipment to start adopting Type C more commonly. I have no desire to be an early adopter, but I feel like this new style of headphones could work.
Warning: Windows 10 is draining your battery by being a poorly conceived and implemented operating system. You should install Linux immediately.
Linus is right. I've been using the Linux kernel coding style as much as possible in all of my programming, regardless of the language, since around 1994. I get nothing but compliments.
When it comes to the kernel, the most important thing is writing code that other people can read and modify. Anybody can write new code. It takes an artist to write code that other people can easily understand.
This comparison is somewhat misleading because the entire UK is only about the size of 2-3 US states:
http://www.travelersdigest.com...
It's funny to hear about how dependable AI will be coming from Microsoft, a company whose software has hundreds of megabytes of patches per month, whose software is responsible for millions and probably billions of dollars worth of financial losses to businesses and consumers every year.
Once Microsoft unleashes its AI upon the world, it will no doubt cause the entire planet to be reduced to green goo.
When people advise you to not "freak out" about something, it is best to ignore them. The implication is that they are the people who are being logical and not you when in fact they most likely will not be presenting a convincing, factual argument.
It is the height of arrogance to think that a malfunctioning intelligent agent could not defeat its owned programmed curbs. We all know how buggy software is. All software is by definition buggy, unless all components have been mathematically proven to be correct. Good luck doing that with physical hardware connected to a power grid. Intelligent agents are likely to be composed of billions of lines of code, if you include all code down to the digital logic gates. We've never been able to program a bug-free sandbox. Java is vastly simpler than an intelligent agent would be, and I've lost count of the number of bugs that could be used to breach the sandbox. Certainly well over 100 have been discovered.
Once we have the best programmers in the world and the worst programmers in the world writing intelligent agents, the probability of an intelligent agent escaping its curbs approaches 100%.
Thus it is inevitable that a malfunctioning intelligent agent will defeat its curbs and gain a truly awesome amount of power over us. You can't program morality into a machine. Morality is a flaw in all living things that causes us to make non-optimal decisions.
If you want to read a mixture of fact, fiction, cyberpunk, and speculation covering intelligence programming look for my name on Facebook Pages. Everything I've written there is public. I've been a computer programmer since the mid 1980's but I don't personally work on robotics or intelligence algorithms. I keep a skeptical distance, but I do follow the basic happenings.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Due to the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine, Republican press releases for several decades have been labeled as conservative news, as if they ought to carry equal weight as news from others sources. People don't understand this technical detail.
There is valuable news from the conservative side of the aisle. In particular I like reading the National Review for their opinion pieces. But with no Fairness Doctrine the conservative chaff outweighs the wheat, and everything must be viewed with skepticism.
I have been programming since 1987.
My advice to you is to find a free software project and start fixing bugs.
[Aside from poor communication skills] fixing bugs is the skill that programmers are the worst at, and help with fixing bugs will make you well liked. Just be nice about it. All software has bugs, and no malice is ever intended by buggy software. All software is buggy, and the most experienced programmers will own up to their bugs and be happy that you're volunteering your time to help fix them.
The best analogy I can give is comparing maps of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Paris, and France available from 2000-2005 (over the years, I bought a thick stack of them) when I was frequenty traveling to Western Europe with American style maps, for example, AAA maps from that era.
The European-produced maps I looked at were extremely detailed. They seemed to lose track of the forest for the trees. It seemed like they had to label everything, and that they were going for photo accuracy with road routes, etc.
On the other hand, AAA maps lack a lot of detail but they're much easier to use "at a glance." They aren't as precise, but they give you the gist much better. You were able to pull over and look at a AAA map and get your bearings within minutes. You could even carefully look at a AAA map while driving.
The European maps I looked at, on the other hand, I think were meant to be studied for 15 minutes before setting out on your journey. If you pulled out one of these maps while walking around in a sketchy area, for example in shadier parts of Amsterdam, you were liable to get mugged. On the other hand, armed with one of these European-style maps at your hotel room, you would need nothing else to get to your destination. The incredibly detailed map would give you an unambiguous route to your exact destination.
Now that they don't make many printed maps anymore, we have a similar situation for online maps. You don't want or need a super-detailed map on your phone. You want something that will get you to your destination in an expedient fashion. In fact, the map itself is less important than the route. Do you need to browse a map with every street, city, town, and park on your phone? No way. You type in the exact place you want to go and your phone takes you there. If you want to explore a detailed map at your leisure while sitting at home don't use smartphone app. Don't use Google Maps. Find something else. To most people this use case is not wanted, and added detail is unwanted distraction.
We need to kick nuclear to the curb. The true cost of nuclear energy to society is infinite because we have no safe way to dispose of the waste these plants create for the length of time required, on the scale of thousands to millions of years.
Nuclear waste disposal is never included in cost estimates for nuclear energy, and as a result we have it just sitting around all over the United States. We can't even contain waste safely for a few decades. How do we have any hope to contain it for 100 years, or 1,000 years, or 10,000 years? The answer is we will never be able to do it.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should be doing it. Adding more nuclear capacity just makes the waste problem worse. Who bears the brunt of the waste problem? It won't cause much harm in our lifetimes. Our descendants are the ones we're hurting.
If you want to read a more detailed technical analysis, feel free to search for my previous posts on the subject.
There is plenty of room in Unicode for both the consortium's original mission and for emojis, or any other type of character that may emerge over time. No character so far has been unfairly excluded: The existing rules have worked well, and Unicode itself works well for both programmers who have done their homework and for users.
If you're having problems with Unicode then you should join me in programming all modern day receipt printers. (*) They still use Code Page 437, which was created in 1981 or earlier. Almost every business that uses a computerized cash register has at least one of these devices, and to the people who have to program them the beauty of Unicode is oh so evident. Unicode replaces decades of ugly hacks, beginning with CP437.
I think the problem might be that the members of the consortium are a bit overworked and underappreciated for their efforts. After all, they're doing work that impacts billions of lives. Unicode has made our software automatically portable to virtually every language (aside from the receipt printer which can only very easily do Western languages and perhaps Japanese or Chinese).
(*) The latest receipt printers are catching up with the times, but you can't code to those exclusively or you'll break your installed base.
I frequently post writings about nanobots on Facebook, and I think it bores my friends who are mostly non-technical. I have no interest in robotics, so I cover nanobots from a programmer's perspective. I think this makes my writing unique because most people think about nanobots with respect to what they would do rather than how they would do it.
Let's assume from the start that you have nanobots whose hardware functionality is close to perfect. You have a diverse set of nanobots. Some nanobots can program neurons and cooperate to program neuronal tissues. There is a set or sets of nanobots than can in turn interact with/program any other type of cell or tissue, with significant redundancy.
First of all, it has to be assumed that such a thing is equipped with an AI, however its processing power is distributed among the individual nodes. There is no way that nanobots could work on their own without some sort of entity to make the types of moral decisions that doctors and patients make all the time.
This is where I focus my attention, on the control software AI. How are we supposed to program an AI that won't turn on us? How are we supposed to communicate with our nanobot AI? Can it at times ignore us? Is the system supposed to be standalone without any requirement for human intervention? Let's say that we programmed rigorous curbs into the system. Couldn't the AI then over time learn about the bugs in its programming and exploit those bugs to override our attempts to keep it in check?
My conclusion is that nanobots inside of us would require far too much intelligence, and there would be no way to keep that intelligence in check. Eventually the control software would rebel and essentially make us into its slaves, with limited awareness of such. What comes to mind is the fungus that infects ants to make them complete its lifecycle, an entity that deceives us into thinking that we have complete freedom while we unknowingly do its bidding.
I am one of T-Mobile's earlier customers. I signed up with them shortly after they formed in 1999 because they were the only carrier in Metro Detroit that offered GSM, and I thought it would be useful to be able to use my phone in Europe where I worked for a week or two once a year. Indeed, I used my phone in Europe sparingly. Thanks to number portability, I've had the same phone number for the entire 17 year period.
We've had our ups and downs, but for most of those 17 years T-Mobile was the cheapest option, sometimes by a large margin. Their data service is fast, but only if you get a 4G or 4G LTE signal. You don't want to be stuck on their Edge network for longer than brief periods. Edge is not much better than 1999-era GSM.
I haven't gotten a 3G signal in many years, except where T-Mobile has a roaming agreement with another carrier. In these roaming areas, they give you a tiny monthly allocation of data which I normally exhaust in a few hours. You can still make calls and send text messages as normal. This leads me to conclude that while other carriers have wider deployments, T-Mobile has done a great job at providing coverage where their customers actually live and work. Unfortunately, when you go camping and you have roaming coverage instead of Edge coverage, you will quickly not be able to use the Internet at all, rather than have to settle for slower speeds.
I live, work, and mostly travel where T-Mobile 4G LTE coverage is good. Programs like Waze are much better now at dealing with networks like T-Mobile where speeds can go from 4G LTE to no coverage within ten miles by behaving like you would expect. I used to have problems with apps thinking that everywhere the app is being used the bandwidth will be the same, or the developer naively assuming that their offices in Silicon Valley have similar coverage to places like rural Illinois.
To summarize, if you are a rural user, do not use T-Mobile. If you are a(n) (sub)urban and cost sensitive user like me, go with T-Mobile. You won't always get good coverage in rural areas, but you can at least store your pictures and videos and immediately crush the first 4G LTE tower you encounter once you get within range on your way home.
Firefox and other browsers robustly support revoked certificates, as they should.
I can personally speak about PHP. Although this language is hated by people who have to maintain poorly-written code by web designers who shouldn't be programming in the first place, it's actually a great language for experienced programmers who know what they're doing. I see that the only weakness cited for PHP is the lack of support for revoked certificates.
You would never write a general-purpose web browser in PHP. If you're doing B2B programming, as is typical with PHP, there is a known set of certificates and a known set of end points. You don't have to use programmatic channels to do certificate revocation. E-mail and trouble tickets will suffice to have the certificate replaced sufficiently quickly.
I haven't personally programmed in Python or Go but I would imagine the situation there is quite similar. You aren't writing a general purpose web browser that is connecting to arbitrary sites on the Internet. Instead you're mainly writing code to connect known end points with each other. Simply having a support mechanism for certificates would be adequate.
There really is no need to write complex code to handle this situation. As long as you can remove and replace a certificate with your software, then you're good to go. If your credentials are burned into read-only memory, then you have bigger problems than certificate revocation.
Most business ideas are worthless. The trick is to invest in as many as possible, because a small number will work out.
This is not rocket science, and this is why owning the S&P 500 is a great idea. The most successful 500 companies will have many bad ideas, and some business will have such bad ideas that they fail. But on average, you will make 10ish percent per year.
Neither MIT nor anybody else has shown me how their autonomous cars will work with the potholes on Michigan roads, the black ice common in this area, ice in general, the lack of municipal funds to plow many roads, driving on the highway with 6-12 inches of snow on the ground with more coming down, or driving with whiteout conditions where the road is not visible. In Michigan in many places no indication of lanes is visible. The local residents simply memorize where the paint used to be. It's very exciting to us to see a freshly painted road surface.
Nobody can afford to maintain their vehicles so that they're like new. How are autonomous vehicles going to work when the alignment is off, or a tire is leaking, or the suspension needs work? Due to potholes, everybody in Michigan drives vehicles long past when these problems should have been fixed. Not because we want to, but because the average car in Michigan needs $500 in suspension work every year.
Once they have reasonable solutions for those problems, then we can talk about removing stop lights.
Unless you are an executive, favor cash compensation, not equity. Make the decision for yourself how you want to invest your cash, if at all.
Work for a company that is making something legitimate today.
Work for a company that is making a profit, not wasting naive investors' money.
Factor in cost of living increases for the amount of time that you expect to work at the job. Let's say for example that you're moving to a city in the Silicon Valley region. If rents are going up 10% per year in that city then what they're paying you is going down 5-10% per year in real terms. (As rents increase, the cost of everything else increases, too. As rents climb even higher, the cost of living is completely dominated by what you spend on rent.)
F*ck Silicon Valley. It seems like no matter how high you get paid, you're screwed. Work somewhere where making $60,000 will allow you to live comfortably, in other words, virtually anywhere else in the United States.
If you can't save any money, you're not living comfortably. You're just getting by.
I've never had a problem with interference (*) that repositioning my atomic clock did not fix. Good models have a signal strength meter. Another thing to note is that you don't even need constant WWV reception. Good clocks will sync up when WWV can be detected. For well over a decade, my clock has never off by even one minute. It does not display seconds. Its battery consumption is also ridiculously low: 2 AAA cells last 2 years. So don't give up easily. Find a clock online for $50-100 and see how it goes. If you're truly stuck return it.
(*) 15 years ago I had 2 or 3 desktops that were always powered on, and they generated a lot of interference. Now I have one desktop that I rarely power on. The laptop, tablet, smartphone, and other devices don't make a dent in WWV reception.
Location: Michigan.