The REAL impact is that the rate of consumption of natural resources by 7 BILLION humans has LONG AGO surpassed the ability of the Earth to replenish itself.
Actually, we're only a quarter of the way to that point, according to PNAS.
And you're right to be angry. But being angry doesn't justify killing someone else, even if that other person is at fault for making you angry. Nor does it justify inflating the magnitude of punishment, especially to the point that the consequences of that punishment become a burden on society. That's just using the legal system as the instrument of an emotional temper tantrum.
If the standard is that people who do things that through several links of causality are guilty of murder, probably everyone is guilty of murder. Economic crimes cause excess deaths because of opportunity costs. Do any of the companies you invest in do financially dodgy stuff? How about companies invested in by your mutual funds? Loaned money by your bank?
Here's what I say to my kids when they get caught up in some kind of Internet jihad: there are 30000 tons of brussels sprouts produced in the USA every year (7500 acres planted x 8000 pounds/acre typical yield). So clearly some people like brussels sprouts, peculiar as that is. If you take a large enough group of people you can find exemplars for any behavior, preference and outcome you need to "prove" any point (e.g., "brussels sprouts are yummy"). Everything that Gamergaters say about feminists is true -- of somebody, somewhere. It proves nothing about what a typical feminist is like.
To get at the truth you need to do two things: (1) find aggregate data which tells you whether your generalization has even a chance of being true; the disaggregate that data to find the kernel of truth that makes your over-generalization feel convincing. It's bound to be true of some people, and that's where you need to focus your attention.
So lets take the notion that white males are discriminated against educationally. The aggregate data clearly shows this is not generally true. For males age 25-29, 55% of Asians have a college degree, 37% of whites, 17% of blacks, and 13% of hispanics. In total 31% of males have college degrees and 37% of females. This paints a picture where white males don't get quite as much education as females, but are still in a very strong position compared to their black and hispanic counterparts. Some of the male/female educational disparity may be due to high-paying trade jobs generally being more open to men; if you look at income, the median male income is $860/week vs. $706/week for women.
So the overall picture is mixed, but for the most part the picture looks relatively rosy from white men in general. But no individual white man is in exactly the position of men in general. It's clear that a lot of white men are in a bad situation now, which they may attribute to benefits going to their hispanic or black neighbors, but in fact those group are in a similar or worse place if you compare hispanics and blacks of similar educational attainment.
Uniquely in the developed world mortality for American men aged 45-54 has increased; men who should be near the apex of their earning capacity and benefiting from a reduction in smoking and advances in medical treatment of degenerative diseases that start to kick it that age. But if you disaggregate that data you see that it's driven by a massive increase in mortality for men with only a high school education.
What this tells me is that we have an economic class problem in this country. Some white men look around and think the weight of all those hispanics and blacks are making the boat sink, but the real problem is that the boat has a hole in it.
Hmm. The only pipelines that have the 2m + ID required for a hyperloop are water pipelines, and those ginormous mains are typically not elevated, but rather buried. Sometimes they're bored through rock and the walls cast in place like NYC's Tunnel #3, a project which when it completes in 2020 will have taken fifty years to bridge 100 km.
Of course the biggest advantage as you point out is that the weight of a hyperloop is going to weigh much less than a pipeline that carries liquid, so you wouldn't have to bury it. But I think it's likely that the project will be unique, and I doubt you can estimate it precisely just by extrapolating from experience with water or oil pipelines. I think they'll have to build a non-trivially sized working model first.
Well, golly, I'm an engineer too, so I know engineers aren't infallible. In fact we can be downright stupid. But usually not so stupid that people outside our field understand problems in our field better than we do.
You'd think that the engineers designing this system would have thought of that, but apparently they aren't as smart as us random people on Slashdot are.
I really like Apple hardware. I bought the Macbook Pro I'm writing this on from a Mac fan on the upgrade treadmill. I'm not a big fan of MacOS, I prefer Mint or Xubuntu, or if it's a server, Debian, but MacOS works well enough I can't be bothered to replace it since I do most of my work in virtual machines anyway, and now increasingly in the cloud. Given the build quality a used relatively high end mac is -- not exactly a good deal, but a good enough deal for hardware you like.
Anyhow, having lived to see Digital Equipment go from a tech juggernaut to being sold off to Compaq, then seeing Compaq sold to HP and HP turn into the sick man of the computer industry, I'd say don't be making any 200 year predictions. The thing that keeps a company going is cash, which Apple is swimming in, but a few years of lackluster profits and investors will start to think about better uses for that cash (e.g. selling the company's parts off and pocketing the proceeds).
Most of the science fiction-y things people imagine doing outside the immediate vicinity of the Earth (e.g. mining the asteroid belt) are dependent upon two things becoming much cheaper: moving things around, and generating energy (almost certainly nuclear if we're talking about doing stuff with trans-Neptunian objects). It's fairly certain that nothing very exciting other than science will get done outside the immediate vicinity of the Earth until those things become a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper. After they do, all bets are off because people will do just about anything for the hell of it if it's not prohibitively expensive.
Well, by that argument we're all doomed because the universe will eventually slide into entropic heat death. In the long term every company that enjoys a dominant position is going to screw up and lose that position. So we need specific reasons why Apple is going to screw up in the relatively short term, and I can think of only one: the expectations game.
Apple's always had its share of product flops, but now that it's iconic leader Jobs is dead, we look back at his admittedly brilliant tenure with rose-tinted glasses. We're looking for signs that the mojo is gone, and every time a product is less than a home run it's inevitably seen as the harbinger of Apple's demise. The truth is that while Jobs is certainly responsible for Apple's design-centric corporate culture, he didn't actually design any of Apple's big hits. The design choices that were actually his doing were really not very good.
Musk smack-talking Apple has a considerable element of strategic self-interest involved. Not that it doesn't ever happen, mind you, but if he can create the impression that only losers who can't get a job at Tesla work for Apple it makes competing with Apple for employees easier. The uncertainty about whether Apple can follow up on its past successes in a post-Job era is an opportunity for him to create FUD. In any case while Apple engineering has been good, it's not the secret sauce of Apple's success; design is. But it is true if enough people believe the magic (ugh) is gone and never coming back, then Apple won't be able to attract top talent, or stave off investors demanding quick financial results.
Apple is by any stretch of the imagination very well positioned now, and all things being equal being well-positioned at present is favorable to your future. Will they lose their mojo eventually? Sure. But nobody will really know when that will be until it's apparent in retrospect.
key phrase: "People have cobbled things together "
And that is the problem. All those nice little bits and pieces are just that: bits and pieces, poorly documented, often not handling everything.
Well yes, that's exactly my point. We need more attention to the SDR stuff, hacking that would be waaay more impactful than hacking some obscure Chinese handheld; more attention to this area will draw more effort.
Not that I have any criticism of the people doing this; you hack what interests you; often what you've got lying around. Good for them. I just wanted people to know about the super-cheap SDR dongles they can get. If they're interested in this radio project they'll be interested in that too.
Never said it wasn't my opinion, but practically any assertion about the future has to be regarded as an opinion. But I think it's a reasonable opinion, because it's based on only three assumptions (1) if the binge on program is successful, then other companies will offer same deal; (2) that those companies will subsequently try to differentiate their offerings in a way their competitors can't copy; (3) Once they have successfully differentiated their offerings they will structure those offerings in the way that maximizes the revenue they can extract. None of these assumptions is particularly radical, they're all based on commonplace marketing strategies that telecom providers actually used in the past when they competed based on access to content.
To be clear, I have no problem with the proximate consequences of the program, so if it's possible to forestall the product differentiation stage of my presumed scenario I have no problem with anyone providing meter free video service, even though this technically violates some definitions of net neutrality. As long as vendors are still essentially competing based on network service. But since Verizon Communications Inc. v. FCC there is no legal barrier to any service providers negotiating exclusive or discriminatory side deals or monetizing access to certain resources. It's all legal and good for the bottom line.
How do you think they figured out the formula for the volume of a sphere? Or proved that the area of a circle was proportional to the square of its radius when it's impossible to construct a square of the same area in a finite number of steps with ruler-and-compass methods? The same techniques were rediscovered in China around the 3rd century CE, again as a result of trying to calculate the area of a circle.
I think the basic ideas behind integral calculus are pretty much inevitable when you have mathematicians messing with geometry problems that can only be solved with successive approximations -- although inevitable only because eventually someone really smart will get bored with doing things the long way.
What's distinctive about modern calculus is it's connections to analytic geometry and algebra (algebra with good notation, I might add). This allows us to generalize problems in a way that transcends geometric resemblance, e.g., the area under the curve of any polynomial.
it's nonsense to criticise the plan on the grounds of what you fear it could become.
Not if my fear is well-founded. I speak as someone who's worked for many years with telecom companies as a developer/business partner, and I can tell you they hate being in the commodity bandwidth business and they're always looking for a way to differentiate themselves from their competitors. The Binge On program is such an attempt, but it's not a sustainable differentiation because anyone can copy it. So what's the next logical step?
Is it inevitable that phone companies who do this will attempt to negotiate exclusive or discriminatory deals with content providers? Well, not in the same sense that if I release a rock from my hand it will fall, but few things in business are. If you want to be nitpicky, I suppose you can say the "Binge On" program is a good one; it's the fact that telecom companies can favor one some content over others is bad, and that in turn is contingent upon the assumption that businesses act in ways that maximize their profits.
It's only a slippery slope if you don't show a reason for the particular consequences you anticipate. Otherwise you can't argue about consequences at all.
Well, I'm convinced people have forgotten what it was like in the pre-iPhone days, when cell phone companies set themselves up as gatekeepers. You'd have a phone with a camera, but often you couldn't get the pictures off it without purchasing a monthly "picture mail" service. You could look up news and information, but only on the phone company's crappy and expensive WAP information service.
This represents the state to which the phone companies would like to return: where they can monetize the things you do with your phone rather sell bulk bandwidth as a commodity whose price and value you can (oh, horror!) easily compare with price and value other carriers. They'd like the comparison to be based on intangible, hard-to-measure things (e.g., is Hulu more important to me than YouTube?).
Now the T-Mobile offering has the advantage that it applies to services that many people demonstrably want. But you have to ask where this leads. What it'll inevitably lead to is various carriers cutting exclusive deals with various providers. As long as carriers have to compete in a total apples-to-apples manner, well fine. But what every businessman (I know I've been there) wants is to get out of that and offer something to his clients that will make it painful to switch. "Commodity" is a dirty word for vendors, which means it is a very happy word -- in the long run at least -- for consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
And she weighs the same as a duck.
How is it any less likely then any other combination?
By having only one way it can happen. There's 6 ways you can get 5 heads in 6 tosses, etc.
The REAL impact is that the rate of consumption of natural resources by 7 BILLION humans has LONG AGO surpassed the ability of the Earth to replenish itself.
Actually, we're only a quarter of the way to that point, according to PNAS.
And you're right to be angry. But being angry doesn't justify killing someone else, even if that other person is at fault for making you angry. Nor does it justify inflating the magnitude of punishment, especially to the point that the consequences of that punishment become a burden on society. That's just using the legal system as the instrument of an emotional temper tantrum.
If the standard is that people who do things that through several links of causality are guilty of murder, probably everyone is guilty of murder. Economic crimes cause excess deaths because of opportunity costs. Do any of the companies you invest in do financially dodgy stuff? How about companies invested in by your mutual funds? Loaned money by your bank?
Call them idiot criminals if you want. They should still be rounded up by law enforcement and executed.
Why execute them? Because they make you angry?
Well, they were starting from much, much higher up. It just supports my contention that the problem is a contraction in opportunity in general.
Here's what I say to my kids when they get caught up in some kind of Internet jihad: there are 30000 tons of brussels sprouts produced in the USA every year (7500 acres planted x 8000 pounds/acre typical yield). So clearly some people like brussels sprouts, peculiar as that is. If you take a large enough group of people you can find exemplars for any behavior, preference and outcome you need to "prove" any point (e.g., "brussels sprouts are yummy"). Everything that Gamergaters say about feminists is true -- of somebody, somewhere. It proves nothing about what a typical feminist is like.
To get at the truth you need to do two things: (1) find aggregate data which tells you whether your generalization has even a chance of being true; the disaggregate that data to find the kernel of truth that makes your over-generalization feel convincing. It's bound to be true of some people, and that's where you need to focus your attention.
So lets take the notion that white males are discriminated against educationally. The aggregate data clearly shows this is not generally true. For males age 25-29, 55% of Asians have a college degree, 37% of whites, 17% of blacks, and 13% of hispanics. In total 31% of males have college degrees and 37% of females. This paints a picture where white males don't get quite as much education as females, but are still in a very strong position compared to their black and hispanic counterparts. Some of the male/female educational disparity may be due to high-paying trade jobs generally being more open to men; if you look at income, the median male income is $860/week vs. $706/week for women.
So the overall picture is mixed, but for the most part the picture looks relatively rosy from white men in general. But no individual white man is in exactly the position of men in general. It's clear that a lot of white men are in a bad situation now, which they may attribute to benefits going to their hispanic or black neighbors, but in fact those group are in a similar or worse place if you compare hispanics and blacks of similar educational attainment.
Uniquely in the developed world mortality for American men aged 45-54 has increased; men who should be near the apex of their earning capacity and benefiting from a reduction in smoking and advances in medical treatment of degenerative diseases that start to kick it that age. But if you disaggregate that data you see that it's driven by a massive increase in mortality for men with only a high school education.
What this tells me is that we have an economic class problem in this country. Some white men look around and think the weight of all those hispanics and blacks are making the boat sink, but the real problem is that the boat has a hole in it.
Hmm. The only pipelines that have the 2m + ID required for a hyperloop are water pipelines, and those ginormous mains are typically not elevated, but rather buried. Sometimes they're bored through rock and the walls cast in place like NYC's Tunnel #3, a project which when it completes in 2020 will have taken fifty years to bridge 100 km.
Of course the biggest advantage as you point out is that the weight of a hyperloop is going to weigh much less than a pipeline that carries liquid, so you wouldn't have to bury it. But I think it's likely that the project will be unique, and I doubt you can estimate it precisely just by extrapolating from experience with water or oil pipelines. I think they'll have to build a non-trivially sized working model first.
Well, golly, I'm an engineer too, so I know engineers aren't infallible. In fact we can be downright stupid. But usually not so stupid that people outside our field understand problems in our field better than we do.
This is where I stopped reading what you wrote.
You'd think that the engineers designing this system would have thought of that, but apparently they aren't as smart as us random people on Slashdot are.
I really like Apple hardware. I bought the Macbook Pro I'm writing this on from a Mac fan on the upgrade treadmill. I'm not a big fan of MacOS, I prefer Mint or Xubuntu, or if it's a server, Debian, but MacOS works well enough I can't be bothered to replace it since I do most of my work in virtual machines anyway, and now increasingly in the cloud. Given the build quality a used relatively high end mac is -- not exactly a good deal, but a good enough deal for hardware you like.
Anyhow, having lived to see Digital Equipment go from a tech juggernaut to being sold off to Compaq, then seeing Compaq sold to HP and HP turn into the sick man of the computer industry, I'd say don't be making any 200 year predictions. The thing that keeps a company going is cash, which Apple is swimming in, but a few years of lackluster profits and investors will start to think about better uses for that cash (e.g. selling the company's parts off and pocketing the proceeds).
That's how I read it.
Most of the science fiction-y things people imagine doing outside the immediate vicinity of the Earth (e.g. mining the asteroid belt) are dependent upon two things becoming much cheaper: moving things around, and generating energy (almost certainly nuclear if we're talking about doing stuff with trans-Neptunian objects). It's fairly certain that nothing very exciting other than science will get done outside the immediate vicinity of the Earth until those things become a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper. After they do, all bets are off because people will do just about anything for the hell of it if it's not prohibitively expensive.
Well, by that argument we're all doomed because the universe will eventually slide into entropic heat death. In the long term every company that enjoys a dominant position is going to screw up and lose that position. So we need specific reasons why Apple is going to screw up in the relatively short term, and I can think of only one: the expectations game.
Apple's always had its share of product flops, but now that it's iconic leader Jobs is dead, we look back at his admittedly brilliant tenure with rose-tinted glasses. We're looking for signs that the mojo is gone, and every time a product is less than a home run it's inevitably seen as the harbinger of Apple's demise. The truth is that while Jobs is certainly responsible for Apple's design-centric corporate culture, he didn't actually design any of Apple's big hits. The design choices that were actually his doing were really not very good.
Musk smack-talking Apple has a considerable element of strategic self-interest involved. Not that it doesn't ever happen, mind you, but if he can create the impression that only losers who can't get a job at Tesla work for Apple it makes competing with Apple for employees easier. The uncertainty about whether Apple can follow up on its past successes in a post-Job era is an opportunity for him to create FUD. In any case while Apple engineering has been good, it's not the secret sauce of Apple's success; design is. But it is true if enough people believe the magic (ugh) is gone and never coming back, then Apple won't be able to attract top talent, or stave off investors demanding quick financial results.
Apple is by any stretch of the imagination very well positioned now, and all things being equal being well-positioned at present is favorable to your future. Will they lose their mojo eventually? Sure. But nobody will really know when that will be until it's apparent in retrospect.
That the area of a circle was other than such-and-so.
key phrase: "People have cobbled things together "
And that is the problem. All those nice little bits and pieces are just that: bits and pieces, poorly documented, often not handling everything.
Well yes, that's exactly my point. We need more attention to the SDR stuff, hacking that would be waaay more impactful than hacking some obscure Chinese handheld; more attention to this area will draw more effort.
Not that I have any criticism of the people doing this; you hack what interests you; often what you've got lying around. Good for them. I just wanted people to know about the super-cheap SDR dongles they can get. If they're interested in this radio project they'll be interested in that too.
Never said it wasn't my opinion, but practically any assertion about the future has to be regarded as an opinion. But I think it's a reasonable opinion, because it's based on only three assumptions (1) if the binge on program is successful, then other companies will offer same deal; (2) that those companies will subsequently try to differentiate their offerings in a way their competitors can't copy; (3) Once they have successfully differentiated their offerings they will structure those offerings in the way that maximizes the revenue they can extract. None of these assumptions is particularly radical, they're all based on commonplace marketing strategies that telecom providers actually used in the past when they competed based on access to content.
To be clear, I have no problem with the proximate consequences of the program, so if it's possible to forestall the product differentiation stage of my presumed scenario I have no problem with anyone providing meter free video service, even though this technically violates some definitions of net neutrality. As long as vendors are still essentially competing based on network service. But since Verizon Communications Inc. v. FCC there is no legal barrier to any service providers negotiating exclusive or discriminatory side deals or monetizing access to certain resources. It's all legal and good for the bottom line.
How do you think they figured out the formula for the volume of a sphere? Or proved that the area of a circle was proportional to the square of its radius when it's impossible to construct a square of the same area in a finite number of steps with ruler-and-compass methods? The same techniques were rediscovered in China around the 3rd century CE, again as a result of trying to calculate the area of a circle.
I think the basic ideas behind integral calculus are pretty much inevitable when you have mathematicians messing with geometry problems that can only be solved with successive approximations -- although inevitable only because eventually someone really smart will get bored with doing things the long way.
What's distinctive about modern calculus is it's connections to analytic geometry and algebra (algebra with good notation, I might add). This allows us to generalize problems in a way that transcends geometric resemblance, e.g., the area under the curve of any polynomial.
it's nonsense to criticise the plan on the grounds of what you fear it could become.
Not if my fear is well-founded. I speak as someone who's worked for many years with telecom companies as a developer/business partner, and I can tell you they hate being in the commodity bandwidth business and they're always looking for a way to differentiate themselves from their competitors. The Binge On program is such an attempt, but it's not a sustainable differentiation because anyone can copy it. So what's the next logical step?
Is it inevitable that phone companies who do this will attempt to negotiate exclusive or discriminatory deals with content providers? Well, not in the same sense that if I release a rock from my hand it will fall, but few things in business are. If you want to be nitpicky, I suppose you can say the "Binge On" program is a good one; it's the fact that telecom companies can favor one some content over others is bad, and that in turn is contingent upon the assumption that businesses act in ways that maximize their profits.
It's only a slippery slope if you don't show a reason for the particular consequences you anticipate. Otherwise you can't argue about consequences at all.
This is true. I have to confess I never looked up the details of the TLS handshake negotiation.
Well, I'm convinced people have forgotten what it was like in the pre-iPhone days, when cell phone companies set themselves up as gatekeepers. You'd have a phone with a camera, but often you couldn't get the pictures off it without purchasing a monthly "picture mail" service. You could look up news and information, but only on the phone company's crappy and expensive WAP information service.
This represents the state to which the phone companies would like to return: where they can monetize the things you do with your phone rather sell bulk bandwidth as a commodity whose price and value you can (oh, horror!) easily compare with price and value other carriers. They'd like the comparison to be based on intangible, hard-to-measure things (e.g., is Hulu more important to me than YouTube?).
Now the T-Mobile offering has the advantage that it applies to services that many people demonstrably want. But you have to ask where this leads. What it'll inevitably lead to is various carriers cutting exclusive deals with various providers. As long as carriers have to compete in a total apples-to-apples manner, well fine. But what every businessman (I know I've been there) wants is to get out of that and offer something to his clients that will make it painful to switch. "Commodity" is a dirty word for vendors, which means it is a very happy word -- in the long run at least -- for consumers.
It's a relative thing. Script kiddies are elite relative to Slashdot editors.
Or a $300 laptop. Or even a $40 tablet -- the libraries have been ported to Android.