Well, one of the scenarios I'm referring to is the collapse of a major land-based ice sheet like Greenland or Antarctica. At present evidence does not point to any imminent dramatic collapse in Greenland, although it will contribute somewhat to sea level rise. Antarctica is more of an open question.
In any case we have no firm basis to predict that Antarctica will do anything dramatic in the next 80 years, but there is evidence that it may contribute at higher rates than it is now.
As things stand, we aren't looking at the end of civilization by a long shot -- although a certain mentality needs that kind of thing to get up and do something. What we are looking at is major expenses, probably in the trillions of dollars for the US.
Early projections had wide uncertainties, which means that the upper limits based on some projection technique could be quite eye popping. However so far as I know there was never any widely held scientific opinion that there would be a 3m rise by 2020. More typical projections from about 20 years ago were talking about maybe 12 cm against an 1800s baseline, which turn out to be pretty accurate. However the upper range was on the order of 30 cm and the lower showed an actual decline to pre-20th century levels by 2020 -- which goes to show there was still considerable uncertainty.
Estimates from back in the mid 90s were for a 40cm to 65cm rise by 2100, mainly based on thermal expansion. That's a fairly safe assumption: warmer atmosphere = warmer ocean = more ocean volume.
Now there have been hypothetical scenarios proposed in which sea level could rise rapidly. Obviously those have not happened... yet. But as they are based on certain discrete and unpredictable events that they haven't happened is not evidence that they won't happen. These events are not particularly exotic in terms of the Earth's climate history, but would be unprecedented in recorded human history.
This is an absolute monarchy after all, so it's really more a claim of authority over than a grant of rights to.
The only constitutional limitation of the Saudi monarchy is compliance with Sharia, the Quran and Sunnah. Insofar as these documents do not grant rights to machines of any sort, granting "citizenship" to a robot is effectively meaningless.
Right, that's exactly the point. Nobody is guaranteed bandwidth, that's what makes it so cheap. Guaranteed bandwith is expensive, but that's what you need when enough people demand instant access to fat, isochronous or nearly-isochronous data streams.
No, my argument is based on the assumption that there is finite bandwith that is not sufficient for everyone to stream at 4K, so that when a certain number of people start doing that isochronous streams suffer and have to start buffering.. This is pretty much basic data communication principles.
Because you need more bandwidth to service the same number of customers. That's because of the mathematics of statistical multiplexing.
Let's say I'm the subscriber and you're the telco. If I'm sitting in a cell all by myself, you might as well let me have all the bandwidth in the cell because it doesn't cost you any more. But let's say I'm in a crowded cell with just enough bandwith to service peak demand. Then I try to stream 4K video to my phone and suddenly there's not enough bandwidth for every subscriber in that cell. The performance of a statistical multiplexing drops precipitously once you reach a certain threshold.
The only way you can fix that is to split the cell in two. Now everybody has enough bandwidth, but you've doubled your cost to service that subset of people.
My point is that while the marketing messaging may have been faulty, it's not necessarily a bad thing to give people with no data caps a choice of bandwidth options at different price points. I for one have no interest in streaming 4K video over my data connection, so I don't care to pay more just because someone else wants to.
Well, I take "unlimited" to mean "unlimited quantities of data"; but of course there is no such thing: you are always limited by bandwidth. There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth.
I have no fundamental philosophical objection to a pricing model which considers bandwidth and net data volume separately. Back in the day we used to provision frame relay circults this way; sometimes it was quite economical to provision frame relay circuits with very low bandwidth guarantees, sometimes even zero!
A service which provides the unlimited (i.e., not explicitly capped) volume with the highest technically possible bandwidth would cost more than one where bandwidth is capped. So why not sell a lower priced option?
You could argue that Verizon marketing has screwed itself by overselling what uncapped volume means. But on the flip side, if you've ever been in a position of trying to explain options like this to someone -- say a manager -- when it comes to even simple distinctions like this many people have the attention span of a concussed squirrel.
It's interesting how few people are buying the "low performer" claims. The claims don't really make sense on their face; why would Tesla suddenly discover that its ranks are shot through with masses of people who need to be *immediately fired*? How could things have got so out of hand to require such a drastic immediate step? And how would those management culture problems suddenly be found in completely separate organizations that had been acquired a year ago?
Here's my theory: Tesla has figured out that sometime in the not-quite-near future cash is going to get tight because of its portfolio of buck rogers projects. How far in the future? Well, far enough that an outsider wouldn't see it in the quarterly SEC filings but near enough that they can see it coming. In business cash is like your air supply. If I cut off your air supply you'll be in distress in one minute and unconscious in three. If a business runs out of liquidity to meet current demands it starts coming apart in a month and is unable to operate after a quarter. This can happen even if the business is making a profit; meeting immediate cash demands has surprisingly little to do with turning a profit.
So what you do when you discover cash is going to be tight is look for cash outflows you can trim, and almost always payroll is going to be the biggest one. You start looking for people you can manage without. Low performers are an obvious choice, but if you've been doing your job all along you don't have a lot of those heads to chop. So you also look for people who simply pull down the larger salaries than others doing the same job. If my hypothesis is true, both Tesla's claims and the fired employees counterclaims could have a kernel of truth in them.
But why not simply tell people that this is what they're doing? I think because a lot of Tesla's value is based on an aura of invincibility it has cultivated -- despite or perhaps even because of its past missteps, people believe in this company; they think it will succeed and they want it to succeed. But again if this is what's going on it's risky to in effect libel thousands of workers you've let go for financial reasons.
Well, I'm assuming the alternative solution will be fleets of autonomous cars, so availability will be somewhat more predictable, but this points out something about performance metrics that I've been touting for years: variance is almost as important as average response time.
I noticed this in Windows Vista, which on paper at least, for my hardware, benchmarked as reasonably fast. But occasionally, maybe a dozen times if you used it all day, it'd take a couple of seconds to respond. Now my career stretched back to an era when I'd get up an take a 1 hour walk around a pond once it got clear my compile didn't have any syntax errors. I didn't mind *that*, yet somehow not knowing whether the system might decide to take an extra two or three seconds after I hit return to respond was intolerable.
A consistent, but slow system you can get into a kind of rhythm with. An inconsistent system is a constant source of irritation, even if it is on average fast.
While you raise an interesting point, it's actually not true that you have *no* legal right not to be subjected to annoying things. If your neighbors are loud at 3 AM you can demand they be quiet, or even call the police.
Where this gets tricky is that your right not to be subjected to annoying things isn't unlimited. I's not a right to never be annoyed; that's impossible for some people. But it is a right not to be subjected to something *most* people would find annoying unless there's a good reason. This is how a civilized society works: you have to balance things. A lot of people don't seem to understand this; not everyone can have completely unfettered freedom; civilization is a compromise.
Take small children. A lot of people detest them and would rather not see them. However it's impossible to accommodate their wants with the needs of parents to take children out of the house and indeed socialize them on how to behave in public spaces. So you can't accommodate the extreme child-haters; on the other hand if a child's behavior unduly disrupts the function of a place (a movie auditorium or library) you can reasonably ask the parent to remove that child.
The rules also have to accommodate pre-existing uses too. If your neighbor suddenly started making a racket at 5AM and generating obnoxious odors you'd rightly object to that. But this is exactly the situation people who move into agricultural areas face if they don't do their homework. Farms can be smelly and noisy places. If you move next to one you just have to deal with it.
Car ownership won't become obsolete in US suburbs, which are basically impossible to live in without personal access to a car. Adult suburbanites will either own cars or lease them for their exclusive personal use, simply because adding a few minutes to every trip they have to take will be intolerable.
Even if you mandate they lease their vehicles, that doesn't magically make them take their car in for service. You might as well require them to take certain mandatory service updates.
There would be an interesting environmental benefit from mandating leasing rather than buying: the car companies wouldn't be able to dump their older cars on the used market. This would force the car companies into the recycling business.
Twenty years ago the entrepreneur Paul Hawken (founder of Smith & Hawken) wrote a book called The Ecology of Commerce in which he advocated switching to a lease model for all durable goods -- and then requiring the owner of the goods to take them back and recycle the materials in them. This would extend to things like wall-to-wall carpet. Over 90% of the carpets sold are made from synthetic fibers which could feasibly be recycled into new plastics. The idea is to mimic natural biological systems in which waste products are broken down and reused.
Well, let's say you choose to value human life and suffering at $0 -- which is effectively what you do when you choose to ignore the cost because it's hard to put a precise value on those things. You could even argue this is a defensible philosophical position, although defending that position may take you places you don't want to go.
You can still put a hard cost on what it takes to treat 50,000 cases of fatal pulmonary disease. Is it rational to ignore that?
Here's what you're probably left with if you choose to value human lives, but not factor them into cost calculations: regulation, but no basis whatsoever to decide whether that regulation should be more restrictive or less restrictive.
I have a neighbor who has four pit bulls. Notice I say "has" not "owns". Her adult son, who lives in the same town, is a dog fancier but can't be bothered to feed them, clean up after them, or pay for veterinary care. He just buys dogs and then dumps them on his mom, and comes over to play with them when he feels like.
This is an example of what economists call "externalized costs". The son doesn't pay the food or vet costs, so he acts like they don't exist,
Externalized costs are why the market won't eliminate coal on its own. According to a recent Scientific American article, coal particulates kill as many Americans annually as car accidents. And given the nature of the illnesses caused, that's a lot of cost, not even putting a price on human longevity or quality of life,
If all the costs of pollution were part of the purchase decision, the market would make an objectively optimal choice about continuing to use coal. But the costs are paid by someone else, so as far as the parties to the transaction are concerned they don't exist.
90 % of statistics like yours are pulled out of excretory orifices. As for your claim for social-Darwinist optimality, that is non-negatable. AJ Ayer would say it's devoid of cognitive content.
Yeah, it sounds crazy when you put it that way: "free stuff".
Maybe not so crazy when you specify what the stuff is. Education, for example. Health care. In both these cases insufficient access has an impact on society wider than the directly affected people. Stuff you end up paying for. Because when people have no money, they can still cost the rest of us.
A lot of people would be willing to pay more for the consequences of squalor than to risk someone getting something "for free". It's a principled position, you see. I'm more of a pragmatist, myself.
Well, this is the problem/holy grail of popular entertainment: people want the same old thing, only different.
People crave repeatability, but are thwarted by neuroscience: you get habituated to anything. So you can't recapture the feeling you had watching TOS or TNG (depending on your generation) because you've already had that experience and you will never be able to recapture the sensation of novelty with that exact experience again.
Discovery and Orville are both takes on the "same thing, only different." And that's fine. There isn't a right way to do it, because what people want is basically impossible. You have to use the old to springboard to something new, and that new thing has to stand on its own.
Now specifically addressing the shortcomings of Discovery: the pilot had severe George-Lucas-itis: an inability to refrain from rubbing your eyeballs in their giant budget. It got in the way of the storytelling, which makes it the director's fault. By the time you get to the fourth episode the show gets past that and improves considerably. But it's not like Star Trek in any of its past incarnations. I think that's a non-starter anyway.
After the source is reviewed, you'd have to hand the source to some kind of trusted third party to build and package... Particularly for a Windows app that is packaged with an installer program that has to be run with administrative privileges.
The source code reviewed may be clean as a whistle, but it doesn't necessarily represent what gets installed, and what gets installed isn't everything that runs on the target system.
No matter what delivery system you choose, there is always a point of no return. Against an opponent with limited nuclear counterforce capabilities there is little strategic difference between launching a slow attack and waiting a bit and launching a fast attack.
There's really only one scenario in which launching a B52 nuclear attack makes sense: against an enemy which (a) threatens our land-based ICBMS, (b) somehow threatens our submarine based missiles, and (c) is unable to defend against non-stealth bombers penetrating its territory.
Not necessary. Since we are talking about B52s, anyone we'd be interested in nuking will simply shoot them down. Useful as those old strategic bombers are for conventional warfare, they're sitting ducks for any nation capable of disrupting our command and control system. They're sitting ducks for a lot of nations that don't have a snowball's chance in hell of touching us.
If our command and control systems are intact we can simply wait twelve or twenty hours and launch a missile attack.
Slashdot Mirror
Academic politics is not a new thing. There is an old saw that goes like this: Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.
A quote investigation site recently traced the origin of this back to Samuel Johnson, writing in 1765.
Well, one of the scenarios I'm referring to is the collapse of a major land-based ice sheet like Greenland or Antarctica. At present evidence does not point to any imminent dramatic collapse in Greenland, although it will contribute somewhat to sea level rise. Antarctica is more of an open question.
In any case we have no firm basis to predict that Antarctica will do anything dramatic in the next 80 years, but there is evidence that it may contribute at higher rates than it is now.
As things stand, we aren't looking at the end of civilization by a long shot -- although a certain mentality needs that kind of thing to get up and do something. What we are looking at is major expenses, probably in the trillions of dollars for the US.
Prophecy in the biblical sense usually entails telling truths people in authority don't want to hear, rather than predictions per se.
So these predictions are based on events that haven't happened. Got it...
That is rather entailed in the world "prediction".
Early projections had wide uncertainties, which means that the upper limits based on some projection technique could be quite eye popping. However so far as I know there was never any widely held scientific opinion that there would be a 3m rise by 2020. More typical projections from about 20 years ago were talking about maybe 12 cm against an 1800s baseline, which turn out to be pretty accurate. However the upper range was on the order of 30 cm and the lower showed an actual decline to pre-20th century levels by 2020 -- which goes to show there was still considerable uncertainty.
Estimates from back in the mid 90s were for a 40cm to 65cm rise by 2100, mainly based on thermal expansion. That's a fairly safe assumption: warmer atmosphere = warmer ocean = more ocean volume.
Now there have been hypothetical scenarios proposed in which sea level could rise rapidly. Obviously those have not happened ... yet. But as they are based on certain discrete and unpredictable events that they haven't happened is not evidence that they won't happen. These events are not particularly exotic in terms of the Earth's climate history, but would be unprecedented in recorded human history.
This is an absolute monarchy after all, so it's really more a claim of authority over than a grant of rights to.
The only constitutional limitation of the Saudi monarchy is compliance with Sharia, the Quran and Sunnah. Insofar as these documents do not grant rights to machines of any sort, granting "citizenship" to a robot is effectively meaningless.
Right, that's exactly the point. Nobody is guaranteed bandwidth, that's what makes it so cheap. Guaranteed bandwith is expensive, but that's what you need when enough people demand instant access to fat, isochronous or nearly-isochronous data streams.
No, my argument is based on the assumption that there is finite bandwith that is not sufficient for everyone to stream at 4K, so that when a certain number of people start doing that isochronous streams suffer and have to start buffering.. This is pretty much basic data communication principles.
Because you need more bandwidth to service the same number of customers. That's because of the mathematics of statistical multiplexing.
Let's say I'm the subscriber and you're the telco. If I'm sitting in a cell all by myself, you might as well let me have all the bandwidth in the cell because it doesn't cost you any more. But let's say I'm in a crowded cell with just enough bandwith to service peak demand. Then I try to stream 4K video to my phone and suddenly there's not enough bandwidth for every subscriber in that cell. The performance of a statistical multiplexing drops precipitously once you reach a certain threshold.
The only way you can fix that is to split the cell in two. Now everybody has enough bandwidth, but you've doubled your cost to service that subset of people.
My point is that while the marketing messaging may have been faulty, it's not necessarily a bad thing to give people with no data caps a choice of bandwidth options at different price points. I for one have no interest in streaming 4K video over my data connection, so I don't care to pay more just because someone else wants to.
Well, I take "unlimited" to mean "unlimited quantities of data"; but of course there is no such thing: you are always limited by bandwidth. There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth.
I have no fundamental philosophical objection to a pricing model which considers bandwidth and net data volume separately. Back in the day we used to provision frame relay circults this way; sometimes it was quite economical to provision frame relay circuits with very low bandwidth guarantees, sometimes even zero!
A service which provides the unlimited (i.e., not explicitly capped) volume with the highest technically possible bandwidth would cost more than one where bandwidth is capped. So why not sell a lower priced option?
You could argue that Verizon marketing has screwed itself by overselling what uncapped volume means. But on the flip side, if you've ever been in a position of trying to explain options like this to someone -- say a manager -- when it comes to even simple distinctions like this many people have the attention span of a concussed squirrel.
It's interesting how few people are buying the "low performer" claims. The claims don't really make sense on their face; why would Tesla suddenly discover that its ranks are shot through with masses of people who need to be *immediately fired*? How could things have got so out of hand to require such a drastic immediate step? And how would those management culture problems suddenly be found in completely separate organizations that had been acquired a year ago?
Here's my theory: Tesla has figured out that sometime in the not-quite-near future cash is going to get tight because of its portfolio of buck rogers projects. How far in the future? Well, far enough that an outsider wouldn't see it in the quarterly SEC filings but near enough that they can see it coming. In business cash is like your air supply. If I cut off your air supply you'll be in distress in one minute and unconscious in three. If a business runs out of liquidity to meet current demands it starts coming apart in a month and is unable to operate after a quarter. This can happen even if the business is making a profit; meeting immediate cash demands has surprisingly little to do with turning a profit.
So what you do when you discover cash is going to be tight is look for cash outflows you can trim, and almost always payroll is going to be the biggest one. You start looking for people you can manage without. Low performers are an obvious choice, but if you've been doing your job all along you don't have a lot of those heads to chop. So you also look for people who simply pull down the larger salaries than others doing the same job. If my hypothesis is true, both Tesla's claims and the fired employees counterclaims could have a kernel of truth in them.
But why not simply tell people that this is what they're doing? I think because a lot of Tesla's value is based on an aura of invincibility it has cultivated -- despite or perhaps even because of its past missteps, people believe in this company; they think it will succeed and they want it to succeed. But again if this is what's going on it's risky to in effect libel thousands of workers you've let go for financial reasons.
Well, I'm assuming the alternative solution will be fleets of autonomous cars, so availability will be somewhat more predictable, but this points out something about performance metrics that I've been touting for years: variance is almost as important as average response time.
I noticed this in Windows Vista, which on paper at least, for my hardware, benchmarked as reasonably fast. But occasionally, maybe a dozen times if you used it all day, it'd take a couple of seconds to respond. Now my career stretched back to an era when I'd get up an take a 1 hour walk around a pond once it got clear my compile didn't have any syntax errors. I didn't mind *that*, yet somehow not knowing whether the system might decide to take an extra two or three seconds after I hit return to respond was intolerable.
A consistent, but slow system you can get into a kind of rhythm with. An inconsistent system is a constant source of irritation, even if it is on average fast.
While you raise an interesting point, it's actually not true that you have *no* legal right not to be subjected to annoying things. If your neighbors are loud at 3 AM you can demand they be quiet, or even call the police.
Where this gets tricky is that your right not to be subjected to annoying things isn't unlimited. I's not a right to never be annoyed; that's impossible for some people. But it is a right not to be subjected to something *most* people would find annoying unless there's a good reason. This is how a civilized society works: you have to balance things. A lot of people don't seem to understand this; not everyone can have completely unfettered freedom; civilization is a compromise.
Take small children. A lot of people detest them and would rather not see them. However it's impossible to accommodate their wants with the needs of parents to take children out of the house and indeed socialize them on how to behave in public spaces. So you can't accommodate the extreme child-haters; on the other hand if a child's behavior unduly disrupts the function of a place (a movie auditorium or library) you can reasonably ask the parent to remove that child.
The rules also have to accommodate pre-existing uses too. If your neighbor suddenly started making a racket at 5AM and generating obnoxious odors you'd rightly object to that. But this is exactly the situation people who move into agricultural areas face if they don't do their homework. Farms can be smelly and noisy places. If you move next to one you just have to deal with it.
Car ownership won't become obsolete in US suburbs, which are basically impossible to live in without personal access to a car. Adult suburbanites will either own cars or lease them for their exclusive personal use, simply because adding a few minutes to every trip they have to take will be intolerable.
Even if you mandate they lease their vehicles, that doesn't magically make them take their car in for service. You might as well require them to take certain mandatory service updates.
There would be an interesting environmental benefit from mandating leasing rather than buying: the car companies wouldn't be able to dump their older cars on the used market. This would force the car companies into the recycling business.
Twenty years ago the entrepreneur Paul Hawken (founder of Smith & Hawken) wrote a book called The Ecology of Commerce in which he advocated switching to a lease model for all durable goods -- and then requiring the owner of the goods to take them back and recycle the materials in them. This would extend to things like wall-to-wall carpet. Over 90% of the carpets sold are made from synthetic fibers which could feasibly be recycled into new plastics. The idea is to mimic natural biological systems in which waste products are broken down and reused.
Well, let's say you choose to value human life and suffering at $0 -- which is effectively what you do when you choose to ignore the cost because it's hard to put a precise value on those things. You could even argue this is a defensible philosophical position, although defending that position may take you places you don't want to go.
You can still put a hard cost on what it takes to treat 50,000 cases of fatal pulmonary disease. Is it rational to ignore that?
Here's what you're probably left with if you choose to value human lives, but not factor them into cost calculations: regulation, but no basis whatsoever to decide whether that regulation should be more restrictive or less restrictive.
I have a neighbor who has four pit bulls. Notice I say "has" not "owns". Her adult son, who lives in the same town, is a dog fancier but can't be bothered to feed them, clean up after them, or pay for veterinary care. He just buys dogs and then dumps them on his mom, and comes over to play with them when he feels like.
This is an example of what economists call "externalized costs". The son doesn't pay the food or vet costs, so he acts like they don't exist,
Externalized costs are why the market won't eliminate coal on its own. According to a recent Scientific American article, coal particulates kill as many Americans annually as car accidents. And given the nature of the illnesses caused, that's a lot of cost, not even putting a price on human longevity or quality of life,
If all the costs of pollution were part of the purchase decision, the market would make an objectively optimal choice about continuing to use coal. But the costs are paid by someone else, so as far as the parties to the transaction are concerned they don't exist.
90 % of statistics like yours are pulled out of excretory orifices. As for your claim for social-Darwinist optimality, that is non-negatable. AJ Ayer would say it's devoid of cognitive content.
Yeah, it sounds crazy when you put it that way: "free stuff".
Maybe not so crazy when you specify what the stuff is. Education, for example. Health care. In both these cases insufficient access has an impact on society wider than the directly affected people. Stuff you end up paying for. Because when people have no money, they can still cost the rest of us.
A lot of people would be willing to pay more for the consequences of squalor than to risk someone getting something "for free". It's a principled position, you see. I'm more of a pragmatist, myself.
Well, this is the problem/holy grail of popular entertainment: people want the same old thing, only different.
People crave repeatability, but are thwarted by neuroscience: you get habituated to anything. So you can't recapture the feeling you had watching TOS or TNG (depending on your generation) because you've already had that experience and you will never be able to recapture the sensation of novelty with that exact experience again.
Discovery and Orville are both takes on the "same thing, only different." And that's fine. There isn't a right way to do it, because what people want is basically impossible. You have to use the old to springboard to something new, and that new thing has to stand on its own.
Now specifically addressing the shortcomings of Discovery: the pilot had severe George-Lucas-itis: an inability to refrain from rubbing your eyeballs in their giant budget. It got in the way of the storytelling, which makes it the director's fault. By the time you get to the fourth episode the show gets past that and improves considerably. But it's not like Star Trek in any of its past incarnations. I think that's a non-starter anyway.
Still doesn't tell you what their installer did.
Toppling the regimes was a piece of cake. Establishing a new friendly regime was basically impossible -- at least with military force.
After the source is reviewed, you'd have to hand the source to some kind of trusted third party to build and package ... Particularly for a Windows app that is packaged with an installer program that has to be run with administrative privileges.
The source code reviewed may be clean as a whistle, but it doesn't necessarily represent what gets installed, and what gets installed isn't everything that runs on the target system.
No matter what delivery system you choose, there is always a point of no return. Against an opponent with limited nuclear counterforce capabilities there is little strategic difference between launching a slow attack and waiting a bit and launching a fast attack.
There's really only one scenario in which launching a B52 nuclear attack makes sense: against an enemy which (a) threatens our land-based ICBMS, (b) somehow threatens our submarine based missiles, and (c) is unable to defend against non-stealth bombers penetrating its territory.
Once launched, aircraft can be recalled.
Not necessary. Since we are talking about B52s, anyone we'd be interested in nuking will simply shoot them down. Useful as those old strategic bombers are for conventional warfare, they're sitting ducks for any nation capable of disrupting our command and control system. They're sitting ducks for a lot of nations that don't have a snowball's chance in hell of touching us.
If our command and control systems are intact we can simply wait twelve or twenty hours and launch a missile attack.