This is hardly mysterious. Before something exists, there aren't many applications for that thing that most people need. People got along fine back in the day without computers, networks, mobile phones, and GPS. It doesn't mean you'd get by today, because what's expected of you has grown with what's available to you.
I downloaded Debian 0.91 over a 300 baud modem and put it on a stack of 35 three inch floppies. It took all day. The latest release of Debian is 60x larger.
It takes 3 MB/s dedicated to get Netflix in SD; and that's going to be typical of any video streaming service, not just entertainment. In a neighborhood with 1.5 Mb/s service a household is going to be practically limited in its access to information.
Some problems have no (known) easy solutions. People don't want to solve them the hard way, so they keep doing futile easy things, telling themselves that doing something is better than doing nothing. But it's not necessarily so.
The point of sanctions is to force (or entice) someone to do something.
But the sanctions stick only works if you're willing to stop when they do whatever it is you want.
Short of invading (which would be much, much harder than Iraq), there's no way we can stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. We can't even stop North Korea from having nuclear weapons, and for much the same reason: they don't have to shop around the world for yellowcake. They can dig uranium right out of their own soil.
And Iran is a far more technologically advanced nation than North Korea. It has 30x the GDP too. So we can't use sanctions to force them not to develop nuclear weapons. The most we could do is convince them that they're better off without nukes.
So Iranian sanctions only have a chance of working if you have some kind of end game.
I've put a blink tag in this response for you. Slashcode will filter it out and in any case your browser probably doesn't honor it, but you'll know it's there.
Where the "Smart TV" functionality was on a Roku "stick". I can just pull the stick out of the HDMI port and presto! Dumb TV.
The Roku stick sucks, by the way. Although I find the Roku UI much better than Samsung's horrible smart TV system (which pops up alerts in the middle of stuff you're watching!) the problem is that stick is crashy, playback isn't as smooth as on an external box, and there's no Ethernet. I prefer not to clutter up my wi-fi networks with streaming media.
Yes, but according to the video the reason the it was uneconomical was lack of demand. Given where we are on the adoption curve for electric vehicles, it's hardly a surprise that such a thing would be unsustainable several years ago.
And in any case the economics and logistics for trucking are entirely different.
Still, as long as human truck drivers are still required, as long as the charge rate in miles of range/hour allows the truck to travel at least as far as the next legally mandated rest stop, there's not much reason to add the complexity of a quick swap battery.
Not to mention that if you want to participate in a contraband market, you need to establish reputation; and if the contraband is anything other than information (like lists of stolen credit cards), you have to transfer physical goods too. This means once the authorities have unmasked one party in a web of transactions, they can start unraveling the thread.
While it would be foolish to rely on cryptocurrency as being anonymous, it's not necessarily foolish to try to exploit its pseudonymous nature, if you understand the limitations. You have to protect your real (or at least official) identity using money-laundering techniques. Those aren't perfect either, but there's no such thing as perfect security in this world.
Well, money is anything that people agree is money. If you and I were to agree on M&Ms as a medium of exchange, that'd be money. If we agree to exchange goods for Monopoly money, that Monopoly money becomes real money.
The volatility of the value of Bitcoin is neither here nor there, other than it is an inconvenience for a currency. Bitcoin is a currency in which users are also speculators. Should I spend now, or hang on to see if the price goes up?
Actually IBM uses "blockchain" singular to describe its product. You can refer to "blockchains" if you refer to instances of blockchain technology collectively, or "blockchain" if you are referring to the technology itself; there is no practical semantic difference.
Sometimes a company with a complex product just sucks at one aspect of that product. When I was a kid back in the 70s Fords had a reputation for leaking oil. You'd buy a new Ford, park it in your driveway and there'd be an oil slick the next day. In the 90s, after the glory days of 1-2-3 on DOS, Lotus was never able to deliver any products whose UI wasn't a miserable failure.
The thing is, dysfunctional companies produce dysfunctional products. If your car leaks oil or your users can't figure out your UI, you'd think the solution would be simple: hire an engineer with expertise in the relevant areas and do what he says. And yet it often takes years for companies to correct obvious deficiencies in their practices.
I owned a Samsung S6, and it's battery life was comically bad. If I actually used it as a smart phone, I could actually *watch* the battery percentage drop as the phone became almost too hot to hold; I ended up carrying it in "super battery saving mode", which essentially turns it into a dumb phone, because that's the only way I could get through a full eight hour day and still have any battery left.
So when the Note 7 fiasco happened, I simply wrote Samsung off. Obviously power management is something they suck at. Now maybe the S8 will be better, but I'll wait a generation or two of products; if the can go two or three years without a fiasco maybe I'll consider them again, but my experience with technology is not to assume a company will get its act together because you'd think they'd do it.
And never, ever, ever make a mistake. Mistakes never go away.
What's in addition point mistakes, where you reveal a single, discrete detail that identifies you, there are cumulative mistakes, where you release enough enough information over time; innocuous details that crosschecked with each other can locate you in time and space.
Even your writing style and subject matter can identify you. That's how they caught the Unabomber, through content and style of his manifesto. Keep your communications terse, business-like and confine them to the point, and avoid regionalisms.
If you must argue politics, use sock puppet accounts.
That's was my reaction. Take out just enough, in cash, that with your probably meager pay you're doing pretty well for yourself. Then I noticed where he's from: Iowa. If you lived in New York City you could cash a couple dozen lottery tickets a week an never visit the same lottery agent twice, but if you lived in Cedar Rapids you'd get noticed eventually.
Still, trying to take out over a million bucks is crazy. In most states you can't take a large lottery prize anonymously, which he should have known.
Specifically blockchain creates a distributed audit trail that is for practical purposes protected by the massive computational resources needed to reconstruct it, and does it in a way in which pseudonymous parties can agree without trusting each other or even knowing who each other is.
Clever as it is, very few applications really have all those requirements. That means that most proposed uses of blockchain are just pointlessly complicated and expensive ways of achieving things that could be accomplished with a few simple cryptographic and data representation conventions. In fact they make ordinary data management tasks incredibly cumbersome. If a bitcoin moves from Alice to Bob to Carol, Carol really wants to make sure that Alice doesn't repudiate the initial transaction with Bob. If company A mistakenly records a transfer to company B, in order to make that fixable you have to build an entire set of practices on top of blockchain to undo what blockchain is supposed to do.
I think you have to ask "why brick at all?" Anything you do with brick you can do with concrete. Architects love concrete for its possibilities, but normal humans prefer the traditional look of brick.
And while you're talking about 3D printing, concrete as a 3D printing medium is coming along nicely, and is in the very early adopter stage where people who use it do so because it creates things that look different. But early adopters, while crucial in the tech adoption curve, aren't where you make money. You make money selling to the masses, and the masses are conservative.
Take concrete block construction; this does exactly what you suggest, make the construction cheaper and faster by using larger units. I live in a block house, and it would not be a whit better if it were made from bricks instead, but it'd be worth a lot more because people know concrete block construction is cheaper than brick.
So the advantage of a robot that lays conventional-looking bricks isn't functional. It's economic. Brick-laying robots create structures that have greater value than ones made by block-laying or concrete extruding robots.
If I said it wouldn't hit any particles, I misspoke. It will continully encounter elementary particles and helium nuclei -- in other words "cosmic radiation". It's just unlikely to hit anything that will cause immediate macroscopic damage, not in interstellar space.
The cosmic ray flux measurable near earth suggests a 1m^2 surface receives about 10,000 cosmic ray particles with energies in the GeV range every second. Three or four times a year a particle with energies in the peta-EV range will pass through it. But it will take a long time for that to create any kind of noticeable change in the artifact.
But the time that it would take Voyager to run into something *big* enough to cause immediate macro damage in one go is so longer, we're not talking about billions of years, but thousands of billions. Not that it can't happen sooner; it might be happening even as you're reading this but we won't know for another 16 hours. Forever is a long time, and eventually anything that can happen will happen. The question is whether running into macroscopic matter is more likely than cumulative exposure to radiation transients from things like novae.
Well, that's two different propositions, which are two different kettles of fish.
Astronomers actually have actually estimated the time it would take for the probability of Voyager running into a star to be even: 10^21 years. Note that's 12 orders of magnitude longer than the Golden Record's expected longevity, and 11 orders of magnitude greater than the current age of the universe. Of course that's not really a valid prediction because it assumes things will remain the same. At roughly 4 billion years the Milky Way and Andromeda will coalesce into a single galaxy; however even though the galaxies will "collide" it is highly unlikely any two stars will collide, simply because they're so sparse. Also well before 10^21 years most of the smaller stars in the Milky Way will have been ejected from the galaxy; likewise Voyager may be ejected from the galaxy before then through similar mechanisms.
So it's fairly safe that the Golden Record is more likely to decay than it is to run into something.
Now as for the second kettle of fish, it depends on the nature of capabilities of the civilization involved. If an object like Voyager passed through the solar system chances are we given our current capabilities wouldn't notice it. Not unless it passed within few hundred miles of Earth. But a Star Trek tech level civilization would see it before it entered the Solar System because they have magical tech. I actually think it is unlikely that even a much more technologically advanced civilization than us would pay any attention to random interstellar detritus; although the density of interstellar space is low, the volume is enormous so there's way too much random junk out there to worry about.
So as am upper limit I'd say the chance of the Golden Record being found by an alien civilization is no greater than it running into a star, based on the physical similarity of the events (having to pass very close). The wild card his that there is a lot more room for the unexpected when you're talking about alien civilizations than when your talking cosmic gravity-billiards.
(1) planets are vastly larger targets than the Voyager spacecraft. (2) planets (by definition currently) have powerful gravitational effects in their neighborhood. (3) planets in comparatively crowded neighborhoods -- the ecliptic plane in the immediate vicinity of stars, which have *massive* gravitational wells. (4) Interstellar space is much, much more sparsely populated (1 atom/m^3) than the solar system.
That's possible, according to the article that will take over a billion years, which to me sounds like long enough for something else to happen.
Which is exactly my point: our intuitions about what "sounds" likely are unreliable because they're based on our experiences, which are all formed on the Earth where stuff is abundant and interacting with other stuff all the time. Our imaginations are simply not attuned to the emptiness of space.
Not very likely. Space is, to coin a phrase, is big. All the stuff there is hardly amounts to anything compared to space. The average density of the universe is roughly one atom for every four cubic meters.
Now gravitation will tend to steer the things to places with more matter, but if you were to send the largest thing made by humans through the densest part of the Asteroid belt, in all likelihood it would encounter nothing but a few stray atoms.
Our mental pictures of space are corrupted by science fiction, which for dramatic purposes draws upon nautical imagery: storms and shoals and the like. But most likely events in navigating space, other than slowly cooking in radiation if you're in the vicinity of a star, are all system failures. Natural events will be a once-in-many-lifetime occurrences. There are no "ion storms" in space; asteroid fields would appear to human perception as utterly devoid of anything.
Slashdot Mirror
This is hardly mysterious. Before something exists, there aren't many applications for that thing that most people need. People got along fine back in the day without computers, networks, mobile phones, and GPS. It doesn't mean you'd get by today, because what's expected of you has grown with what's available to you.
I downloaded Debian 0.91 over a 300 baud modem and put it on a stack of 35 three inch floppies. It took all day. The latest release of Debian is 60x larger.
It takes 3 MB/s dedicated to get Netflix in SD; and that's going to be typical of any video streaming service, not just entertainment. In a neighborhood with 1.5 Mb/s service a household is going to be practically limited in its access to information.
Some problems have no (known) easy solutions. People don't want to solve them the hard way, so they keep doing futile easy things, telling themselves that doing something is better than doing nothing. But it's not necessarily so.
In fact this HELPS the Iranian government
We never managed to learn that particular less in fifty years of US-Cuba relations.
The point of sanctions is to force (or entice) someone to do something.
But the sanctions stick only works if you're willing to stop when they do whatever it is you want.
Short of invading (which would be much, much harder than Iraq), there's no way we can stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. We can't even stop North Korea from having nuclear weapons, and for much the same reason: they don't have to shop around the world for yellowcake. They can dig uranium right out of their own soil.
And Iran is a far more technologically advanced nation than North Korea. It has 30x the GDP too. So we can't use sanctions to force them not to develop nuclear weapons. The most we could do is convince them that they're better off without nukes.
So Iranian sanctions only have a chance of working if you have some kind of end game.
What if the state gave local entrepreneurs 208 million in incentives to start businesses. Would that create more jobs/revenue than a data center?
Nostalgic, I see.
I've put a blink tag in this response for you. Slashcode will filter it out and in any case your browser probably doesn't honor it, but you'll know it's there.
Where the "Smart TV" functionality was on a Roku "stick". I can just pull the stick out of the HDMI port and presto! Dumb TV.
The Roku stick sucks, by the way. Although I find the Roku UI much better than Samsung's horrible smart TV system (which pops up alerts in the middle of stuff you're watching!) the problem is that stick is crashy, playback isn't as smooth as on an external box, and there's no Ethernet. I prefer not to clutter up my wi-fi networks with streaming media.
Yes, but according to the video the reason the it was uneconomical was lack of demand. Given where we are on the adoption curve for electric vehicles, it's hardly a surprise that such a thing would be unsustainable several years ago.
And in any case the economics and logistics for trucking are entirely different.
Still, as long as human truck drivers are still required, as long as the charge rate in miles of range/hour allows the truck to travel at least as far as the next legally mandated rest stop, there's not much reason to add the complexity of a quick swap battery.
Trump won. Look up definition of "Pyrrhic victory".
Not to mention that if you want to participate in a contraband market, you need to establish reputation; and if the contraband is anything other than information (like lists of stolen credit cards), you have to transfer physical goods too. This means once the authorities have unmasked one party in a web of transactions, they can start unraveling the thread.
While it would be foolish to rely on cryptocurrency as being anonymous, it's not necessarily foolish to try to exploit its pseudonymous nature, if you understand the limitations. You have to protect your real (or at least official) identity using money-laundering techniques. Those aren't perfect either, but there's no such thing as perfect security in this world.
Well, money is anything that people agree is money. If you and I were to agree on M&Ms as a medium of exchange, that'd be money. If we agree to exchange goods for Monopoly money, that Monopoly money becomes real money.
The volatility of the value of Bitcoin is neither here nor there, other than it is an inconvenience for a currency. Bitcoin is a currency in which users are also speculators. Should I spend now, or hang on to see if the price goes up?
Pedantic much?
Actually IBM uses "blockchain" singular to describe its product. You can refer to "blockchains" if you refer to instances of blockchain technology collectively, or "blockchain" if you are referring to the technology itself; there is no practical semantic difference.
Sometimes a company with a complex product just sucks at one aspect of that product. When I was a kid back in the 70s Fords had a reputation for leaking oil. You'd buy a new Ford, park it in your driveway and there'd be an oil slick the next day. In the 90s, after the glory days of 1-2-3 on DOS, Lotus was never able to deliver any products whose UI wasn't a miserable failure.
The thing is, dysfunctional companies produce dysfunctional products. If your car leaks oil or your users can't figure out your UI, you'd think the solution would be simple: hire an engineer with expertise in the relevant areas and do what he says. And yet it often takes years for companies to correct obvious deficiencies in their practices.
I owned a Samsung S6, and it's battery life was comically bad. If I actually used it as a smart phone, I could actually *watch* the battery percentage drop as the phone became almost too hot to hold; I ended up carrying it in "super battery saving mode", which essentially turns it into a dumb phone, because that's the only way I could get through a full eight hour day and still have any battery left.
So when the Note 7 fiasco happened, I simply wrote Samsung off. Obviously power management is something they suck at. Now maybe the S8 will be better, but I'll wait a generation or two of products; if the can go two or three years without a fiasco maybe I'll consider them again, but my experience with technology is not to assume a company will get its act together because you'd think they'd do it.
And never, ever, ever make a mistake. Mistakes never go away.
What's in addition point mistakes, where you reveal a single, discrete detail that identifies you, there are cumulative mistakes, where you release enough enough information over time; innocuous details that crosschecked with each other can locate you in time and space.
Even your writing style and subject matter can identify you. That's how they caught the Unabomber, through content and style of his manifesto. Keep your communications terse, business-like and confine them to the point, and avoid regionalisms.
If you must argue politics, use sock puppet accounts.
That's was my reaction. Take out just enough, in cash, that with your probably meager pay you're doing pretty well for yourself. Then I noticed where he's from: Iowa. If you lived in New York City you could cash a couple dozen lottery tickets a week an never visit the same lottery agent twice, but if you lived in Cedar Rapids you'd get noticed eventually.
Still, trying to take out over a million bucks is crazy. In most states you can't take a large lottery prize anonymously, which he should have known.
Specifically blockchain creates a distributed audit trail that is for practical purposes protected by the massive computational resources needed to reconstruct it, and does it in a way in which pseudonymous parties can agree without trusting each other or even knowing who each other is.
Clever as it is, very few applications really have all those requirements. That means that most proposed uses of blockchain are just pointlessly complicated and expensive ways of achieving things that could be accomplished with a few simple cryptographic and data representation conventions. In fact they make ordinary data management tasks incredibly cumbersome. If a bitcoin moves from Alice to Bob to Carol, Carol really wants to make sure that Alice doesn't repudiate the initial transaction with Bob. If company A mistakenly records a transfer to company B, in order to make that fixable you have to build an entire set of practices on top of blockchain to undo what blockchain is supposed to do.
I think you have to ask "why brick at all?" Anything you do with brick you can do with concrete. Architects love concrete for its possibilities, but normal humans prefer the traditional look of brick.
And while you're talking about 3D printing, concrete as a 3D printing medium is coming along nicely, and is in the very early adopter stage where people who use it do so because it creates things that look different. But early adopters, while crucial in the tech adoption curve, aren't where you make money. You make money selling to the masses, and the masses are conservative.
Take concrete block construction; this does exactly what you suggest, make the construction cheaper and faster by using larger units. I live in a block house, and it would not be a whit better if it were made from bricks instead, but it'd be worth a lot more because people know concrete block construction is cheaper than brick.
So the advantage of a robot that lays conventional-looking bricks isn't functional. It's economic. Brick-laying robots create structures that have greater value than ones made by block-laying or concrete extruding robots.
If I said it wouldn't hit any particles, I misspoke. It will continully encounter elementary particles and helium nuclei -- in other words "cosmic radiation". It's just unlikely to hit anything that will cause immediate macroscopic damage, not in interstellar space.
The cosmic ray flux measurable near earth suggests a 1m^2 surface receives about 10,000 cosmic ray particles with energies in the GeV range every second. Three or four times a year a particle with energies in the peta-EV range will pass through it. But it will take a long time for that to create any kind of noticeable change in the artifact.
But the time that it would take Voyager to run into something *big* enough to cause immediate macro damage in one go is so longer, we're not talking about billions of years, but thousands of billions. Not that it can't happen sooner; it might be happening even as you're reading this but we won't know for another 16 hours. Forever is a long time, and eventually anything that can happen will happen. The question is whether running into macroscopic matter is more likely than cumulative exposure to radiation transients from things like novae.
Well, that's two different propositions, which are two different kettles of fish.
Astronomers actually have actually estimated the time it would take for the probability of Voyager running into a star to be even: 10^21 years. Note that's 12 orders of magnitude longer than the Golden Record's expected longevity, and 11 orders of magnitude greater than the current age of the universe. Of course that's not really a valid prediction because it assumes things will remain the same. At roughly 4 billion years the Milky Way and Andromeda will coalesce into a single galaxy; however even though the galaxies will "collide" it is highly unlikely any two stars will collide, simply because they're so sparse. Also well before 10^21 years most of the smaller stars in the Milky Way will have been ejected from the galaxy; likewise Voyager may be ejected from the galaxy before then through similar mechanisms.
So it's fairly safe that the Golden Record is more likely to decay than it is to run into something.
Now as for the second kettle of fish, it depends on the nature of capabilities of the civilization involved. If an object like Voyager passed through the solar system chances are we given our current capabilities wouldn't notice it. Not unless it passed within few hundred miles of Earth. But a Star Trek tech level civilization would see it before it entered the Solar System because they have magical tech. I actually think it is unlikely that even a much more technologically advanced civilization than us would pay any attention to random interstellar detritus; although the density of interstellar space is low, the volume is enormous so there's way too much random junk out there to worry about.
So as am upper limit I'd say the chance of the Golden Record being found by an alien civilization is no greater than it running into a star, based on the physical similarity of the events (having to pass very close). The wild card his that there is a lot more room for the unexpected when you're talking about alien civilizations than when your talking cosmic gravity-billiards.
So you're thinking it will crash into a planet.
(1) planets are vastly larger targets than the Voyager spacecraft.
(2) planets (by definition currently) have powerful gravitational effects in their neighborhood.
(3) planets in comparatively crowded neighborhoods -- the ecliptic plane in the immediate vicinity of stars, which have *massive* gravitational wells.
(4) Interstellar space is much, much more sparsely populated (1 atom/m^3) than the solar system.
That's possible, according to the article that will take over a billion years, which to me sounds like long enough for something else to happen.
Which is exactly my point: our intuitions about what "sounds" likely are unreliable because they're based on our experiences, which are all formed on the Earth where stuff is abundant and interacting with other stuff all the time. Our imaginations are simply not attuned to the emptiness of space.
You're neglecting a third possibility, that the object will decay to the point where the information encoded is no longer recoverable.
Not very likely. Space is, to coin a phrase, is big. All the stuff there is hardly amounts to anything compared to space. The average density of the universe is roughly one atom for every four cubic meters.
Now gravitation will tend to steer the things to places with more matter, but if you were to send the largest thing made by humans through the densest part of the Asteroid belt, in all likelihood it would encounter nothing but a few stray atoms.
Our mental pictures of space are corrupted by science fiction, which for dramatic purposes draws upon nautical imagery: storms and shoals and the like. But most likely events in navigating space, other than slowly cooking in radiation if you're in the vicinity of a star, are all system failures. Natural events will be a once-in-many-lifetime occurrences. There are no "ion storms" in space; asteroid fields would appear to human perception as utterly devoid of anything.
I thought killer robots were a pretty neat idea, but if Elon Musk says they're bad I must have got things wrong somewhere..