And how would a "benevolent" socialist A.I. avoid the need to use force against the humans who don't wish to follow its dictates? Is Libertarianism only unworkable because you've chosen not wave the magic tech wand at it?
There is a reason why human-organized systems break down, and the Catholics even have a word for it: Subsidiarity. Humans function best, regardless of the type of government they're under, when decision making is left to the lowest possible level of the hierarchy that still serves the common good. But as a system's decision-making is inevitably raised to higher and higher levels (the autocratic King/President/CEO, the Supreme Soviet, Billionaire Corporate & Bank Cartels... etc.) then corruption sets in and rots away the ability of the people at the lowest level of the system to make their decisions locally and rationally according to their specific situational needs. Eventually, all decision-making becomes top-down and irrational, and the system collapses. Due to the inability of those wielding the power (and making all the decisions) to understand, much less care about, what's happening to the people at the bottom of the power pyramid. Sound familiar?
Some governmental forms are more resistant to this rot than others, or rot in different ways. But the solution is the same: De-Centralize the decision-making of the system to the lowest hierarchical level that serves the common good.
Slashdot's owners, apparently, as they are quickly throwing that "socalism" label onto unionization.
That label is also mis-applied. Socialism has nothing to do with the idea of unionization. Which is simply workers forming an organization of their own free will in order to win concessions (better pay, less overtime) from the management of the company they work for. The socialist label would only apply if the workers in question were forced by law into joining a union.
I'll admit that as a libertarian-minded worker in the animation/game industries in my 20's, I didn't grok this distinction properly. There was talk even then of doing something to address the crazy working conditions, and raise the pay – which I rejected. But my 45 year-old conservative-libertarian minded self can now see just how stupid it was to work 12+ hour days for such crap wages. If I hadn't left Silicon Valley just prior to turning 30, I never could have gotten married and started a family on what little I was making. I saw friends with high-profile jobs at places like Lucasfilm, Dreamworks, and Pixar that were barely getting by. Lucky to be able to buy a money-pit fixer-upper in the Sunset district, and have one kid that they might get to see on weekends, if at all.
In his robot utopia the price of energy would for all intents and purposes be zero. All you need is robots pumping out solar panels and windmills, and other robots installing them.
Obviously you can't power mining machinery with solar directly, but once you have "free" energy it's also cheap to make hydrogen or methane or whatever else you want to use for that purpose.
Try going back 500 years and describing our technological wonders to those living in the Middle Ages. Such as how one family can farm the land that 10,000 much larger families used to (leading to empty farm towns across America). How we have machines that allow a dozen men to build what would to them be a huge building. How almost anyone can fly above the clouds to go visit family half a world away. Or how we can instantly communicate with the other side of the world, not just with "letters", but audio and video too. Or the sheer number of people who live in our cities.
Then you can explain to them why, with all of these wonders, we still have a need for money.
Oh please... Nothing is free. Even if we have self-replicating robots, the resources to build them are finite. So are the energy sources to run them. The pollution they produce will be non-zero. Their maintenance and design will require human or genius-bot input, and both of those will be limited in number.
Most importantly, the desires of humans for labor are essentially unlimited in scope. Give a family one robot, and they'll soon "need" 2, 3, and... how many computing devices do you have in your house again? Be sure to count every PC, laptop, tablet, phone, calculator, thermostat, furnace, water heater, oven, game system, TV, and electronic toy, and god knows what else. Robots would proliferate similarly, and we'd still have to have prices to decide who gets more or fewer robots.
And THAT's assuming that the robots don't develop their own desires and dreams.
The monitoring station is in Hawaii. The map shows nothing between Hawaii and Asia because there are no monitoring stations in-between. RTFA and you'll see that there are four major monitoring stations that form a roughly north-south line, and are roughly equidistant from each other.
"Progress" is not a one-way road. Scientists make mistakes all the time (see the low-fat diet fiasco that's killing millions). Scientists makes horrible assumptions constantly (all brains assumed to be same as ONE SINGLE dissection in the 60's until MRIs revealed the multiplicity of structures). Pop-Science gets manipulated by corporate marketing (see the efforts of tobacco and sugar companies to downplay the dangers of their products). Real Science gets highjacked again and again by political interests that control research funds (see the Global Warming/Cooling/Change insanity that every new project has to reference somehow). Real Science, in a false dichotomy against religion, also gets misused and twisted into it's opposite: Dogma (see the cult of the Big Bang).
"Science" needs to rid itself of political chains, encourage not just discovery, but reward positive/negative confirmation, and recognize that it can only observe and describe natural processes. The instant a scientist tries to create moral meaning out of what they see, they are no longer practicing science.
Seriously, Wall Street hates the Bitcoin casino because it's sucking up potential "investment" money from their stock market casino. They're just hating on their competition. It's the same reason that the TV industry spent so much time demonizing video games in the 80's and 90's. The latter reduces the demand for the former.
I still remember a friend of mine buying the original titanium PowerBook upon release. If you picked up his shiny new laptop by opposite corners, the battery would fall out.
Which is why you NEVER, EVER, buy the first version of any Apple product. They test intensively, but not widely, due to their desire for secrecy.
So to those who are buying the new iMac Pro in a few weeks... Good luck suckers!
Bah... Did you see who the executive producer is? Akiva Goldsman, the most overrated writer in Hollywood. One who has NEVER done a decent Sci-Fi project.
"Lost in Space" – I rest my case.
There's also the rumor that next season will take place in a new setting, with new characters. And that the show will be retro-branded as an "Anthology".
I wonder if you might be on to something here. Not dropping a bunch of nukes into the thing and blowing it to hell and back. But instead using nuclear demolitions at key stress points to release pressure in a controlled way.
If you're talking about pressure release, why does it have to involve "nukes" at all? Just to sound more fun?
Such an operation would have a lot more in common with fracking for natural gas than anything else. Simply drilling down and fracturing the crust with a little conventional explosive in the right place would likely do the trick just fine. Assuming that poking a hole in a giant magma balloon is even the right call. Or that there even is a right call other than building places that humans could survive an eruption in, or getting a breeding population of us off this rock entirely.
Oh I agree with you that the Soyuz is not a perfect craft, but it does have a long history which does count for something. Build quality though, I've read this is a major problem throughout the Russian space program these days. I guess the sanctions are starting to bite a bit?
Progress requires the assumption and management of risk. Without technical and economic progress in the space-launch industry, there will be no qualitative or quantitative increases in space exploration, tourism, or industry beyond the current anemic "just barely up there" rate.
SpaceX forces cargo liability back onto the customer, so its stealing from them with unavoidable risk and loss due to technical malfunctions.
So? Why should anyone but SpaceX and their customers give a damn about the contracts they have negotiated between themselves? Do you regularly worry about the contracts your neighbors sign for remodeling work, or that your county signs for re-paving a roadway?
Even if the customer has to buy their own launch insurance, they're still getting a WAY better deal with SpaceX than they would with a competitor who charges 10X as much per launch. They also get to shop around for that insurance rather than pay some Apple-like markup for that "service" from SpaceX itself.
Musk does a lot of projects, and I don't like how he has funded some of them.
Regardless though, SpaceX has been nothing but a glowing success after years of failures and the hard work it took to overcome them. NASA and his other customers are getting the best possible value for their dollars compared to all of his competitors, and that's a very good thing for everyone.
If you want to talk about rampant fraud while on the government teat, go take a look at Lockheed Martin's ongoing disaster with the F-35 project.
Depression is a signal from your body/mind that you need to make a serious life change. This is why you start looking outside yourself more. Because you need to figure out (or honestly face) what is deeply wrong with your life.
They have 90% of the profits in phones and laptops. They don't care about making the ultra-thin margin me-too products that would increase their market share.
The previous model of MacBookPro had two Thunderbolt2 ports. Had Apple simply upgraded those two ports to TB3, and left the rest (including the MagSafe adapter), it would have been a better product.
Dream on, coal is dead and is not coming back. Now the US has held back from producing solar technology. Wants to institute protectionism to make up for poor planning. Wait till the wto steps us and says the US is unfairly charging tariffs allowing other countries to charge tariffs too.
All that are hurt are US citizens. China will sell its solar cells someplace else and US will lose those markets too. Poor planning.
Logical fail.
The proposed tariff would hurt CHINESE manufacturing, while encouraging US production of solar panels.
The result would be higher prices (hurting adoption of solar) in the short term, but a healthier US solar production industry in the long term.
My father was a very good electrical engineer who was never certified. Usually, the companies he worked for would have one or two PEs (usually the owners) that would simply sign off on everyone else's work. It just wasn't worth the cost for all of them to get individually certified.
Sure. It wasn't rampant piracy, or the greed of Publishers, must have been 'consolists'. What a fucking retard.
And here I thought that it was Microsoft cannibalizing the PC development community in '03 by making the XBox more attractive to develop for.
With nearly all of the action-game developers (Bungie et al) suddenly switching to XBox, and later PS3/4, you saw the number of PC games dwindle to the point where they'd all but disappeared from retail stores by '05. Steam stepped in, and provided a good platform for small indie games to prosper. Then the big console titles started getting ported to PC again, but now something like 85% of all big-budget PC games are also available on XBox or PS4.
The day I finally broke down and bought a PS4 (to play Zero Dawn), I discovered that the damn thing was really just a PC without a keyboard and mouse. You can download games from Sony's store. You can play games over the net with friends with an ease that makes a mockery of having to set up Teamspeak to do the same thing on a PC. Then my kid discovered that you can actually share your games with someone else over the net so that you both can play together.
Which leaves only a couple of advantages for the PC:
1) Open Development 2) Keyboard and Mouse Input (though anything designed for a console still works better with an XBox or PS4 controller). 3) Faster hardware. IF you have the money, and IF the game isn't graphically locked to what an XBox or PS4 can render, and IF the indie developer (cough... battlegrounds... cough) isn't sucking up all that power to display PS3-level graphics with unoptimized code.
Do you now who P&G is? Do you think that they sell direct to consumer? Their ads are far more indirect, meant to increase sales at retail.
They are a HUGE player in B2B retail layout research. Companies go to them to optimize product placement on shelves (every shelf level has a price, endcaps go for a premium). Retailers go to them to learn how to make their stores more welcoming and less stressful. Notice how Walgreens did a makeover a few years back? That was P&G.
I've been in meetings with product managers from P&G. Trust me, they are anything but morons. More like Type-A Geniuses in constant competition with each other.
I came in there with a technology to sell them, and was very effectively questioned as to how exactly it worked, and it's precise differences from a competing product. Each question was cunningly designed to try and catch me up in any kind of lie or exaggeration. I impressed them by knowing what I was talking about.
If they have any weaknesses, it's a fanatical adherence to a literal book full of established company procedures. That and the internal competition makes it very difficult to do business with them if you can't set up an outsourcing operation in China or the Philippines that serves them globally.
Slashdot Mirror
And how would a "benevolent" socialist A.I. avoid the need to use force against the humans who don't wish to follow its dictates? Is Libertarianism only unworkable because you've chosen not wave the magic tech wand at it?
There is a reason why human-organized systems break down, and the Catholics even have a word for it: Subsidiarity. Humans function best, regardless of the type of government they're under, when decision making is left to the lowest possible level of the hierarchy that still serves the common good. But as a system's decision-making is inevitably raised to higher and higher levels (the autocratic King/President/CEO, the Supreme Soviet, Billionaire Corporate & Bank Cartels... etc.) then corruption sets in and rots away the ability of the people at the lowest level of the system to make their decisions locally and rationally according to their specific situational needs. Eventually, all decision-making becomes top-down and irrational, and the system collapses. Due to the inability of those wielding the power (and making all the decisions) to understand, much less care about, what's happening to the people at the bottom of the power pyramid. Sound familiar?
Some governmental forms are more resistant to this rot than others, or rot in different ways. But the solution is the same: De-Centralize the decision-making of the system to the lowest hierarchical level that serves the common good.
Slashdot's owners, apparently, as they are quickly throwing that "socalism" label onto unionization.
That label is also mis-applied. Socialism has nothing to do with the idea of unionization. Which is simply workers forming an organization of their own free will in order to win concessions (better pay, less overtime) from the management of the company they work for. The socialist label would only apply if the workers in question were forced by law into joining a union.
I'll admit that as a libertarian-minded worker in the animation/game industries in my 20's, I didn't grok this distinction properly. There was talk even then of doing something to address the crazy working conditions, and raise the pay – which I rejected. But my 45 year-old conservative-libertarian minded self can now see just how stupid it was to work 12+ hour days for such crap wages. If I hadn't left Silicon Valley just prior to turning 30, I never could have gotten married and started a family on what little I was making. I saw friends with high-profile jobs at places like Lucasfilm, Dreamworks, and Pixar that were barely getting by. Lucky to be able to buy a money-pit fixer-upper in the Sunset district, and have one kid that they might get to see on weekends, if at all.
In his robot utopia the price of energy would for all intents and purposes be zero. All you need is robots pumping out solar panels and windmills, and other robots installing them.
Obviously you can't power mining machinery with solar directly, but once you have "free" energy it's also cheap to make hydrogen or methane or whatever else you want to use for that purpose.
Try going back 500 years and describing our technological wonders to those living in the Middle Ages. Such as how one family can farm the land that 10,000 much larger families used to (leading to empty farm towns across America). How we have machines that allow a dozen men to build what would to them be a huge building. How almost anyone can fly above the clouds to go visit family half a world away. Or how we can instantly communicate with the other side of the world, not just with "letters", but audio and video too. Or the sheer number of people who live in our cities.
Then you can explain to them why, with all of these wonders, we still have a need for money.
Oh please... Nothing is free. Even if we have self-replicating robots, the resources to build them are finite. So are the energy sources to run them. The pollution they produce will be non-zero. Their maintenance and design will require human or genius-bot input, and both of those will be limited in number.
Most importantly, the desires of humans for labor are essentially unlimited in scope. Give a family one robot, and they'll soon "need" 2, 3, and... how many computing devices do you have in your house again? Be sure to count every PC, laptop, tablet, phone, calculator, thermostat, furnace, water heater, oven, game system, TV, and electronic toy, and god knows what else. Robots would proliferate similarly, and we'd still have to have prices to decide who gets more or fewer robots.
And THAT's assuming that the robots don't develop their own desires and dreams.
The monitoring station is in Hawaii. The map shows nothing between Hawaii and Asia because there are no monitoring stations in-between. RTFA and you'll see that there are four major monitoring stations that form a roughly north-south line, and are roughly equidistant from each other.
"Progress" is not a one-way road. Scientists make mistakes all the time (see the low-fat diet fiasco that's killing millions). Scientists makes horrible assumptions constantly (all brains assumed to be same as ONE SINGLE dissection in the 60's until MRIs revealed the multiplicity of structures). Pop-Science gets manipulated by corporate marketing (see the efforts of tobacco and sugar companies to downplay the dangers of their products). Real Science gets highjacked again and again by political interests that control research funds (see the Global Warming/Cooling/Change insanity that every new project has to reference somehow). Real Science, in a false dichotomy against religion, also gets misused and twisted into it's opposite: Dogma (see the cult of the Big Bang).
"Science" needs to rid itself of political chains, encourage not just discovery, but reward positive/negative confirmation, and recognize that it can only observe and describe natural processes. The instant a scientist tries to create moral meaning out of what they see, they are no longer practicing science.
Seriously, Wall Street hates the Bitcoin casino because it's sucking up potential "investment" money from their stock market casino. They're just hating on their competition. It's the same reason that the TV industry spent so much time demonizing video games in the 80's and 90's. The latter reduces the demand for the former.
I still remember a friend of mine buying the original titanium PowerBook upon release. If you picked up his shiny new laptop by opposite corners, the battery would fall out.
Which is why you NEVER, EVER, buy the first version of any Apple product. They test intensively, but not widely, due to their desire for secrecy.
So to those who are buying the new iMac Pro in a few weeks... Good luck suckers!
Why are racist posts like the parent modded up on Slashdot? The old Slashdot didn't tolerate racism, but it seems like it's okay now.
Hognoxious, you should apologize for your racist post.
"Not being racist is the new racism." - Jeff Winger on "Community"
Augh! Jar-Jar Abrams involved, very evil omen.
Bah... Did you see who the executive producer is? Akiva Goldsman, the most overrated writer in Hollywood. One who has NEVER done a decent Sci-Fi project.
"Lost in Space" – I rest my case.
There's also the rumor that next season will take place in a new setting, with new characters. And that the show will be retro-branded as an "Anthology".
Wow, what an interesting story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_Muntz.
Thanks!
Ah... So we can blame HIM for inventing the convention of measuring the size of monitors from corner-to-corner.
Actually, the new keyboard (but not the useless touch strip) is the only part of my new MBP that I actually like.
The ports annoy me Every. Single. Day. Why they didn't just swap the two TB2 ports on the 2015 model with two TB3 ports is beyond me.
I wonder if you might be on to something here. Not dropping a bunch of nukes into the thing and blowing it to hell and back. But instead using nuclear demolitions at key stress points to release pressure in a controlled way.
If you're talking about pressure release, why does it have to involve "nukes" at all? Just to sound more fun?
Such an operation would have a lot more in common with fracking for natural gas than anything else. Simply drilling down and fracturing the crust with a little conventional explosive in the right place would likely do the trick just fine. Assuming that poking a hole in a giant magma balloon is even the right call. Or that there even is a right call other than building places that humans could survive an eruption in, or getting a breeding population of us off this rock entirely.
Oh I agree with you that the Soyuz is not a perfect craft, but it does have a long history which does count for something. Build quality though, I've read this is a major problem throughout the Russian space program these days. I guess the sanctions are starting to bite a bit?
Progress requires the assumption and management of risk. Without technical and economic progress in the space-launch industry, there will be no qualitative or quantitative increases in space exploration, tourism, or industry beyond the current anemic "just barely up there" rate.
SpaceX forces cargo liability back onto the customer, so its stealing from them with unavoidable risk and loss due to technical malfunctions.
So? Why should anyone but SpaceX and their customers give a damn about the contracts they have negotiated between themselves? Do you regularly worry about the contracts your neighbors sign for remodeling work, or that your county signs for re-paving a roadway?
Even if the customer has to buy their own launch insurance, they're still getting a WAY better deal with SpaceX than they would with a competitor who charges 10X as much per launch. They also get to shop around for that insurance rather than pay some Apple-like markup for that "service" from SpaceX itself.
Musk does a lot of projects, and I don't like how he has funded some of them.
Regardless though, SpaceX has been nothing but a glowing success after years of failures and the hard work it took to overcome them. NASA and his other customers are getting the best possible value for their dollars compared to all of his competitors, and that's a very good thing for everyone.
If you want to talk about rampant fraud while on the government teat, go take a look at Lockheed Martin's ongoing disaster with the F-35 project.
I have yet to see anyone invent a flat cathode ray tube (CRT) display. :P
The Federation obviously uses absurdly high-power plasma display panels though, since they're always blowing up at the least little thing.
Depression is a signal from your body/mind that you need to make a serious life change. This is why you start looking outside yourself more. Because you need to figure out (or honestly face) what is deeply wrong with your life.
They have 90% of the profits in phones and laptops. They don't care about making the ultra-thin margin me-too products that would increase their market share.
The previous model of MacBookPro had two Thunderbolt2 ports. Had Apple simply upgraded those two ports to TB3, and left the rest (including the MagSafe adapter), it would have been a better product.
Dream on, coal is dead and is not coming back. Now the US has held back from producing solar technology. Wants to institute protectionism to make up for poor planning. Wait till the wto steps us and says the US is unfairly charging tariffs allowing other countries to charge tariffs too.
All that are hurt are US citizens. China will sell its solar cells someplace else and US will lose those markets too. Poor planning.
Logical fail.
The proposed tariff would hurt CHINESE manufacturing, while encouraging US production of solar panels.
The result would be higher prices (hurting adoption of solar) in the short term, but a healthier US solar production industry in the long term.
My father was a very good electrical engineer who was never certified. Usually, the companies he worked for would have one or two PEs (usually the owners) that would simply sign off on everyone else's work. It just wasn't worth the cost for all of them to get individually certified.
Consolitis fucked over a few PC games
Sure. It wasn't rampant piracy, or the greed of Publishers, must have been 'consolists'.
What a fucking retard.
And here I thought that it was Microsoft cannibalizing the PC development community in '03 by making the XBox more attractive to develop for.
With nearly all of the action-game developers (Bungie et al) suddenly switching to XBox, and later PS3/4, you saw the number of PC games dwindle to the point where they'd all but disappeared from retail stores by '05. Steam stepped in, and provided a good platform for small indie games to prosper. Then the big console titles started getting ported to PC again, but now something like 85% of all big-budget PC games are also available on XBox or PS4.
The day I finally broke down and bought a PS4 (to play Zero Dawn), I discovered that the damn thing was really just a PC without a keyboard and mouse. You can download games from Sony's store. You can play games over the net with friends with an ease that makes a mockery of having to set up Teamspeak to do the same thing on a PC. Then my kid discovered that you can actually share your games with someone else over the net so that you both can play together.
Which leaves only a couple of advantages for the PC:
1) Open Development
2) Keyboard and Mouse Input (though anything designed for a console still works better with an XBox or PS4 controller).
3) Faster hardware. IF you have the money, and IF the game isn't graphically locked to what an XBox or PS4 can render, and IF the indie developer (cough... battlegrounds... cough) isn't sucking up all that power to display PS3-level graphics with unoptimized code.
Do you now who P&G is? Do you think that they sell direct to consumer? Their ads are far more indirect, meant to increase sales at retail.
They are a HUGE player in B2B retail layout research. Companies go to them to optimize product placement on shelves (every shelf level has a price, endcaps go for a premium). Retailers go to them to learn how to make their stores more welcoming and less stressful. Notice how Walgreens did a makeover a few years back? That was P&G.
I've been in meetings with product managers from P&G. Trust me, they are anything but morons. More like Type-A Geniuses in constant competition with each other.
I came in there with a technology to sell them, and was very effectively questioned as to how exactly it worked, and it's precise differences from a competing product. Each question was cunningly designed to try and catch me up in any kind of lie or exaggeration. I impressed them by knowing what I was talking about.
If they have any weaknesses, it's a fanatical adherence to a literal book full of established company procedures. That and the internal competition makes it very difficult to do business with them if you can't set up an outsourcing operation in China or the Philippines that serves them globally.