Self-driving vehicles (destination by traveler, drive by vehicle) are interesting, but the more removed people get from the driving responsibilities, the worse they actually drive
Once the vehicles drive themselves, who cares? I've lost the ability to translate my high-level code into assembly language by hand, but I don't think I'll ever need to do that again, so I'm not losing sleep over it. If a particular driving skill is taken over (and done at least as well) by automation, then good riddance, the roads will probably be safer without a bunch of drunks and crazies weaving unpredictably back and forth.
Anyway, my guess is the first real self-driving will be on freeways, and people will still have to keep their driving skills up to snuff to get to the freeway and drive wherever they're going after they exit. I really doubt there'll be much degradation in driving skill if people are no longer forced to manually drive in a straight line for an hour with an occasional lane change to break the monotony. City street navigation is a much harder problem and I'm guessing it'll be a lot longer before we see it automated.
1. Coding for pay and working on an open source project aren't mutually exclusive. I've worked on open source code for pay, because my employer felt that it would ultimately benefit the company more to open the code than to keep it proprietary. Many of the biggest open-source projects are full-time jobs to at least a few of their developers. But more commonly...
2. Some of us code for fun! And to us, "Why would you work on open source projects when you already have a job?" is like asking a professional musician, "Why do you jam with your friends on the weekend when you already have a steady gig that's paying your bills?" Or asking a professional travel writer why they go on vacation. Someone wants to pay me to do what I'd be doing on my own anyway -- how lucky is that?
Java hasn't been interpreted byte code (strictly speaking) for some time now. The byte code gets compiled to native code at runtime, with optimizations that are determined by the runtime behavior of the code rather than by simple static analysis.
Haven't you listened to your airline stewardess lately? The use of wireless devices while in flight is prohibited by law. I'd be so embarrassed if the shuttle pilot had to turn the ship around because I just had to use my Bluetooth PSA.
But they're too busy making an email application with 9 frames and 200k of Javascript
Because, of course, if they weren't doing that, every last one of the engineers on that project would be tinkering with the search engine instead. It's not like they have separate engineering teams or people with different areas of expertise there or anything.
...but not on Star Trek. He's one of the regulars on next season's "Fleet Street" on ABC, a spinoff of "The Practice." I was never much for courtroom dramas, but I tuned in to see Shatner's guest role toward the end of the just-concluded season -- and kept tuning in week after week until the end. His role on that show must have been written with him in mind; it fits his acting style absolutely perfectly, and it's funny as hell. (James Spader and Rebecca de Mornay aren't bad either.) If "Fleet Street" can maintain anywhere near the goofiness and energy level of the last several "Practice" episodes, it'll be a must-see, and a few years from now it'll be what anyone under 20 thinks of when the name William Shatner comes up.
3 dimensions means you probably are really far apart from someone who'd be right next to you on the ground -- you can be right behind him, but 1000 feet higher up. Plus the vehicles aren't constrained to narrow roadways in specific places as they are on the ground.
I'd be much less worried about my safety while in the air than while taking off or (especially) landing. I can just see 500 people simultaneously spotting a parking spot at some popular concert venue and all trying to land as close to it as they can.
If copyright is repealed (for example) 30% of the economy vanishes overnight.
Care to back that number up? Why isn't it 10%, or 40%?
And anyway, very few people are talking about repealing copyright completely. Most anti-DMCA folks just want to roll back the relatively recent excesses of copyright law, not to scrap the entire concept (though there is of course a small minority who wants that.)
Why is that sad? The name of the game is not, in fact, support. That's just an aspect of the real concern, which is predictability. If you know a piece of software -- open-source or otherwise -- will cost $X a month in support fees, and that in exchange you'll get any problems looked at ASAP so they cost your people a minimum of time, then you can do your budget numbers at the beginning of the year and be pretty sure you'll hit them. The definition of "ASAP" depends on how much you're willing to pay; it's a tradeoff. Even Microsoft will give you very snappy support if you're paying them enough for it.
With no paid support contract (again, either open-source or closed) you're at the mercy of the developers' spare time. There is no guaranteed response time, no escalation procedure if you're not getting good results. In the case of open-source software, 95% of the time you'll get a bugfix faster than you would from a commercial vendor. But the remaining 5% of the time your problem won't interest the developer for whatever reason, and your organization may end up wasting more money due to the bug than it would have spent on support.
If you're in a big organization whose budgeting process is complex, predictable-but-expensive can be a completely rational thing to choose over probably-cheap-but-maybe-not. You're buying reduced risk, and that can be worth various amounts of money depending on the context.
I should point out that I use OOo for my business and it meets my needs 99% of the time -- but that's my situation, not a universal truth.
"Voter verifiable" means you, the voter, look at the paper and verify its correctness before you put it in the box. Doesn't mean your name is on the paper.
Until pressing a button is as secure as writing (or punching) your vote on paper and dropping it in to a box, e-voting won't be mainstream.
So India's 100% electronic general election, underway as I type this, is just a figment of South Asia's collective imagination? How much more "mainstream" than the entire electorate of a democracy three times as populous as the US can e-voting get?
My mom, who lives in a fairly remote area, recently looked into getting a broadband connection to go along with a new computer. She's paying about $20 a month right now for 56K dialup. The cheapest broadband she could find (not all that high speed, but faster than her modem) was around $50 a month.
Does she want to switch from a modem to broadband? Yeah, sure, she doesn't like waiting forever for all her mail to download. Is it worth shelling out an extra $360 a year on a fixed retirement income? No way. Depending on the wording of a survey like this, she might well show up in the "not interested in broadband" column, even though she'd gladly switch if it was only a marginal price increase.
At any given point, I'm guessing most of the people who care about their connection speed and can afford to do something about it have already done so. Someone who can't afford the extra cost can't afford it, regardless of how much faster they'd be able to surf the web.
Is anyone else annoyed by the amount of story that is given away in trailers now?
Annoyed, yes, but "now" isn't right. I've been watching a lot of old movies on DVD, and on those DVDs that include the original trailers, I've noticed that the "giving the whole plot away" problem isn't anything new. I've seen it in trailers from the 1950s and earlier.
Which, if nothing else, makes me believe that it's a practice that will probably never change no matter how annoying it is to some people.
I think it's one of those things that people always assume is worse today than it was before, just because memory is selective and most people prefer nostalgia to bitterness. I think it's more likely that Sturgeon's Law has been true pretty consistently throughout human history.
All the network shows my household watches regularly (Alias, 24, Century City, Kingdom Hospital, The Practice, The DA, CSI) are either HD or, in 24's case, widescreen 480p. So are HBO's recent original series, as you note. That's plenty of HD content for us.
I've considered gigabit Ethernet for HD streaming too -- I mostly get smooth playback over my 100Mbps network, but occasionally there's a little glitch when the player app moves to the next file, which doesn't happen when playing from the local disk. Hasn't been important enough to make me shell out the money, though.
Ever wonder why HDTV is going so slow in catching on? Because they want to get all this crap out of the way to start with.
Certainly it has nothing to do with the fact that the early-generation monitors, like any newly-introduced technology, were priced way out of the average person's budget and were far too complicated to set up. Or with the fact that huge numbers of people are happy with 19-inch TVs, and at that size HDTV's picture quality isn't much more compelling than NTSC's. Or with the fact that while HDTV has been ramping up, people have been spending their TV-equipment budgets buying DVD players and movies at unprecedented rates.
Nah, it's gotta be a conspiracy instead. All those consumer-electronics manufacturers said to themselves, "Hey, I know! Let's retool our factories to build expensive new products so we can SIT ON THEM while movie studios try to make them illegal! Ha, that'll show those pesky consumers!"
I think you need a little less myopia in your definitions of "smart" and "stupid." Intelligence is a much broader thing than just "talent with numbers and machines."
Mozart and Picasso and Alexander the Great probably wouldn't be able to write a Perl script or analyze a chemical reaction if they were alive today. But I think few people would call any of them unintelligent.
As for wealth vs. intelligence, here's a book for you: "Rich Dad, Poor Dad." A bit repetitive, but it talks at length about how someone can be very smart in some ways but not when it comes to money.
Being able to figure out the decay rate of a new radioactive isotope doesn't make you good at figuring out which underpriced region is going to have the next big real estate boom. But both of those things require smarts.
That said, at least one study (admittedly, performed by someone whose views on the subject are controversial) shows a pretty good correlation between high IQ and financial success. That tracks pretty well with my experience in life: most of the rich people I know are pretty sharp. All of the self-made rich people I know are pretty sharp. If you can provide a pointer to any research showing a reverse correlation, I'd be fascinated to see it.
Damn straight. And while we're at it, shut down that stupid Carnegie Endowment for the Arts -- how dare those arrogant rich blowhards pay someone to sit around doodling when there are hungry kids on the street? I mean, who cares if it's their money; what right do they have to say what it's spent on when there are obviously higher priorities out there?
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Once the vehicles drive themselves, who cares? I've lost the ability to translate my high-level code into assembly language by hand, but I don't think I'll ever need to do that again, so I'm not losing sleep over it. If a particular driving skill is taken over (and done at least as well) by automation, then good riddance, the roads will probably be safer without a bunch of drunks and crazies weaving unpredictably back and forth.
Anyway, my guess is the first real self-driving will be on freeways, and people will still have to keep their driving skills up to snuff to get to the freeway and drive wherever they're going after they exit. I really doubt there'll be much degradation in driving skill if people are no longer forced to manually drive in a straight line for an hour with an occasional lane change to break the monotony. City street navigation is a much harder problem and I'm guessing it'll be a lot longer before we see it automated.
Really?
1. Coding for pay and working on an open source project aren't mutually exclusive. I've worked on open source code for pay, because my employer felt that it would ultimately benefit the company more to open the code than to keep it proprietary. Many of the biggest open-source projects are full-time jobs to at least a few of their developers. But more commonly...
2. Some of us code for fun! And to us, "Why would you work on open source projects when you already have a job?" is like asking a professional musician, "Why do you jam with your friends on the weekend when you already have a steady gig that's paying your bills?" Or asking a professional travel writer why they go on vacation. Someone wants to pay me to do what I'd be doing on my own anyway -- how lucky is that?
Java hasn't been interpreted byte code (strictly speaking) for some time now. The byte code gets compiled to native code at runtime, with optimizations that are determined by the runtime behavior of the code rather than by simple static analysis.
What part of "European Union" don't you understand?
A $30000 room is a lot cheaper than three kids.
Haven't you listened to your airline stewardess lately? The use of wireless devices while in flight is prohibited by law. I'd be so embarrassed if the shuttle pilot had to turn the ship around because I just had to use my Bluetooth PSA.
Because, of course, if they weren't doing that, every last one of the engineers on that project would be tinkering with the search engine instead. It's not like they have separate engineering teams or people with different areas of expertise there or anything.
(Good God, I've done it, used "u" instead of "you." My soul is forfeit.)
...but not on Star Trek. He's one of the regulars on next season's "Fleet Street" on ABC, a spinoff of "The Practice." I was never much for courtroom dramas, but I tuned in to see Shatner's guest role toward the end of the just-concluded season -- and kept tuning in week after week until the end. His role on that show must have been written with him in mind; it fits his acting style absolutely perfectly, and it's funny as hell. (James Spader and Rebecca de Mornay aren't bad either.) If "Fleet Street" can maintain anywhere near the goofiness and energy level of the last several "Practice" episodes, it'll be a must-see, and a few years from now it'll be what anyone under 20 thinks of when the name William Shatner comes up.
I'd be much less worried about my safety while in the air than while taking off or (especially) landing. I can just see 500 people simultaneously spotting a parking spot at some popular concert venue and all trying to land as close to it as they can.
One word, man: reincarnation!
Care to back that number up? Why isn't it 10%, or 40%?
And anyway, very few people are talking about repealing copyright completely. Most anti-DMCA folks just want to roll back the relatively recent excesses of copyright law, not to scrap the entire concept (though there is of course a small minority who wants that.)
If "creating an AI" is more practical than another idea, time to ditch the other idea.
$5 savings isn't. $150 might be. Depends on what you're buying.
With no paid support contract (again, either open-source or closed) you're at the mercy of the developers' spare time. There is no guaranteed response time, no escalation procedure if you're not getting good results. In the case of open-source software, 95% of the time you'll get a bugfix faster than you would from a commercial vendor. But the remaining 5% of the time your problem won't interest the developer for whatever reason, and your organization may end up wasting more money due to the bug than it would have spent on support.
If you're in a big organization whose budgeting process is complex, predictable-but-expensive can be a completely rational thing to choose over probably-cheap-but-maybe-not. You're buying reduced risk, and that can be worth various amounts of money depending on the context.
I should point out that I use OOo for my business and it meets my needs 99% of the time -- but that's my situation, not a universal truth.
"Voter verifiable" means you, the voter, look at the paper and verify its correctness before you put it in the box. Doesn't mean your name is on the paper.
So India's 100% electronic general election, underway as I type this, is just a figment of South Asia's collective imagination? How much more "mainstream" than the entire electorate of a democracy three times as populous as the US can e-voting get?
Does she want to switch from a modem to broadband? Yeah, sure, she doesn't like waiting forever for all her mail to download. Is it worth shelling out an extra $360 a year on a fixed retirement income? No way. Depending on the wording of a survey like this, she might well show up in the "not interested in broadband" column, even though she'd gladly switch if it was only a marginal price increase.
At any given point, I'm guessing most of the people who care about their connection speed and can afford to do something about it have already done so. Someone who can't afford the extra cost can't afford it, regardless of how much faster they'd be able to surf the web.
I don't see that very often from people of any political stripe.
Which, if nothing else, makes me believe that it's a practice that will probably never change no matter how annoying it is to some people.
I think it's one of those things that people always assume is worse today than it was before, just because memory is selective and most people prefer nostalgia to bitterness. I think it's more likely that Sturgeon's Law has been true pretty consistently throughout human history.
I've considered gigabit Ethernet for HD streaming too -- I mostly get smooth playback over my 100Mbps network, but occasionally there's a little glitch when the player app moves to the next file, which doesn't happen when playing from the local disk. Hasn't been important enough to make me shell out the money, though.
Certainly it has nothing to do with the fact that the early-generation monitors, like any newly-introduced technology, were priced way out of the average person's budget and were far too complicated to set up. Or with the fact that huge numbers of people are happy with 19-inch TVs, and at that size HDTV's picture quality isn't much more compelling than NTSC's. Or with the fact that while HDTV has been ramping up, people have been spending their TV-equipment budgets buying DVD players and movies at unprecedented rates.
Nah, it's gotta be a conspiracy instead. All those consumer-electronics manufacturers said to themselves, "Hey, I know! Let's retool our factories to build expensive new products so we can SIT ON THEM while movie studios try to make them illegal! Ha, that'll show those pesky consumers!"
Mozart and Picasso and Alexander the Great probably wouldn't be able to write a Perl script or analyze a chemical reaction if they were alive today. But I think few people would call any of them unintelligent.
As for wealth vs. intelligence, here's a book for you: "Rich Dad, Poor Dad." A bit repetitive, but it talks at length about how someone can be very smart in some ways but not when it comes to money.
Being able to figure out the decay rate of a new radioactive isotope doesn't make you good at figuring out which underpriced region is going to have the next big real estate boom. But both of those things require smarts.
That said, at least one study (admittedly, performed by someone whose views on the subject are controversial) shows a pretty good correlation between high IQ and financial success. That tracks pretty well with my experience in life: most of the rich people I know are pretty sharp. All of the self-made rich people I know are pretty sharp. If you can provide a pointer to any research showing a reverse correlation, I'd be fascinated to see it.
Damn straight. And while we're at it, shut down that stupid Carnegie Endowment for the Arts -- how dare those arrogant rich blowhards pay someone to sit around doodling when there are hungry kids on the street? I mean, who cares if it's their money; what right do they have to say what it's spent on when there are obviously higher priorities out there?