All I'm seeing after clicking on the "non-paywalled link" is a page with a spinner icon near the middle and the text "Loading Enhanced PDF..." at the bottom. I'm using the latest version of the Chromium browser packaged for Debian GNU/Linux. It would be nice if there's a pre-print version available at the usual source.
Society scrambling to find "make work" jobs for the masses that include the army and pointless infra projects? Double check.
How do you think Hitler got Germany back onto its feet after World War I? FDR had managed to stabilize things a bit, but the US only got out of the Great Depression thanks to the birth of the military-industrial complex.
That's a myth that keeps getting repeated. No. Wars do not bring a society out of depression. If you look at the actual standard of living, the second world war depressed it further by almost every measure, and most essential goods were actually rationed. What the war does, instead, is give people a good reason for their privation. They're not scrimping and getting by with less because the economy is bad: they're scrimping and getting by with less to support the war effort-- in Germany , as well as in America (not to mention England and the Soviet Union)..
What pulled he economy out of the Great Depression was the end of the war.
Wars might bring countries, especially the losers, to ruin, but the preparation for war, before the first bombs are dropped or the first tanks roll in from across the border, results in an increase in production. This is no different from any pump priming scheme. Of course, a drawn-out war can bankrupt even a resource-rich country far from the theater of conflict. But this wasn't the case for US during WW2. Also, jingoistic nationalism, while ultimately destructive, also helps give people a sense of purpose, such that they see their "privation" as part of their noble duty to the motherland.
Are they though? There are a lot of SF writers that get the details wrong but get the overall state of society right. Go read "Player Piano" and tell me that Vonnegut did not nail the current economy. A small number of automation engineers making tons of money? check.
A small number of an elite knowledge class making tons of money? This isn't new. In the past, it was the literate elite. Now, when everybody in the civilized world could read and write, it's the technical elite. Of course, above them, in any age, there's still the ruling class, which include not just the MPs and dictators of the world, but also the members of the sub-1%, the CEOs and plain filthy rich.
Society scrambling to find "make work" jobs for the masses that include the army and pointless infra projects? Double check.
How do you think Hitler got Germany back onto its feet after World War I? FDR had managed to stabilize things a bit, but the US only got out of the Great Depression thanks to the birth of the military-industrial complex.
You can make human colonies in faraway places without humans having to travel there. In 200 years, I expect that we will be able to reproduce entire ecosystems from data alone. That data "recipe" could be packed into a rather small package and transported slowly to many distant solar systems to germinate into diverse islands of life and civilization.
Since we're talking about 200 years, let me add another sci-fantastic idea, mind uploading. If we could turn consciousness into data then all we need for "humans" to colonize another planet is a von Neumann probe that, in addition to its viral job of replicating itself, could print out or grow the bodies needed to house the uploaded minds.
If the accurate recording of brain states is ruled out by quantum physics, then we could go for the next best thing, uploading video, audio, and perhaps other sense data recorded by a person using body-mounted sensors similar to Google Glass. The idea would be to record a VR movie of that person's daily life. Using this person's genetic data, a clone would produced when the probe reaches its destination. The clone could then be "programmed" using the VR data, in effect recreating the consciousness of the original person.
Patents should be granted and immediately sold exclusively to the government, who can then open them up for everyone to use.
Wouldn't not granting the patents in the first place be more efficient? Patents are an artificial monopoly, protected by the government, so the government has the power not to honor patents that don't benefit the public. There's no natural analog to patents and other so-called "intellectual" property, unlike real property, which can be found in the territorial instincts of many animals.
I can't see how a non-government backed cyber-attack can work against a group with a distributed online presence. If you take down one site, wouldn't they just pop up another and use social media, or more old fashioned communications methods like email, to spread word about the new site. So are these New World hackers planning to also take down Facebook, Twitter, Sony or even the almighty Google?
Truly. Don't underestimate the "some people just want to watch the world burn" types. Groups like Boko Haram exist to destroy things they think are "too western," and are happy to slaughter whole towns full of people just to keep their profile up. As Islamic fundamentalism spreads through Africa, large and long-term projects like this - fragile things with a huge attack surface - will become favorite targets of the medieval-minded theocracy crowd.
Terrorists care less about attack surface and more about getting maximum bang for the buck, either literally or figuratively. This makes solar panel farms less attractive than a dam, skyscraper or nuclear power plant. It would be far easier for a terrorist groups to simply sabotage the electric grid, destroying a few critical transmission towers, than destroy individual solar panels across hundreds of squares miles of desert.
We're probably in a better state to reach Mars today than to reach the Moon in the 1960's. While rocket propulsion has been stuck in the Sputnik era, other technologies have seen considerable improvement, particularly in the accuracy of navigation, which is what matters the most after you've reached escape velocity. I think it's more a question of why not how. Why go to Mars? Barring a revolution in rocket technology that makes vacations in space cheap enough for the average millionaire, don't expect a mission to Mars until it becomes a political issue. The Martian will either be Elon Musk or the vanguard of the next space race.
I've had the feeling more than once that NASA promotes a lot of ideas that they know are impractical in order to fire up their base of support, which is largely SF fans who can't or won't distinguish fantasy from reality. With an election coming up the strategy works brilliantly, and now they're handed a big pot of money to begin realizing their dreams. So they have to hire a battalion of scientists and engineers to work on growing crops on Mars, squeezing water out of rocks, mining asteroids for minerals, and all the rest. This should be interesting.
You're overestimating the political clout of the space ex community. Since when was space ever a political issue? JFK "might" have turned the moon into a political issue, but he never ran on a reach for the stars platform. Sure there's some local politics involved, but it's more a question of Congressional pork for the states that host space launch facilities than of SF fans dreaming of moon bases.
CS is obsolete and needs a medium. English teachers yes would not be qualified but part of the problem is CS itself
CS is not obsolete. The problem is that the scope of CS has been expanded too much to include low-level skills that require training rather than education. So instead of learning good principles, students are expected to learn specific applications of those principles. Which works for the short term, as students taught to be MS Windows experts become MS Windows experts, but ultimately disastrous when the next IT technology shift comes around, like the current rage about apps and the mobile web.
I see now that the whole idea of what movie and movie going is, has changed. It is a much larger "consumer experience" that involves merchandizing, social media, a plethora of buttons being pushed cleverly on kids and their parents, social engineering, social media, stiffing political correctness.......and the quality of the actual film is not significant anymore! It is a product, not a movie!
Lucas practically invented the it's a product not a movie school of movie-making! Google Star Wars lunchbox. What about the Star Wars expanded universe media? It's all part of the merchandising. If somebody invented Facebook in the 70s, I'm sure your BBS will be spammed by Star Wars promos in glorious green.
German court cases have no virtually effect on the English speaking countries. So unless you're a data center or married to a Valkyrie, this case has more of an academic than practical interest.
However, the BBC article and apparently even the German ruling itself, which is linked in the BBC article, refer to "intimate" rather than simply naked photos. Quoting from the first paragraph, and hoping I don't run afoul of German copyright law:
"Fertigt im Rahmen einer intimen Beziehung ein Partner vom anderen intime
Bild- oder Filmaufnahmen, kann dem Abgebildeten gegen den anderen nach
dem Ende der Beziehung ein Löschanspruch wegen Verletzung seines Persönlichkeitsrechts
zustehen, wenn er seine Einwilligung in die Anfertigung und
Verwendung der Aufnahmen auf die Dauer der Beziehung - konkludent - beschränkt
hat."
Even without the usual Google translate copy pasta, we can see the German word for intimate used twice in the phrases "intimen Bezeihung", intimate relationships, and "intime Bild- oder Filmaufnahmen", intimate photos and videos. I'm not patient enough to process the PDF file but I did stumble upon the German phrases for "wearing only underwear", so I can conclude that the ruling isn't limited to naked photos but extends to embarrassing photos, perhaps even something as innocent as a kiss.
"We want a revenue stream sustained for 10 years without us having to constantly develop new games and enter into the lottery that is mobile games today....... We also want it to never rain during the daytime, or when we are out and about.
Part 2 is easy. Go to a desert. Part of Part 1 has an analogy. Develop a game for people who don't like excitement, the old folks maybe, where you can expect greater loyalty. The problem here is that these are the sort of games that an inspired and competent developer can develop from his bedroom and, unless you're a big bad IP troll, relatively easy to clone. So it's again the luck of the draw. I know people who still play some variant of Tetris or a Rogue-like adventure game.
I thought Facebook had > 1 billion users. Does this mean most users are still accessing the site via their laptops or desktop computers, or are most of them fake accounts made by bots or cyberstalkers? Third option is many sign up but rarely visit.
No, in the best-case scenario, any Mars outpost will be a massive money pit for nations and corporations on earth for a good 50-100 years. That's about the time you would need to build the ridiculous infrastructure and industrial base required to live independently on Mars. I wouldn't count on anything more than a token presence on Mars in our lifetimes.
Not if we can perfect portable or at least truck-size replicators. The idea isn't to build massive infrastructure but to build on as-needed basis. I'm not saying that Mars necessarily has the resources. Maybe Mars lacks the elements and minerals necessary to reproduce technology from sratch. But if there's even a dim possibility of building an independent industrial base using resources from the Martian crust, why build it? Why build a nuclear power plant or factories when solar panels and a 3D printer can do? Mass production only works if you have the population for it. So as the Martian population grows, the Martians can start making their means of production more efficient.
Anyway, it'll never happen. We aren't getting off this rock in any real sense ever. I choose to intellectually masturbate about other subjects as a result. Now... let's talk about femm-bots.
You're right. This story should be tagged IDLE, since speculation about humans living in Mars is right up there with talk about the Singularity. No organism has evolved to cope with harsh conditions of space. So the only way we're going to make it in outer space long term is to develop into something other than human, maybe as sexy cyborgs or super-genetically enhanced transhumans. So I say, perfect strong AI and mind uploading first, then we can think of colonizing the cosmos.
Now, let's look at Japan, where they are NOT culturally diverse, respect for the law is a lot higher, the society stresses conforming, and suspects do not have the same legal protections that we do here. They also have no guns, and a MUCH higher suicide rate. I am not to dishonest as to ignore the other differences and say that if they had guns, that the suicide rate would drop to US levels. Apparently, you are not so honest and just like to look at the one difference that matters to you and are free to ignore the other differences.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather live in a place where the suicide rate is high than in a place where the murder rate, the killing of other people, is high.
So no thanks teabaggers, I will happily give $100 today to assist a poor/sick/uneducated person in the hopes that they will improve their life rather than piss it away into the machines of our economy that run on suffering. Maybe that person squanders that assistance, maybe they don't - but I can be damn sure that the alternative is a wasted investment.
A noble idea, but where does the altruism end? Let's assume the US is already a paradise, wouldn't there still be people outside the walled garden who want to get in? Should we help the poor/sick/uneducated in other countries as well?
The "life-extinguishing" events that have happened thus far in Earth's natural history can be survived by building a sufficient number of nuclear bunkers and similar fortified constructions in widely dispersed locations around the world. No nuclear bunker could withstand a direct impact from the asteroid that wiped out most of the dinosaurs but there would be survivors in shelters hundreds or thousands of miles away. The same thing goes for planet-wide volcanism, which can be survived by building from from the edges of the continental plates and using biohazard-quality air filters against the toxic emissions.
The only disaster for which Mars could be a planetary backup plan have not occurred since the appearance of the first microbes, a collision with another planet. A collision between Earth and another planet is theorized to have produced the moon but that took place way before the birth of life.
Slashdot Mirror
They popped a hydrogen filled balloon with a lit cigarette and declared success.
So you're saying junior great leader Kim has achieved the Holy Grail of energy research?
All I'm seeing after clicking on the "non-paywalled link" is a page with a spinner icon near the middle and the text "Loading Enhanced PDF..." at the bottom. I'm using the latest version of the Chromium browser packaged for Debian GNU/Linux. It would be nice if there's a pre-print version available at the usual source.
Society scrambling to find "make work" jobs for the masses that include the army and pointless infra projects? Double check.
How do you think Hitler got Germany back onto its feet after World War I? FDR had managed to stabilize things a bit, but the US only got out of the Great Depression thanks to the birth of the military-industrial complex.
That's a myth that keeps getting repeated. No. Wars do not bring a society out of depression. If you look at the actual standard of living, the second world war depressed it further by almost every measure, and most essential goods were actually rationed. What the war does, instead, is give people a good reason for their privation. They're not scrimping and getting by with less because the economy is bad: they're scrimping and getting by with less to support the war effort-- in Germany , as well as in America (not to mention England and the Soviet Union)..
What pulled he economy out of the Great Depression was the end of the war.
Wars might bring countries, especially the losers, to ruin, but the preparation for war, before the first bombs are dropped or the first tanks roll in from across the border, results in an increase in production. This is no different from any pump priming scheme. Of course, a drawn-out war can bankrupt even a resource-rich country far from the theater of conflict. But this wasn't the case for US during WW2. Also, jingoistic nationalism, while ultimately destructive, also helps give people a sense of purpose, such that they see their "privation" as part of their noble duty to the motherland.
Are they though? There are a lot of SF writers that get the details wrong but get the overall state of society right. Go read "Player Piano" and tell me that Vonnegut did not nail the current economy. A small number of automation engineers making tons of money? check.
A small number of an elite knowledge class making tons of money? This isn't new. In the past, it was the literate elite. Now, when everybody in the civilized world could read and write, it's the technical elite. Of course, above them, in any age, there's still the ruling class, which include not just the MPs and dictators of the world, but also the members of the sub-1%, the CEOs and plain filthy rich.
Society scrambling to find "make work" jobs for the masses that include the army and pointless infra projects? Double check.
How do you think Hitler got Germany back onto its feet after World War I? FDR had managed to stabilize things a bit, but the US only got out of the Great Depression thanks to the birth of the military-industrial complex.
You can make human colonies in faraway places without humans having to travel there. In 200 years, I expect that we will be able to reproduce entire ecosystems from data alone. That data "recipe" could be packed into a rather small package and transported slowly to many distant solar systems to germinate into diverse islands of life and civilization.
Since we're talking about 200 years, let me add another sci-fantastic idea, mind uploading. If we could turn consciousness into data then all we need for "humans" to colonize another planet is a von Neumann probe that, in addition to its viral job of replicating itself, could print out or grow the bodies needed to house the uploaded minds.
If the accurate recording of brain states is ruled out by quantum physics, then we could go for the next best thing, uploading video, audio, and perhaps other sense data recorded by a person using body-mounted sensors similar to Google Glass. The idea would be to record a VR movie of that person's daily life. Using this person's genetic data, a clone would produced when the probe reaches its destination. The clone could then be "programmed" using the VR data, in effect recreating the consciousness of the original person.
Patents should be granted and immediately sold exclusively to the government, who can then open them up for everyone to use.
Wouldn't not granting the patents in the first place be more efficient? Patents are an artificial monopoly, protected by the government, so the government has the power not to honor patents that don't benefit the public. There's no natural analog to patents and other so-called "intellectual" property, unlike real property, which can be found in the territorial instincts of many animals.
I can't see how a non-government backed cyber-attack can work against a group with a distributed online presence. If you take down one site, wouldn't they just pop up another and use social media, or more old fashioned communications methods like email, to spread word about the new site. So are these New World hackers planning to also take down Facebook, Twitter, Sony or even the almighty Google?
Truly. Don't underestimate the "some people just want to watch the world burn" types. Groups like Boko Haram exist to destroy things they think are "too western," and are happy to slaughter whole towns full of people just to keep their profile up. As Islamic fundamentalism spreads through Africa, large and long-term projects like this - fragile things with a huge attack surface - will become favorite targets of the medieval-minded theocracy crowd.
Terrorists care less about attack surface and more about getting maximum bang for the buck, either literally or figuratively. This makes solar panel farms less attractive than a dam, skyscraper or nuclear power plant. It would be far easier for a terrorist groups to simply sabotage the electric grid, destroying a few critical transmission towers, than destroy individual solar panels across hundreds of squares miles of desert.
We're probably in a better state to reach Mars today than to reach the Moon in the 1960's. While rocket propulsion has been stuck in the Sputnik era, other technologies have seen considerable improvement, particularly in the accuracy of navigation, which is what matters the most after you've reached escape velocity. I think it's more a question of why not how. Why go to Mars? Barring a revolution in rocket technology that makes vacations in space cheap enough for the average millionaire, don't expect a mission to Mars until it becomes a political issue. The Martian will either be Elon Musk or the vanguard of the next space race.
I've had the feeling more than once that NASA promotes a lot of ideas that they know are impractical in order to fire up their base of support, which is largely SF fans who can't or won't distinguish fantasy from reality. With an election coming up the strategy works brilliantly, and now they're handed a big pot of money to begin realizing their dreams. So they have to hire a battalion of scientists and engineers to work on growing crops on Mars, squeezing water out of rocks, mining asteroids for minerals, and all the rest. This should be interesting.
You're overestimating the political clout of the space ex community. Since when was space ever a political issue? JFK "might" have turned the moon into a political issue, but he never ran on a reach for the stars platform. Sure there's some local politics involved, but it's more a question of Congressional pork for the states that host space launch facilities than of SF fans dreaming of moon bases.
CS is obsolete and needs a medium. English teachers yes would not be qualified but part of the problem is CS itself
CS is not obsolete. The problem is that the scope of CS has been expanded too much to include low-level skills that require training rather than education. So instead of learning good principles, students are expected to learn specific applications of those principles. Which works for the short term, as students taught to be MS Windows experts become MS Windows experts, but ultimately disastrous when the next IT technology shift comes around, like the current rage about apps and the mobile web.
I see now that the whole idea of what movie and movie going is, has changed. It is a much larger "consumer experience" that involves merchandizing, social media, a plethora of buttons being pushed cleverly on kids and their parents, social engineering, social media, stiffing political correctness.......and the quality of the actual film is not significant anymore! It is a product, not a movie!
Lucas practically invented the it's a product not a movie school of movie-making! Google Star Wars lunchbox. What about the Star Wars expanded universe media? It's all part of the merchandising. If somebody invented Facebook in the 70s, I'm sure your BBS will be spammed by Star Wars promos in glorious green.
You must be dreaming
Much cheaper if they go to China, so long as they're not choosy about the sign at the gate.
They will deny him landing rights?
German court cases have no virtually effect on the English speaking countries. So unless you're a data center or married to a Valkyrie, this case has more of an academic than practical interest.
However, the BBC article and apparently even the German ruling itself, which is linked in the BBC article, refer to "intimate" rather than simply naked photos. Quoting from the first paragraph, and hoping I don't run afoul of German copyright law:
Even without the usual Google translate copy pasta, we can see the German word for intimate used twice in the phrases "intimen Bezeihung", intimate relationships, and "intime Bild- oder Filmaufnahmen", intimate photos and videos. I'm not patient enough to process the PDF file but I did stumble upon the German phrases for "wearing only underwear", so I can conclude that the ruling isn't limited to naked photos but extends to embarrassing photos, perhaps even something as innocent as a kiss.
"We want a revenue stream sustained for 10 years without us having to constantly develop new games and enter into the lottery that is mobile games today.... ... We also want it to never rain during the daytime, or when we are out and about.
Part 2 is easy. Go to a desert. Part of Part 1 has an analogy. Develop a game for people who don't like excitement, the old folks maybe, where you can expect greater loyalty. The problem here is that these are the sort of games that an inspired and competent developer can develop from his bedroom and, unless you're a big bad IP troll, relatively easy to clone. So it's again the luck of the draw. I know people who still play some variant of Tetris or a Rogue-like adventure game.
I thought Facebook had > 1 billion users. Does this mean most users are still accessing the site via their laptops or desktop computers, or are most of them fake accounts made by bots or cyberstalkers? Third option is many sign up but rarely visit.
Russian roulette, vodka, communism, zombie bacteria, Vladimir Putin -- Russians really know how to take risks.
No, in the best-case scenario, any Mars outpost will be a massive money pit for nations and corporations on earth for a good 50-100 years. That's about the time you would need to build the ridiculous infrastructure and industrial base required to live independently on Mars. I wouldn't count on anything more than a token presence on Mars in our lifetimes.
Not if we can perfect portable or at least truck-size replicators. The idea isn't to build massive infrastructure but to build on as-needed basis. I'm not saying that Mars necessarily has the resources. Maybe Mars lacks the elements and minerals necessary to reproduce technology from sratch. But if there's even a dim possibility of building an independent industrial base using resources from the Martian crust, why build it? Why build a nuclear power plant or factories when solar panels and a 3D printer can do? Mass production only works if you have the population for it. So as the Martian population grows, the Martians can start making their means of production more efficient.
Anyway, it'll never happen. We aren't getting off this rock in any real sense ever. I choose to intellectually masturbate about other subjects as a result. Now... let's talk about femm-bots.
You're right. This story should be tagged IDLE, since speculation about humans living in Mars is right up there with talk about the Singularity. No organism has evolved to cope with harsh conditions of space. So the only way we're going to make it in outer space long term is to develop into something other than human, maybe as sexy cyborgs or super-genetically enhanced transhumans. So I say, perfect strong AI and mind uploading first, then we can think of colonizing the cosmos.
Now, let's look at Japan, where they are NOT culturally diverse, respect for the law is a lot higher, the society stresses conforming, and suspects do not have the same legal protections that we do here. They also have no guns, and a MUCH higher suicide rate. I am not to dishonest as to ignore the other differences and say that if they had guns, that the suicide rate would drop to US levels. Apparently, you are not so honest and just like to look at the one difference that matters to you and are free to ignore the other differences.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather live in a place where the suicide rate is high than in a place where the murder rate, the killing of other people, is high.
So no thanks teabaggers, I will happily give $100 today to assist a poor/sick/uneducated person in the hopes that they will improve their life rather than piss it away into the machines of our economy that run on suffering. Maybe that person squanders that assistance, maybe they don't - but I can be damn sure that the alternative is a wasted investment.
A noble idea, but where does the altruism end? Let's assume the US is already a paradise, wouldn't there still be people outside the walled garden who want to get in? Should we help the poor/sick/uneducated in other countries as well?
For better, for worse, Bill and Hillary are still married. HP has already divorced Fiorina.
The "life-extinguishing" events that have happened thus far in Earth's natural history can be survived by building a sufficient number of nuclear bunkers and similar fortified constructions in widely dispersed locations around the world. No nuclear bunker could withstand a direct impact from the asteroid that wiped out most of the dinosaurs but there would be survivors in shelters hundreds or thousands of miles away. The same thing goes for planet-wide volcanism, which can be survived by building from from the edges of the continental plates and using biohazard-quality air filters against the toxic emissions.
The only disaster for which Mars could be a planetary backup plan have not occurred since the appearance of the first microbes, a collision with another planet. A collision between Earth and another planet is theorized to have produced the moon but that took place way before the birth of life.