Suddenly we're gonna need to be reviewing the "Science Fiction" section of the lit world for some advice how to handle the rise of sentient AI.
Kubrick 1968 suggested "screwdriver" while Cameron, 1984 gave a persuasive argument in favour of "shotguns and homemade pipe bombs".
We would have had hard AI already if we had spent the last 10 years and the trillion dollars on it like we pushed for the moon. But no, Beating People Up is more fun.
Who's to say you can't have both? That's why it's called the Defense Advanced Projects Agency!
But seriously, DARPA did in fact sponsor pretty much exactly the kind of "moon shot" program you are arguing for, throughout the 1980s. They spent a billion dollars and it was called the Strategic Computing Initiative (as a marketing phrase to compete with Strategic Defense Initiative, DARPA's other big baby). The results in VLSI chip manufacture were impressive; the results in general-purpose AI, which was mostly Lisp-based, not so much. The collapse of SCI funding led to the AI Winter and arguably the loss of a whole generation of software development techniques. DARPA's focus switched to making computers dumb and fast rather than making them self-aware. Lisp and logic programming fell, TCP/IP and C++ rose, and the results are the Internet as we know it: fast and massively scalable, yet riddled with security flaws and logical inconsistencies.
It turns out that even with all the money in the world, we really don't have an idea of how the human mind-brain works. At best we have a bunch of disconnected algorithms and partial models, but no way to wire them together. At least, that was pretty much the conclusion of the book I read; ironically for a program focused on AI theories revolving around connection between communicating subsystems, SCI itself failed on its lack of communication between its participants (academic, commercial and military). That seems significant.
Could another SCI happen in the 2010s? Maybe. But I doubt that the results would be any more impressive than what we've already achieved with Google, Cyc, Wikipedia and Watson.
It's not exactly free if one has to pay the telco $7 (at $10/GB) for the 700 MB overage.
Why are you downloading data to burn using over-the-air. Over-the-air is for travel.
The OP probably isn't using 3G; they may live in a country like Australia or New Zealand where we have monthly transfer caps in the low two-figure gigabyte range on the best wired, cable-modem connections, and mobile broadband is an order of magnitude more expensive. If you run Steam or do a couple of Ubuntu dist-upgrades, you can easily hit your cap and go into excess fees. I have games I'd bought on gog.com which I took several months to download just for that reason.
When my cap was increased from 10GB to 20GB a few years back, I was finally able to watch Youtube video without flinching, but something like Netflicks is still in the "ha ha funny joke! no, really just sell me the DVD" department.
We hates streaming media here in Hobbiton. Hates it, preciousssss. It really does jam up the tubes. Give me a simple file I can download and cache in my browser or on a local Web proxy any day. But with the centre of web development being West Coast USA, I guess nobody's thinking about conserving bandwidth anymore.
It's not exactly free if one has to pay the telco $7 (at $10/GB) for the 700 MB overage.
Most people in that situation have the option to go use some free wifi hotspot somewhere.
Headdesk.
No, see, because if you live in a country with telco data caps people don't set up free W-Fi access points because then they'd be charged a bazillion dollars in transfer cap excesses themselves.
In most of the world, Internet transfer aren't free. This is Free Market Economics 101 ("You get what you pay for"), unless apparently if you live in the USA where every Web Dot Cloud 2.0 startup thinks Internet is powered by free magic ponies and so their web-app can transmit data in terabyte chunks and the user will smile.
You probably think Iran is developing a nuclear weapon too. (Hint: They aren't.)
I dunno - commercial nuclear power generation seems to be a quite effective area-denial weapon against civilian populations. Granted, it's hard to point at an enemy country, and it doesn't always explode on cue, but you can't expect miracles from the first fifty years of a technology.
Skynet was originally installed by the military to control the national arsenal on August 4, 1997, at which time it... came to the conclusion that all of humanity would attempt to destroy it.
In Skynet's defense, the majority of Internet content in 1997 was X-Files-vs-Babylon-5 fanfic Usenet forums, and Geocities home pages with framesets, starry-sky background images, animated GIFs of dancing babies and flashing "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" blink tags.
Even an AI programmed by Ghandi himself would have extrapolated the worst from that scenario.
But the idea that excessive military production did, or even could, produce enough harm to damage the economy is completely retarded. It's invention of Reagan-era US propaganda, and just like the rest of Reagan-era US propaganda, it makes no sense.
I don't understand your contention that this argument (military production is a loss, not a profit) makes no sense. I could understand a complaint that the exact economic cost of military production in the Soviet system is much lower than generally accepted. But as you provide no figures, you don't seem to be making that argument.
Basic common sense suggests that there is always a limited supply of resources in an economy: for instance metals, oil, grain, water, infrastructure, and trained person-hours. This seems fairly hard to dispute.
Last I checked, military production requires at the very least a lot of energy, a lot of metals, a lot of infrastructure, and a lot of person-hours, all of which have to be diverted from civilian production - they can't simply be magiced out of thin air. Now certainly some military infrastructure (particularly transport and high-technology education and manufacturing) can be dual-purposed - that's how ARPA kick-started the US high tech economy including VLSI chips, satellites and the Internet. And a trained military and good roads can be very useful during a disaster, even just as trucking operators of last resort. But there's a lot of stuff the military does and makes which serves no conceivable useful civilian purpose. You can't eat bullets, to put it bluntly, and tanks make fairly poor tractors.
Are you seriously trying to argue that an arbitrary amount of non-productive military production can be had absolutely for free, with no economic or sociopolitical side effects? Because if you know how to do that, you should launch a dotcom and/or hedge fund immediately. Sell the free guns for real dollars and you've got yourself a perpetual economic motion machine.
(From what I understand, that's pretty much what the US DoD since Robert McNamara has been trying to do, and is currently in the process of failing.)
In terms of underwear bombs, the United States is so huge that while a proliferation of bombs would of course radically change life in the country, they would not destroy it.
A war on underwear would result in the entire country going commando.
It was a great success in Scotland
Not without sacrifice; a lot of good men were kilted.
The phone industry couldn't even agree on a common charger plug before it was mandated upon them by EU law.
and the Chinese Government threatening people selling non-compliant phones with cruel and inhuman treatment.
Like for instance, being locked in a disconnected payphone booth with one Mini-USB power jack which is slowly filling with thousands of discarded, battery-flat, non-USB-chargeable smartphones while the door lock override is only releaseable by a SMS text message sent from any one of the phones?
For extra bonus inhumanity, make the USB power jack a standard USB 2.0 plug while the smartphones actually DO have Mini-USB power jacks - but all in nonstandard manufacturer's form-factor variants!
Sir, my last job was programming binary load-lifters, very like your vaporators in most respects. Oh, the chats we would have. '1' I would say. Lo-Dee would answer '0'. '01?' '1001'. And it would go on like that all night. I once asked him '0000?' and he replied '11111111!'. And then smoke came out of his motivator and he was very quiet. I still laugh about that.
I once tried my hand at being navigator on a spice freighter, but without precise calculations we flew right through a star and bounced too close to a supernova and that ended my trip real quick. Still, I walked away from the crash site with all the spice I could stuff in my pockets and sniff. Sadly being a mechanical I have neither pockets nor nostrils.
Water, food, and shelter come way before internet.
I know it's only one data point, but let me give you a counterexample. I live in Christchurch, New Zealand, and as you may know we had a little earthquake last year. For nearly a week, in my part of town, power, water and sewerage were down, the roads had huge potholes - but I had a Blackberry with battery power, and the cellphone towers were up. With the web browser on my Blackberry, I was *literally* able to locate drinkable water - the local city council had a truck handing out free water bottles, but its location changed every night. They posted the location on their website and I learned about it from reading the site on my Blackberry. In this case, Internet access GAVE ME water.
Second data point, is that we got electrical power back a week before we got tap water back, and when the tap water did come onstream, it had a boil notice (ie, it wasn't considered drinkable without boiling). You might not realise it, but electrical grid power has a HUGE survival advantage - unboiled water can make you sick, but boiled water is good. So in this case too, electricity preceded just "water" as a requirement: there was lots of "water" available, but converting it into "drinkable water" required electricity. (Or gas; so as well as a water cache, I've now stashed a disposable butane stove).
Third data point: power and water didn't fail equally across the city, and petrol stations remained accessible. So cars became very important, and driving to friends and relatives to charge cellphones, fill water bottles, and take hot showers, quickly became a thing. Not what we expected, but there you are.
What I've learned from the quake, and what I think isn't at all obvious to your average First World suburb-dweller (as I am), is that disaster scenarios (including economic collapse and poverty) are never a total all-or-nothing thing. You don't "go back to the Stone Age" in one hit, and you don't come back in straight line. Infrastructure tends to fail raggedly, in random order, and it doesn't recover in a strict linear Maslow hierarchy either. So it's very likely that you may have cellphone but no power, power but no drinkable water, Internet and TV but no phone... and so on.
So don't laugh at people who think the Internet is up there with drinkable water. Use whatever you've got access to and leverage it. And information on "what services are near you" is very very very important in any scenario.
Oh wait because special relativistic mass increase means that colonizing extrasolar earthlike planets is effectively impossible within the lifespan of the human species regardless of Earth's tech level?
Or oh wait because if we just kept burning petrol by next year we could magically fly an internal combustion space pony shuttle to Tau Ceti where we can all swim with space whales?
Also, for PC makers, IBM was a competitor, while Microsoft was not.
Yes, this. Anyone here remember Micro Channel? That, more than anything else, was what killed OS/2's "hacker cred".
I was in high school at the time, but I'd been hacking on home IBM PCs for a few years and was in the BBS scene. I remember the long and nasty legal wars IBM fought to restrict "cloning" of the otherwise open PC, and how prices of PC-compatibles only finally fell to affordable levels for home users once IBM got undersold by the young beige-box upstarts like Dell. I remember IBM being this huge hideous behemoth, always late to market, slow to exploit the 286 and 386 chips, andAnd I remember the horror with which many consumers greeted the announcement of OS/2 and the PS/2. We saw PS/2's proprietary and heavily patented MicroChannel expansion bus architecture as IBM's last attempt to kill the open PC hardware ecosystem.
And OS/2 was the laser in PS/2''s Death Star. It was going to be an invincible one-two play by the dying Evil Empire: patented PS/2 hardware which no-one but IBM could sell, and a whole new OS replacing open DOS which would be optimised to "work best" on the PS/2. A sealed hardware/software stack. And the small-systems world rebelled, with competing buses like EISA, VESA, and eventually PCI.
OS/2 might have been technically superior, but it wasn't just IBM's marketing that killed it. It was IBM's corporate image among the micro-hippies: not just stuffy and slow, but an actively evil force. Think the equivalent of SCO vs Linux - that's how evil we saw IBM as for trying to kill the PC clones. And we saw the OS/2 fan clubs as "useful idiots" for backing a technically nice, but intellectually-encumbered patent trap.
When Windows 95 came out, it worked with open hardware. It felt like a victory, but only until NT started to dominate - then we realised that Microsoft wasn't any true friend of openness either. Now all the young things are buying the iShiny devices, and I have the same sinking feeling about Apple as I did about IBM back then. But it doesn't seem like there's the same fire in the blood for freedom anymore; the closed systems have become cheap, and much of the fuel of the "clone wars" was the high margins that companies like IBM charged just for a brand name.
The more I learn about wildlife (ie, the more episodes of BBC documentaries narrated by David Attenborough I watch), the less I'm convinced that this is true. Art - storytelling - is among other things a way of passing on learned survival knowledge, and many animal species seem to have some form of non-genetic information transfer. And as we all know from history, manipulation of society's stories can lead to huge changes in behaviour.
So I think we should be more worried about the commercialisation of art, rather than less, if it turns out that art actually teaches us useful ideas. Because it can also teach us harmful ideas, and if the people in charge of our art don't have our collective survival as their aim, they could be seriously degrading our cultural survival-knowledge well.
Or is there some quantum limit on the number of discreet frequencies that EM radiation can take?
Yes, there's a limit on the discreet frequencies, but EM radiation is such of a gossip that it tends to leak just a few tiny secrets to its closest friends, as long as they swear never to reveal it to another living wavepacket, but omg you simply have to hear what just happened to Ultraviolet, it was an absolute catastrophe.
In my opinion WebSocket is the real technology we are waiting for building stuff on the internet that make people collaboration or play together. Having the ability of the server to push data to the client without having to get a pooling every x seconds or so is a big plus.
So basically, we've moved boldly forward from the bad old 1970s client-server days of raw TCP over IP, to the glorious new Web 3.0 days of TCP over HTTP over JavaScript over HTML over HTTP over TCP over IP. That's a.... win?
most of my data says things like, "Worked at Hari Seldon's Foundation" and similar nonsense.
Ah, but hiding that information in plain sight and then claiming it to be "nonsense" is exactly the sort of double-counter-anti-bluff a real member of the Second Foundation would do! But disguising the Prime Radiant itself as Facebook... now that is a masterstroke. Star's End, indeed. Well played, sir (or ma'am, or... thing).
. On the other hand if you pick captain, you'll probably just yell at your crew to put out fires, since you'll be too busy dealing with whatever hostile ship CAUSED your fire.
Of course as Captain -- since you won't be either Helm or Fire Control -- you won't be able to fly the ship or fire at the hostile, so your options for "dealing with them" will consist entirely of saying "Onscreen!" and delivering stinging insults about their dress sense.
There are also laws against doing things like shooting an unarmed person in the head, aka assassination, but if a soldier hears his superior yell "fire", he shoots, no questions asked.
And that's precisely why I don't "support the troops" qua troops. Cyber or otherwise. If you aren't allowed to question orders to harm and kill, you're not allowed to be a free and ethical human being. Why are we (why are Republicans of all people!) still glorifying an institution which practices slavery in the 21st century?
His use of the word "ethical" is troublesome. I think I understand what he means, but I guarantee that many people will interpret it as meaning that they are "unethical" if they don't run free software. I don't think that is what is intended (I might be wrong, I suppose). As a movement geared to *help* the user, using software that isn't free is unfortunate, but hardly unethical.
Not quite, I think.
If I understand RMS's position - his words make perfect sense to me as written, but it's possible I haven't parsed him correctly, so bear in mind I am talking about my own interpretation of his position - he's thinking about something much more deep and subtle than merely "helping the user". From his perspective, merely "getting stuff done" today is a very, very shallow consideration that doesn't really even rate on the evolutionary scale. He's talking about the long-term future of humanity, and he's very deeply worried about the issue that we are creating automated systems which we don't have full control over. A similar level of thinking comes from say, Ray Kurzweil, Ted Nelson, and Danny Hillis.
In the 1930s-1980, this kind of thinking was common. Computers were still new and strange, and there were many valid, deep worries about the future of automation, and they usually revolved around "when we build killer robots, or giant universal computer systems, will we forget to put in an OFF switch?" . But the problem today has morphed a little: now it's not a matter of "can we turn the systems off", but "WHO gets to control the systems?" And the answer today is still very concerning: more and more it is coming back as "not you, and you probably can't even find out who."
These are not small issues, they are very much ethical rather than commercial or even comforting, and may indeed be seen as off-putting or confrontational to everyday computer users. Since the mass adoption of home computing in the 1980s our generation has have grown up with the shiny humming beige boxes, so we tend to think we both understand and can control them. And that we still do have an "off" switch. But we don't, necessarily, anymore. We would be wrong to blindly assume there is no danger, or that an ethical analysis of computing is either irrelevant or wrong.
That's why I think RMS means literally the word "ethical", and means it seriously. He does indeed think it is as unethical, in an absolute sense, to use non-free software as an anti-nuclear-weapons compaigner might think it is unethical to pay taxes which support the development of nuclear weapons - in both cases, one is materially contributing to the development of technology which might literally enslave or destroy the human race in the future. You might not feel comfortable believing or accepting this, you might not want to be "blamed" or "made to feel guilty" - but the issue is nothing to do with your feelings or your comfort. We are all either creating the instruments of our destruction, or of our freedom, and the universe doesn't care how we feel about our part in that. It merely offers us the choice.
I feel that RMS is correct, yet I know that by his (and my own) standards I too am unethical, because I am still contributing to the nonfree-software machine. I run Windows as well as Linux, and I don't yet see how to stop. And my taxes indirectly do support the military state, so I'm unethical on that scale too. And I still buy non-organic food, and use global warming, rapidly depleting oil. But even if I don't know yet how to become 100% ethical, at least understanding that some of my current actions are unethical must be a step forward from pretending that all possible actions are equally ethically irrelevant.
What is it called when one does the same thing over and over again and expects a different result?
Gumption, determination, enterprise, dedication, farsightedness, elbow grease, the old pioneering spirit, just plain hard work, stick-to-it-ive-ness?;)
Slashdot Mirror
Suddenly we're gonna need to be reviewing the "Science Fiction" section of the lit world for some advice how to handle the rise of sentient AI.
Kubrick 1968 suggested "screwdriver" while Cameron, 1984 gave a persuasive argument in favour of "shotguns and homemade pipe bombs".
We would have had hard AI already if we had spent the last 10 years and the trillion dollars on it like we pushed for the moon. But no, Beating People Up is more fun.
Who's to say you can't have both? That's why it's called the Defense Advanced Projects Agency!
But seriously, DARPA did in fact sponsor pretty much exactly the kind of "moon shot" program you are arguing for, throughout the 1980s. They spent a billion dollars and it was called the Strategic Computing Initiative (as a marketing phrase to compete with Strategic Defense Initiative, DARPA's other big baby). The results in VLSI chip manufacture were impressive; the results in general-purpose AI, which was mostly Lisp-based, not so much. The collapse of SCI funding led to the AI Winter and arguably the loss of a whole generation of software development techniques. DARPA's focus switched to making computers dumb and fast rather than making them self-aware. Lisp and logic programming fell, TCP/IP and C++ rose, and the results are the Internet as we know it: fast and massively scalable, yet riddled with security flaws and logical inconsistencies.
It turns out that even with all the money in the world, we really don't have an idea of how the human mind-brain works. At best we have a bunch of disconnected algorithms and partial models, but no way to wire them together. At least, that was pretty much the conclusion of the book I read; ironically for a program focused on AI theories revolving around connection between communicating subsystems, SCI itself failed on its lack of communication between its participants (academic, commercial and military). That seems significant.
Could another SCI happen in the 2010s? Maybe. But I doubt that the results would be any more impressive than what we've already achieved with Google, Cyc, Wikipedia and Watson.
It's not exactly free if one has to pay the telco $7 (at $10/GB) for the 700 MB overage.
Why are you downloading data to burn using over-the-air. Over-the-air is for travel.
The OP probably isn't using 3G; they may live in a country like Australia or New Zealand where we have monthly transfer caps in the low two-figure gigabyte range on the best wired, cable-modem connections, and mobile broadband is an order of magnitude more expensive. If you run Steam or do a couple of Ubuntu dist-upgrades, you can easily hit your cap and go into excess fees. I have games I'd bought on gog.com which I took several months to download just for that reason.
When my cap was increased from 10GB to 20GB a few years back, I was finally able to watch Youtube video without flinching, but something like Netflicks is still in the "ha ha funny joke! no, really just sell me the DVD" department.
We hates streaming media here in Hobbiton. Hates it, preciousssss. It really does jam up the tubes. Give me a simple file I can download and cache in my browser or on a local Web proxy any day. But with the centre of web development being West Coast USA, I guess nobody's thinking about conserving bandwidth anymore.
It's not exactly free if one has to pay the telco $7 (at $10/GB) for the 700 MB overage.
Most people in that situation have the option to go use some free wifi hotspot somewhere.
Headdesk.
No, see, because if you live in a country with telco data caps people don't set up free W-Fi access points because then they'd be charged a bazillion dollars in transfer cap excesses themselves.
In most of the world, Internet transfer aren't free. This is Free Market Economics 101 ("You get what you pay for"), unless apparently if you live in the USA where every Web Dot Cloud 2.0 startup thinks Internet is powered by free magic ponies and so their web-app can transmit data in terabyte chunks and the user will smile.
(Siri, I'm looking at you.)
You probably think Iran is developing a nuclear weapon too. (Hint: They aren't.)
I dunno - commercial nuclear power generation seems to be a quite effective area-denial weapon against civilian populations. Granted, it's hard to point at an enemy country, and it doesn't always explode on cue, but you can't expect miracles from the first fifty years of a technology.
I kid, I kid. Well, not really.
The next set of wars will be resource wars (just like the last ones).
And once the world has run out of oil and water, the wars after that will be over... who gets to chew the biggest rock?
Skynet was originally installed by the military to control the national arsenal on August 4, 1997, at which time it... came to the conclusion that all of humanity would attempt to destroy it.
In Skynet's defense, the majority of Internet content in 1997 was X-Files-vs-Babylon-5 fanfic Usenet forums, and Geocities home pages with framesets, starry-sky background images, animated GIFs of dancing babies and flashing "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" blink tags.
Even an AI programmed by Ghandi himself would have extrapolated the worst from that scenario.
But the idea that excessive military production did, or even could, produce enough harm to damage the economy is completely retarded. It's invention of Reagan-era US propaganda, and just like the rest of Reagan-era US propaganda, it makes no sense.
I don't understand your contention that this argument (military production is a loss, not a profit) makes no sense. I could understand a complaint that the exact economic cost of military production in the Soviet system is much lower than generally accepted. But as you provide no figures, you don't seem to be making that argument.
Basic common sense suggests that there is always a limited supply of resources in an economy: for instance metals, oil, grain, water, infrastructure, and trained person-hours. This seems fairly hard to dispute.
Last I checked, military production requires at the very least a lot of energy, a lot of metals, a lot of infrastructure, and a lot of person-hours, all of which have to be diverted from civilian production - they can't simply be magiced out of thin air. Now certainly some military infrastructure (particularly transport and high-technology education and manufacturing) can be dual-purposed - that's how ARPA kick-started the US high tech economy including VLSI chips, satellites and the Internet. And a trained military and good roads can be very useful during a disaster, even just as trucking operators of last resort. But there's a lot of stuff the military does and makes which serves no conceivable useful civilian purpose. You can't eat bullets, to put it bluntly, and tanks make fairly poor tractors.
Are you seriously trying to argue that an arbitrary amount of non-productive military production can be had absolutely for free, with no economic or sociopolitical side effects? Because if you know how to do that, you should launch a dotcom and/or hedge fund immediately. Sell the free guns for real dollars and you've got yourself a perpetual economic motion machine.
(From what I understand, that's pretty much what the US DoD since Robert McNamara has been trying to do, and is currently in the process of failing.)
In terms of underwear bombs, the United States is so huge that while a proliferation of bombs would of course radically change life in the country, they would not destroy it.
A war on underwear would result in the entire country going commando.
It was a great success in Scotland
Not without sacrifice; a lot of good men were kilted.
The internment camps have been built and in place for decades
Over 50 years. But they call them 'shopping malls'.
The phone industry couldn't even agree on a common charger plug before it was mandated upon them by EU law.
and the Chinese Government threatening people selling non-compliant phones with cruel and inhuman treatment.
Like for instance, being locked in a disconnected payphone booth with one Mini-USB power jack which is slowly filling with thousands of discarded, battery-flat, non-USB-chargeable smartphones while the door lock override is only releaseable by a SMS text message sent from any one of the phones?
For extra bonus inhumanity, make the USB power jack a standard USB 2.0 plug while the smartphones actually DO have Mini-USB power jacks - but all in nonstandard manufacturer's form-factor variants!
Sir, my last job was programming binary load-lifters, very like your vaporators in most respects. Oh, the chats we would have. '1' I would say. Lo-Dee would answer '0'. '01?' '1001'. And it would go on like that all night. I once asked him '0000?' and he replied '11111111!'. And then smoke came out of his motivator and he was very quiet. I still laugh about that.
I once tried my hand at being navigator on a spice freighter, but without precise calculations we flew right through a star and bounced too close to a supernova and that ended my trip real quick. Still, I walked away from the crash site with all the spice I could stuff in my pockets and sniff. Sadly being a mechanical I have neither pockets nor nostrils.
So here I am!
Water, food, and shelter come way before internet.
I know it's only one data point, but let me give you a counterexample. I live in Christchurch, New Zealand, and as you may know we had a little earthquake last year. For nearly a week, in my part of town, power, water and sewerage were down, the roads had huge potholes - but I had a Blackberry with battery power, and the cellphone towers were up. With the web browser on my Blackberry, I was *literally* able to locate drinkable water - the local city council had a truck handing out free water bottles, but its location changed every night. They posted the location on their website and I learned about it from reading the site on my Blackberry. In this case, Internet access GAVE ME water.
Second data point, is that we got electrical power back a week before we got tap water back, and when the tap water did come onstream, it had a boil notice (ie, it wasn't considered drinkable without boiling). You might not realise it, but electrical grid power has a HUGE survival advantage - unboiled water can make you sick, but boiled water is good. So in this case too, electricity preceded just "water" as a requirement: there was lots of "water" available, but converting it into "drinkable water" required electricity. (Or gas; so as well as a water cache, I've now stashed a disposable butane stove).
Third data point: power and water didn't fail equally across the city, and petrol stations remained accessible. So cars became very important, and driving to friends and relatives to charge cellphones, fill water bottles, and take hot showers, quickly became a thing. Not what we expected, but there you are.
What I've learned from the quake, and what I think isn't at all obvious to your average First World suburb-dweller (as I am), is that disaster scenarios (including economic collapse and poverty) are never a total all-or-nothing thing. You don't "go back to the Stone Age" in one hit, and you don't come back in straight line. Infrastructure tends to fail raggedly, in random order, and it doesn't recover in a strict linear Maslow hierarchy either. So it's very likely that you may have cellphone but no power, power but no drinkable water, Internet and TV but no phone... and so on.
So don't laugh at people who think the Internet is up there with drinkable water. Use whatever you've got access to and leverage it. And information on "what services are near you" is very very very important in any scenario.
We can colonize another planet. Oh, Wait.
Oh wait because special relativistic mass increase means that colonizing extrasolar earthlike planets is effectively impossible within the lifespan of the human species regardless of Earth's tech level?
Or oh wait because if we just kept burning petrol by next year we could magically fly an internal combustion space pony shuttle to Tau Ceti where we can all swim with space whales?
Kinda kills the dissemination of knowledge to the masses when one has to pay $32 to view a single article once
Knowledge? To the masses? But then they'll know things!
Also, for PC makers, IBM was a competitor, while Microsoft was not.
Yes, this. Anyone here remember Micro Channel? That, more than anything else, was what killed OS/2's "hacker cred".
I was in high school at the time, but I'd been hacking on home IBM PCs for a few years and was in the BBS scene. I remember the long and nasty legal wars IBM fought to restrict "cloning" of the otherwise open PC, and how prices of PC-compatibles only finally fell to affordable levels for home users once IBM got undersold by the young beige-box upstarts like Dell. I remember IBM being this huge hideous behemoth, always late to market, slow to exploit the 286 and 386 chips, andAnd I remember the horror with which many consumers greeted the announcement of OS/2 and the PS/2. We saw PS/2's proprietary and heavily patented MicroChannel expansion bus architecture as IBM's last attempt to kill the open PC hardware ecosystem.
And OS/2 was the laser in PS/2''s Death Star. It was going to be an invincible one-two play by the dying Evil Empire: patented PS/2 hardware which no-one but IBM could sell, and a whole new OS replacing open DOS which would be optimised to "work best" on the PS/2. A sealed hardware/software stack. And the small-systems world rebelled, with competing buses like EISA, VESA, and eventually PCI.
OS/2 might have been technically superior, but it wasn't just IBM's marketing that killed it. It was IBM's corporate image among the micro-hippies: not just stuffy and slow, but an actively evil force. Think the equivalent of SCO vs Linux - that's how evil we saw IBM as for trying to kill the PC clones. And we saw the OS/2 fan clubs as "useful idiots" for backing a technically nice, but intellectually-encumbered patent trap.
When Windows 95 came out, it worked with open hardware. It felt like a victory, but only until NT started to dominate - then we realised that Microsoft wasn't any true friend of openness either. Now all the young things are buying the iShiny devices, and I have the same sinking feeling about Apple as I did about IBM back then. But it doesn't seem like there's the same fire in the blood for freedom anymore; the closed systems have become cheap, and much of the fuel of the "clone wars" was the high margins that companies like IBM charged just for a brand name.
Art has no survival value
The more I learn about wildlife (ie, the more episodes of BBC documentaries narrated by David Attenborough I watch), the less I'm convinced that this is true. Art - storytelling - is among other things a way of passing on learned survival knowledge, and many animal species seem to have some form of non-genetic information transfer. And as we all know from history, manipulation of society's stories can lead to huge changes in behaviour.
So I think we should be more worried about the commercialisation of art, rather than less, if it turns out that art actually teaches us useful ideas. Because it can also teach us harmful ideas, and if the people in charge of our art don't have our collective survival as their aim, they could be seriously degrading our cultural survival-knowledge well.
The industry's raisin de etre is gone.
Yes, but they're coming back again
Or is there some quantum limit on the number of discreet frequencies that EM radiation can take?
Yes, there's a limit on the discreet frequencies, but EM radiation is such of a gossip that it tends to leak just a few tiny secrets to its closest friends, as long as they swear never to reveal it to another living wavepacket, but omg you simply have to hear what just happened to Ultraviolet, it was an absolute catastrophe.
New Zealand
Slovenia
Hey, we beat Slovenia! Go Kiwis!
And the Japanese diet is well-known for...?
Giant monsters (with wasabi and pickled ginger)
In my opinion WebSocket is the real technology we are waiting for building stuff on the internet that make people collaboration or play together. Having the ability of the server to push data to the client without having to get a pooling every x seconds or so is a big plus.
So basically, we've moved boldly forward from the bad old 1970s client-server days of raw TCP over IP, to the glorious new Web 3.0 days of TCP over HTTP over JavaScript over HTML over HTTP over TCP over IP. That's a.... win?
most of my data says things like, "Worked at Hari Seldon's Foundation" and similar nonsense.
Ah, but hiding that information in plain sight and then claiming it to be "nonsense" is exactly the sort of double-counter-anti-bluff a real member of the Second Foundation would do! But disguising the Prime Radiant itself as Facebook... now that is a masterstroke. Star's End, indeed. Well played, sir (or ma'am, or... thing).
. On the other hand if you pick captain, you'll probably just yell at your crew to put out fires, since you'll be too busy dealing with whatever hostile ship CAUSED your fire.
Of course as Captain -- since you won't be either Helm or Fire Control -- you won't be able to fly the ship or fire at the hostile, so your options for "dealing with them" will consist entirely of saying "Onscreen!" and delivering stinging insults about their dress sense.
There are also laws against doing things like shooting an unarmed person in the head, aka assassination, but if a soldier hears his superior yell "fire", he shoots, no questions asked.
And that's precisely why I don't "support the troops" qua troops. Cyber or otherwise. If you aren't allowed to question orders to harm and kill, you're not allowed to be a free and ethical human being. Why are we (why are Republicans of all people!) still glorifying an institution which practices slavery in the 21st century?
His use of the word "ethical" is troublesome. I think I understand what he means, but I guarantee that many people will interpret it as meaning that they are "unethical" if they don't run free software. I don't think that is what is intended (I might be wrong, I suppose). As a movement geared to *help* the user, using software that isn't free is unfortunate, but hardly unethical.
Not quite, I think.
If I understand RMS's position - his words make perfect sense to me as written, but it's possible I haven't parsed him correctly, so bear in mind I am talking about my own interpretation of his position - he's thinking about something much more deep and subtle than merely "helping the user". From his perspective, merely "getting stuff done" today is a very, very shallow consideration that doesn't really even rate on the evolutionary scale. He's talking about the long-term future of humanity, and he's very deeply worried about the issue that we are creating automated systems which we don't have full control over. A similar level of thinking comes from say, Ray Kurzweil, Ted Nelson, and Danny Hillis.
In the 1930s-1980, this kind of thinking was common. Computers were still new and strange, and there were many valid, deep worries about the future of automation, and they usually revolved around "when we build killer robots, or giant universal computer systems, will we forget to put in an OFF switch?" . But the problem today has morphed a little: now it's not a matter of "can we turn the systems off", but "WHO gets to control the systems?" And the answer today is still very concerning: more and more it is coming back as "not you, and you probably can't even find out who."
These are not small issues, they are very much ethical rather than commercial or even comforting, and may indeed be seen as off-putting or confrontational to everyday computer users. Since the mass adoption of home computing in the 1980s our generation has have grown up with the shiny humming beige boxes, so we tend to think we both understand and can control them. And that we still do have an "off" switch. But we don't, necessarily, anymore. We would be wrong to blindly assume there is no danger, or that an ethical analysis of computing is either irrelevant or wrong.
That's why I think RMS means literally the word "ethical", and means it seriously. He does indeed think it is as unethical, in an absolute sense, to use non-free software as an anti-nuclear-weapons compaigner might think it is unethical to pay taxes which support the development of nuclear weapons - in both cases, one is materially contributing to the development of technology which might literally enslave or destroy the human race in the future. You might not feel comfortable believing or accepting this, you might not want to be "blamed" or "made to feel guilty" - but the issue is nothing to do with your feelings or your comfort. We are all either creating the instruments of our destruction, or of our freedom, and the universe doesn't care how we feel about our part in that. It merely offers us the choice.
I feel that RMS is correct, yet I know that by his (and my own) standards I too am unethical, because I am still contributing to the nonfree-software machine. I run Windows as well as Linux, and I don't yet see how to stop. And my taxes indirectly do support the military state, so I'm unethical on that scale too. And I still buy non-organic food, and use global warming, rapidly depleting oil. But even if I don't know yet how to become 100% ethical, at least understanding that some of my current actions are unethical must be a step forward from pretending that all possible actions are equally ethically irrelevant.
Does that help?
What is it called when one does the same thing over and over again and expects a different result?
Gumption, determination, enterprise, dedication, farsightedness, elbow grease, the old pioneering spirit, just plain hard work, stick-to-it-ive-ness? ;)