AI, at least on Turing-complete architectures, cannot and will not happen. Roger Penrose pretty much put the final nail in the AI coffin nearly thirty years ago when he (rightfully) pointed out that there are non-algorithmic aspects to cognition and consciousness (prereqs for intelligence in anybody's book) that can't even be simulated, let alone replicated, on a Turing machine. He based his argument on a novel but quite defensible interpretation of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Look up the Halting Problem, if you need a concrete example of why AI Just. Won't. Happen.
With that said, the next likely apocalypse is going to be economic, and it is going to happen because of computer-enabled high frequency trading. Peta-FLOP scale compute clusters at brokerage houses with single digit pings to stock exchanges, running trading algorithms written by ex-physicists and ex-mathematicians that were originally designed to parse peta-byte sized data dumps from supercolliders, are what we need to worry about, not HAL 9000.
I thought all countries (in the developed world, at the very least) had laws stating in one wording or another that it is illegal for a business to refuse payment in the country's official currency?
Well, perhaps they do. Your point, sir? What is preventing them from changing the law? Maybe a little history is in order. After the failure of the Bretton Woods agreement when the US pulled out of it in 1971, national currencies became fiat, i.e., they have value only because the government says it does. If the government decides it no longer has value, then by fiat, it no longer has value. Remember, currency is just a tool, and like any tool, it can be abandoned when it has outlived it's usefulness. Hopefully, Swedish authorities will also legislate protections against abuse of transaction data, but we will have to wait and see.
There is not a regime on earth that bans things that it does not consider harmful to the people. Remember that.
False. In the US, for example, bans can and are enacted when local governments decide that something needs to be banned, even though the federal government says it shall not be. Case in point: Abortion. The federal government decided in Roe v. Wade that a woman's right to opt for an abortion is protected, meaning that the procedure cannot be banned at the state level. Yet it is effectively banned in most states of the former Confederacy, because those state legislatures enacted laws making it practically impossible for abortion providers to practice, thus effectively banning abortions in those states. Thwok, ball's in your court.
if you think about it for a moment in terms of the weak anthropic principle, gravity has to be very weak, because it is cumulative. The Weyl curvature of spacetime, which is the metric tensor that governs the propagation of gravity in free space, acts across the entire Einstein manifold, i.e., everywhere at the same time. If gravity were any stronger, it is pretty unlikely that matter as we understand it would be able to exist long enough to produce objects like humans capable of asking that question.
With that said, it is not really an important question question on its own, as the over-hyped intro suggests. The important questions pretty much are looking for explanations as to why the universe behaves so differently at different scales and velocities. Important questions in physics and cosmology are more along the lines of "Why are our two most successful theories about the nature of the universe, quantum mechanics and general relativity, incompatible with each other?"
Remember the Michelson-Morley experiments? From the pov of empirical adequacy, those negative results actually were confirmations of a more correct theory that was still eighteen years away. The classical, Newtonian paradigm, useful though it was (and still is, at non-relativistic velocities) needed to be tweaked to accommodate new evidence -- in the MM case, the lack of confirmatory results. When you use a model to ask a question about the universe, you have to be willing to change your model when the answer you get doesn't fit anywhere in your model. That is science. Anything else is religion, i.e., you ignore the answer or discredit the question, which is what the scientistific priesthood did to MM after they failed to find evidence of the "luminiferous aether." which was the dominant relig^H^H^H^H^H paradigm of the day.
So put the pitchforks and torches away, at least until science can come up with an altered holographic model to explain these results.
This. I've never understood why everyone wants the phones to keep getting lighter and thinner, with things like a glass back, only to then have to put them in a giant bulky plastic case to protect them, entirely defeating the purpose. People (mostly tech journalists) complained about how the Samsung S3/S4 felt with its plastic back, but you could actually get away without putting it in a case, which seems to be true of fewer and fewer phones these days (certainly not the iPhones or the S6).
Hmmm. I have never seen an iPhone in a case. Hiding those patented curves in an unaesthetic box would truly defeat the purpose of having an iPhone. I have an iPhone for one reason -- herd acceptance. At meetings with clients, for example, it is sometimes useful to flash the bling to blend in. I have a venerable Galaxy S5 for the other 23 hours of my day, safely ensconced in a Lifebox. Most tech types are sceptical of arguments grounded in social behavior, I know, but it pays to acknowledge that a large number of humans care deeply about how they are perceived by others. Jobs made himself a wealthy, wealthy man by pitching his products to people who care more about how they look holding it, than what they can do with it. Sleek is sexy, and therefore sells much better to people who need to be perceived as sexy.
With that said, there are great functional reasons to reduce the size of certain components, if for no other reason than to leave more room for battery, as several people already have mentioned in this thread. Eliminating external physical ports would help ruggedize any phone, and simultaneously make it easier (read: less expensive to manufacture) to make it look sexy. And not having to deal with cables every fucking day is a win for me. Finding a micro-USB port is goddamn hard for those of us with failing eyesight and deteriorating motor skills. The only cable I have to deal with now on a regular basis (~ weekly) is the micro-USB charger for my BT headset; I installed a $40 wireless charging kit on my aforementioned S5 and I'm loving it.
It is incredible how many people bring "free speech!" up in conversation where it is not warranted.
It's actually more incredible how many people think that freedom of speech is only a concept in relation to governmental restrictions on communication.
Obviously private party restrictions on speech aren't a violation of 1st Amendment rights, but it should be more than obvious that freedom of speech can be threatened by private restrictions on speech by refusing access to media, venues or physical places which are commonly accepted as public spaces.
uh, what? what does the first amendment to the US constitution have to do with a group of british theater owners deciding what can and can't be seen on their theater screens, which are located in Britain, and not in the US?
Columbus was sponsored by a wealthy and powerful sovereign government.
He was indeed. But many follow on missions were privately funded. Governments funded the development of better compasses, sextants, chronometers, and better ships, as well as the initial voyages. But within a few decades, the spice trade, slave trade, and sugar/rum trade had made oceanic voyages profitable enough for the private sector to dominate.
Careful -- expand your horizons a bit. Your southern europe biases are showing. Government funded development of navigational tech and tools did occur and was helpful, as were the (morally dubious, in the case of the slave trade) motivations of commercial profit.
But -- profit in and of itself is not a sufficient, or indeed, even a necessary condition for exploration. The islands of Polynesia were explored, settled and exploited at least a millenia before Europe even knew the earth was round, using only naked eye observations to navigate.
And what about northern europe's contribution to exploration? When Erik the Red and his kin went a'viking, they took it across at least one ocean, with only their own eyesight to guide them.
I've been a happy civ addict for decades now, and I've been playing free civ on my linux based systems since I first heard about it on the civ fanatics site back in the early 2000's. I think civ has had to evolve to remain competitive in the gaming market place, and the producers and developers who assumed the mantle after the initial market success at Microprose have done an excellent job at it. And I certainly include in that all the modders and the fine folks like you who gave us free civ and all the great mods that enhance and improve (and fix!) the game we love so much.
But -- and I would really lilke a dev's opinion on this -- where does Civ go from here? To me, Civ started out as a resource management game, fun and absorbing at the same time. Multiplayer mode in CivNet extended that to something to share with friends and fellow civ fanatics online. But with civ 3, the resource management aspects of the game started to share the limelight with RPG elements. by the time of Civ 4, the resource management aspects of the game seemed to stop evolving, and the RPG elements started to get more and more of the developer's attention. By Civ 5, especially the BE version, the game stopped evolving along resource management lines, and seemed to be focussed by the devs on improving and enhancing the RPG elements. Is Civ going to continue to focus on RPG-style play at the expense of the resource management game?
Wake me when vendors actually agree on a common way of drawing the required power from the USB chargers. Sure there's a standard published but when will vendors actually follow the current standard, or in the case of Apple follow any standard at all.
uhh,,,what? not an apple fanboi here, but why does apple need to follow a standard? standards are for companies who are selling products in a competitive market place, but don't want to have to compete on *everything.* Since Apple is really not competing in the same space as LG, Samsung, Motorola, et al, they do not need to follow every standard adopted by those other companies or even a fraction of those standards. standards promote interoperability between market competitors, and that is it, full stop. Standards are useful if you are competing where interoperability gives you a market advantage. That is a battle that Apple has dodged, quite successfully. As Sun Tzu and Miyamoto Mushashi point out again and again, only fight battles you are likely to win. Apple is competing in the design space, not the tech space, and that is probably why they are the wealthiest company in the history of the world, and with just a minuscule market share, to boot. Think: Apple is not about how well the tech works with the competition, but what the tech does for the consumer who purchases it. It's called choosing your battles, and Jobs chose well, dying an incredibly wealthy man.
Well, no. A game, like a movie, is an expensive risk. Going with a proven moneymaker is pretty much why we see sequels and reboots coming out of Hollywood more than we see original work. Ditto games -- the boundary between movie making and game making is getting pretty porous, with game tie-ins for movies and movies based on popular games all too common. All businesses try to reduce and/or mitigate risk, and Squeenix is no exception.
It took a decade for Deus Ex to get right. DE:HR was game of the year for a reason. It is in HD, a golden-hued, blade-runner-invoking, ridley-scott homaging, glorious meld of FPS and RPG. Don't try to gild this lily, guys. Fuck with FF if you must, but not this franchise, please.
Get over your puffery and credentialism - no one cares.
The degrees at most universities are a bit misnamed. The CompSci degree is an engineering degree, with a focus on writing software to solve problems. If you're building a repeatable process to solve real-world problems, you're an engineer. The few "Computer Engineering" degrees I've seen have been full of project management BS. I really don't understand the choice of name for that. Maybe it will correct in time.
The tiny percentage of people doing academic research work in the field also have CompSci degrees, and it doesn't really seem like you'd need a different undergrad degree program for that yet, as the work you do for your PhD will create the distinction.
Well, I think that you may be correct now, but there are a lot of us with CS degrees that are definitely not engineering degrees in any shape, form, or fashion. My undergrad CS degree (1998) was mostly discrete math. Courses in graph theory, number theory, theory of computation, computational complexity, algorithm design, and symbolic logic comprised most of my curriculum. Understanding why Godel's Theorem put an absolutely road block on computational AI, and why the Church-Turing hypothesis and NP-completeness constrained the types of problems computers could and could not solve were strongly emphasized in my undergrad program. Coding was pretty much optional in most of those classes -- though, tbh, my algorithm professor (Udi Manber, of agrep fame) expressed some surprise and consternation that I had actually passed his course without submitting a single line of compiled code. Out of >60 units in the upper division classes of my CS major, I had exactly 12 units (three 4-unit classes) from the CS catalog that required me to code (compiler design, software engineering, and operating system design and development.) So, no, my CS degree was definitely not an engineering degree. It was about how to ask questions about computation that could be answered in a rational, reproducible way. Engineering, imho, is about taking those rational, reproducible answers and figuring out how to build a money-making widget with them.
Some Christians. I am not really the person to defend people whose only defense against the DSM IV definition of delusion is that they are explicitly exempt from it (because else any religion very much fits the definition perfectly), but it should be said that not all of them are THAT delusional. Only a rather tiny minority, and close to 100% of that minority residing in the USA, actually believes that.
That definition was changed in DSM-V. Significantly. The delusion no longer has to be demonstrably false. Now, they can believe that it is true, and still be diagnosed with a mental illness, if their behavior warrants it. But it also means that it is up to the clinician making the diagnosis. Parents who sincerely think praying is going to heal their child should not be penalized for holding that belief if the clinician determines there is no danger to the child. As long as their delusions are doing no harm in the opinion of the clinician, they fit the exemption. But it will be harder to ask for an insanity defense -- they will have to face their crime for what it is if the child dies.
Outside the US, new earth rubbish plays no significant role.
Ahh, yes. But it does play a significant role in the U.S. It is perhaps unlikely, but it is certainly possible, especially if any one of the current GOP candidates for president actually win, that somebody that (emphasis yours) delusional could achieve the highest office in the land. You really, really don't want an American president, a man who can call down a nuclear strike if he thinks it is necessary, to believe the earth is only 6000 years old, and to believe there is an invisible man in the sky telling him to do it... .
The other reality and I am not sure even Jeb! gets it is that Trump is the best thing that could have happened to him at least as far as the primaries go.
The whole "anchor baby" conversation the other day with him getting testy isn't good. What Jeb! needs to do if he wants to win is stay the hell out of the spot light. Let Trump continue to suck up all the oxygen.
Trump will flame out sooner or later, he has too. Trump is smart guy but the rules of the game are different in politics there is only one Trump, if one of hits bets does not pay off its over. Its not like the world he is accustom to where if one entity goes bankrupt he has ten more pull capital out of and try another new business. Outspoken as he is eventually he will say something people can't get passed in a careless moment.
As long as Trump stays front an center the votes won't hear jack about any of the other candidates. At some point after Trump craters the voters are going to be left with 14 other candidates they have hardly heard of and a name they know "Bush". That will be enough to win a primary. I don't like it but its true.
No, I don't think Trump will flame out. He is saying things that the xenophobic, racist, Evangelical Christian base of the Republican party wants to hear. The GOP helped create the conditions for a Trump-like candidate, starting with the Southern Strategy that put Nixon in the Whitehouse. Fox News helped too, by mainstreaming the same calculated paranoid, racial fear mongering to its audience. Fox News is the most widely watched program in the US, reaching tens of millions of voters every fucking night. So, no, the Donald is not going to flame out. In fact, the rest of the clown car that is the GOP nomination race are falling over themselves to move to Trump's right. Attacking the 14th Amendment seems to be the current tactic -- two-thirds of the GOP nominees are promising to end jus soli, which is the source of all the "anchor baby" angst that Trump is currently capitalizing on.
I used the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's System Advisor Model (SAM) tool when I designed my 16kWdc rooftop array. You can download SAM from the NREL site. They also have a web-based tool called PVWatts that is far less detailed, but is definitely easy to use and produces a very reliable estimate if you are thinking about a PV array.
For what it is worth, rooftop solar is facing stiff opposition from utility companies and energy producers because it directly affects their bottom line. Changes in net metering regulations that favor the existing energy production infrastructure over locally produced alternative energy are becoming more common as the fossil fuel industry fights to retain the status quo. Without going on a rant about it, I watched my seven year ROI on a $42k project evaporate because of changes to Arizona's net metering regulations put in place this year by the bought-and-paid-for-by-Koch Industries Arizona Corporation Commission.
I don't know that it is the media's responsibility to report every bad side-effect that a minority of people experience to some common food additive. They'd be so busy reporting on what affects a minority that the main news would never get covered.
Indeed. The bar for food and drugs is 3 sigmas. That is pretty high, but not as high as it could be -- physicists need 5 if they want to claim they've discovered something "new." To put it in perspective: If, in your double blind clinical trials, subjects who use your food additive or drug report negative/adverse/null effects in only 1 case out of 3000 subjects, FDA approval is pretty much a done deal at this point. The FDA already requires disclosure of negative/adverse/null effects on all packaging, so why does the media need to get involved? If you aren't already interested enough in reading the label on the shit you are putting into your one and only body, there is no amount of media that can help you.
One of the things that has consistently mystified me about Americans' complacency with drone warfare is the underlying assumption that our current monopoly on drones is going to last forever. If it's ok for the U.S. to use drones to assassinate "terrorist" anti-American agitators in Yemen, what are we going to say when China starts using drones to assassinate "terrorist" Chinese dissidents on American soil, or Europe, or elsewhere? For all intents and purposes, we're already using killbots, and the really important point here is that airborne killbots can be used (for now) with impunity across borders.
"American Exceptionalism" basically means we allow ourselves to commit war crimes with impunity.
What is there to be mystified about? If any other state actor with drone technology does anything like what you are suggesting, they will cease to exist as a state, period. They know what would happen. The Romans used salt to make sure Carthago delenda est; America will use Strontium 90. America's social order may be iffy, but their ability to come together and destroy other nations when provoked is a matter of historical record. They have more than enough nukes left in their arsenal to pave any ten countries if provoked, and I am pretty certain random drone strikes killing Americans in Des Moines would be provocation enough. You are right about American exceptionalism, in the sense that "He who has the ability to destroy the planet, controls the planet." And before you point out that lots of nations have nukes, ask yourself this one question: In the seven decades since our species developed nuclear weapons, what was the nationality of the only human in history to use a nuclear weapon in anger? Here's a hint: He actually did it twice.
This is one of those "You only hear about the failures" situation. No one hears about the crazy kid that was given psychiatric counseling and decided NOT to use an ak47 to kill everyone.
There have not been 4 attempts to do this (Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, North Korea), but 400. We stopped well over 90% of them, but you don't hear about them
As for those people you mentioned, many of them were hamstrung by ethical people whose refusal to kill slowed down their crazy lessons.
Fail.
1) False equivalence. Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, and North Korea's dictator are equal to a kid with an assault rifle? Really?
2) Fallacy of the fourth term. You made a pretty interesting argument with your psychopathic tyrant with an army of amoral killers, but now you are suggesting that it was ethics that slowed them down, not morality. I can see why you made the switch -- unlike morality, ethics can be prescriptive -- but you need to revisit your premise since you introduced a new term.
Instead, it is the rise of a human psychopathic tyrant working with a force of soldiers that obediently kill at his command, with no chance of moral rebellion within his own force.
morality is often cited as a reason to control technology when it enables behavior that somebody doesn't like. The same class of arguments was used against file sharing twenty years ago, the Pill fifty years ago, and alcohol a hundred years ago, and we all see how successful those arguments were. the problem with hanging your argument on morality is that morality is not a standard of behavior, it is just a description of a certain kind of behavior. So, indeed the problem is not the rise of an AI revolution, but nor is it the rise of a psychopathic tyrant with AI killers at his/her command. The problem is convincing people that living in a world with autonomous weapons is better than living in a world where autonomous weapons are banned.
I beg to differ. clock for clock, AMD blows Intel out of the water. Clocks-per-instruction (CPI) is a useful metric when it comes to comparing CPU horsepower across differing architectures, and AMD is the clear winner when you do. In an understandable decision, Intel listened to their marketers, who told them, "we need higher clocks than our competitors, because that's what people want to buy." So Intel chose long instruction pipes so they could get higher clock frequencies, and then focussed on minimizing the inherent penalties (like having to flush said long pipeline on a branch instruction.) Intel's branch prediction algorithms are excellent, but they can't erase the branch penalty caused by those long instruction pipelines. That penalty is why an AMD running at half the clock speed of an Intel processor (and therefore costing 1/2 to 1/3 as much!) does as much or more actual computing (CPI) than the Intel.
Doom, but not Quake? Pac-man and Tetris, but not Space Invaders or Defender or Donkey Kong? WoW but not EQ or EVE? And no mention of any of the rogue-likes? Where is Civ, and Halo? I truly hope the curators are not going to commit the same kind of errors around inclusions and exclusions that rendered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame irrelevant. You know what I'm talking about -- The Who, but not Jethro Tull? Kiss, but not Deep Purple? Pink Floyd, but not The Moody Blues, ELP or Yes?
There is no solution to this problem that involves restricting drones, because that won't stop the bad guys. The only solution is to ensure the Killer Drone can't get to your high-value target.
Yes, but.... To the government's internal security apparatus, there is no useful distinction between a law abiding citizen with access to lethal technology (guns, explosives, drones, etc) and a terrorist --- they must assume the former can and will become the latter under the right circumstances (see T. McVeigh and T. Kaczinsky) -- so restricting public access to terrorist tools is is exactly what is going to happen, in the name of public security.
Distributed storage capacity has the potential to even out the prices over the day and match consumption and production. It also solves a major issue with most renewables. It would be even more interesting if people were allowed to store cheap electricity and sell it back during expensive hours for profit.
true, and in a free market, that is exactly what would happen. sadly, the US energy market is no where near free. In the last three years, Koch Industries has successfully lobbied legislative bodies in 17 states to impede the deployment of alternative energy, and to drastically roll back, if not outrightly abandon existing programs. Case in point: net metering, where the utility company monitors power use and credits a homeowner for power sent back to the grid. In 2014, right here in sunny Az, three Koch-funded candidates were elected to our five person Corporation Commission, which, among other duties, sets utility rates. in february this year, they announced two structural changes that effectively kill net metering. the first change eliminates the ability to bank your credits over the length of a year, meaning that the credits needed to offset months where your PV array doesnt cover your power use are no longer available. the second change reduces the amount of money the utility will pay for your excess production, from full retail to less than half of wholesale. Arizona was seeing fairly strong growth in rooftop solar, until that announcement. in march, new residential solar permits were down 42% over Mar 2014. so far in april, there have been zero new residential permits.
Slashdot Mirror
AI, at least on Turing-complete architectures, cannot and will not happen. Roger Penrose pretty much put the final nail in the AI coffin nearly thirty years ago when he (rightfully) pointed out that there are non-algorithmic aspects to cognition and consciousness (prereqs for intelligence in anybody's book) that can't even be simulated, let alone replicated, on a Turing machine. He based his argument on a novel but quite defensible interpretation of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Look up the Halting Problem, if you need a concrete example of why AI Just. Won't. Happen.
With that said, the next likely apocalypse is going to be economic, and it is going to happen because of computer-enabled high frequency trading. Peta-FLOP scale compute clusters at brokerage houses with single digit pings to stock exchanges, running trading algorithms written by ex-physicists and ex-mathematicians that were originally designed to parse peta-byte sized data dumps from supercolliders, are what we need to worry about, not HAL 9000.
I thought all countries (in the developed world, at the very least) had laws stating in one wording or another that it is illegal for a business to refuse payment in the country's official currency?
Well, perhaps they do. Your point, sir? What is preventing them from changing the law? Maybe a little history is in order. After the failure of the Bretton Woods agreement when the US pulled out of it in 1971, national currencies became fiat, i.e., they have value only because the government says it does. If the government decides it no longer has value, then by fiat, it no longer has value. Remember, currency is just a tool, and like any tool, it can be abandoned when it has outlived it's usefulness. Hopefully, Swedish authorities will also legislate protections against abuse of transaction data, but we will have to wait and see.
There is not a regime on earth that bans things that it does not consider harmful to the people. Remember that.
False. In the US, for example, bans can and are enacted when local governments decide that something needs to be banned, even though the federal government says it shall not be. Case in point: Abortion. The federal government decided in Roe v. Wade that a woman's right to opt for an abortion is protected, meaning that the procedure cannot be banned at the state level. Yet it is effectively banned in most states of the former Confederacy, because those state legislatures enacted laws making it practically impossible for abortion providers to practice, thus effectively banning abortions in those states. Thwok, ball's in your court.
if you think about it for a moment in terms of the weak anthropic principle, gravity has to be very weak, because it is cumulative. The Weyl curvature of spacetime, which is the metric tensor that governs the propagation of gravity in free space, acts across the entire Einstein manifold, i.e., everywhere at the same time. If gravity were any stronger, it is pretty unlikely that matter as we understand it would be able to exist long enough to produce objects like humans capable of asking that question.
With that said, it is not really an important question question on its own, as the over-hyped intro suggests. The important questions pretty much are looking for explanations as to why the universe behaves so differently at different scales and velocities. Important questions in physics and cosmology are more along the lines of "Why are our two most successful theories about the nature of the universe, quantum mechanics and general relativity, incompatible with each other?"
Remember the Michelson-Morley experiments? From the pov of empirical adequacy, those negative results actually were confirmations of a more correct theory that was still eighteen years away. The classical, Newtonian paradigm, useful though it was (and still is, at non-relativistic velocities) needed to be tweaked to accommodate new evidence -- in the MM case, the lack of confirmatory results. When you use a model to ask a question about the universe, you have to be willing to change your model when the answer you get doesn't fit anywhere in your model. That is science. Anything else is religion, i.e., you ignore the answer or discredit the question, which is what the scientistific priesthood did to MM after they failed to find evidence of the "luminiferous aether." which was the dominant relig^H^H^H^H^H paradigm of the day.
So put the pitchforks and torches away, at least until science can come up with an altered holographic model to explain these results.
This. I've never understood why everyone wants the phones to keep getting lighter and thinner, with things like a glass back, only to then have to put them in a giant bulky plastic case to protect them, entirely defeating the purpose. People (mostly tech journalists) complained about how the Samsung S3/S4 felt with its plastic back, but you could actually get away without putting it in a case, which seems to be true of fewer and fewer phones these days (certainly not the iPhones or the S6).
Hmmm. I have never seen an iPhone in a case. Hiding those patented curves in an unaesthetic box would truly defeat the purpose of having an iPhone. I have an iPhone for one reason -- herd acceptance. At meetings with clients, for example, it is sometimes useful to flash the bling to blend in. I have a venerable Galaxy S5 for the other 23 hours of my day, safely ensconced in a Lifebox. Most tech types are sceptical of arguments grounded in social behavior, I know, but it pays to acknowledge that a large number of humans care deeply about how they are perceived by others. Jobs made himself a wealthy, wealthy man by pitching his products to people who care more about how they look holding it, than what they can do with it. Sleek is sexy, and therefore sells much better to people who need to be perceived as sexy.
With that said, there are great functional reasons to reduce the size of certain components, if for no other reason than to leave more room for battery, as several people already have mentioned in this thread. Eliminating external physical ports would help ruggedize any phone, and simultaneously make it easier (read: less expensive to manufacture) to make it look sexy. And not having to deal with cables every fucking day is a win for me. Finding a micro-USB port is goddamn hard for those of us with failing eyesight and deteriorating motor skills. The only cable I have to deal with now on a regular basis (~ weekly) is the micro-USB charger for my BT headset; I installed a $40 wireless charging kit on my aforementioned S5 and I'm loving it.
It is incredible how many people bring "free speech!" up in conversation where it is not warranted.
It's actually more incredible how many people think that freedom of speech is only a concept in relation to governmental restrictions on communication.
Obviously private party restrictions on speech aren't a violation of 1st Amendment rights, but it should be more than obvious that freedom of speech can be threatened by private restrictions on speech by refusing access to media, venues or physical places which are commonly accepted as public spaces.
uh, what? what does the first amendment to the US constitution have to do with a group of british theater owners deciding what can and can't be seen on their theater screens, which are located in Britain, and not in the US?
Columbus was sponsored by a wealthy and powerful sovereign government.
He was indeed. But many follow on missions were privately funded. Governments funded the development of better compasses, sextants, chronometers, and better ships, as well as the initial voyages. But within a few decades, the spice trade, slave trade, and sugar/rum trade had made oceanic voyages profitable enough for the private sector to dominate.
Careful -- expand your horizons a bit. Your southern europe biases are showing. Government funded development of navigational tech and tools did occur and was helpful, as were the (morally dubious, in the case of the slave trade) motivations of commercial profit.
But -- profit in and of itself is not a sufficient, or indeed, even a necessary condition for exploration. The islands of Polynesia were explored, settled and exploited at least a millenia before Europe even knew the earth was round, using only naked eye observations to navigate.
And what about northern europe's contribution to exploration? When Erik the Red and his kin went a'viking, they took it across at least one ocean, with only their own eyesight to guide them.
Hello Andreas,
I've been a happy civ addict for decades now, and I've been playing free civ on my linux based systems since I first heard about it on the civ fanatics site back in the early 2000's. I think civ has had to evolve to remain competitive in the gaming market place, and the producers and developers who assumed the mantle after the initial market success at Microprose have done an excellent job at it. And I certainly include in that all the modders and the fine folks like you who gave us free civ and all the great mods that enhance and improve (and fix!) the game we love so much.
But -- and I would really lilke a dev's opinion on this -- where does Civ go from here? To me, Civ started out as a resource management game, fun and absorbing at the same time. Multiplayer mode in CivNet extended that to something to share with friends and fellow civ fanatics online. But with civ 3, the resource management aspects of the game started to share the limelight with RPG elements. by the time of Civ 4, the resource management aspects of the game seemed to stop evolving, and the RPG elements started to get more and more of the developer's attention. By Civ 5, especially the BE version, the game stopped evolving along resource management lines, and seemed to be focussed by the devs on improving and enhancing the RPG elements. Is Civ going to continue to focus on RPG-style play at the expense of the resource management game?
Wake me when vendors actually agree on a common way of drawing the required power from the USB chargers. Sure there's a standard published but when will vendors actually follow the current standard, or in the case of Apple follow any standard at all.
uhh,,,what? not an apple fanboi here, but why does apple need to follow a standard? standards are for companies who are selling products in a competitive market place, but don't want to have to compete on *everything.* Since Apple is really not competing in the same space as LG, Samsung, Motorola, et al, they do not need to follow every standard adopted by those other companies or even a fraction of those standards. standards promote interoperability between market competitors, and that is it, full stop. Standards are useful if you are competing where interoperability gives you a market advantage. That is a battle that Apple has dodged, quite successfully. As Sun Tzu and Miyamoto Mushashi point out again and again, only fight battles you are likely to win. Apple is competing in the design space, not the tech space, and that is probably why they are the wealthiest company in the history of the world, and with just a minuscule market share, to boot. Think: Apple is not about how well the tech works with the competition, but what the tech does for the consumer who purchases it. It's called choosing your battles, and Jobs chose well, dying an incredibly wealthy man.
the weakest link in any security system is the flesh and blood one...
Well, no. A game, like a movie, is an expensive risk. Going with a proven moneymaker is pretty much why we see sequels and reboots coming out of Hollywood more than we see original work. Ditto games -- the boundary between movie making and game making is getting pretty porous, with game tie-ins for movies and movies based on popular games all too common. All businesses try to reduce and/or mitigate risk, and Squeenix is no exception.
It took a decade for Deus Ex to get right. DE:HR was game of the year for a reason. It is in HD, a golden-hued, blade-runner-invoking, ridley-scott homaging, glorious meld of FPS and RPG. Don't try to gild this lily, guys. Fuck with FF if you must, but not this franchise, please.
Get over your puffery and credentialism - no one cares.
The degrees at most universities are a bit misnamed. The CompSci degree is an engineering degree, with a focus on writing software to solve problems. If you're building a repeatable process to solve real-world problems, you're an engineer. The few "Computer Engineering" degrees I've seen have been full of project management BS. I really don't understand the choice of name for that. Maybe it will correct in time.
The tiny percentage of people doing academic research work in the field also have CompSci degrees, and it doesn't really seem like you'd need a different undergrad degree program for that yet, as the work you do for your PhD will create the distinction.
Well, I think that you may be correct now, but there are a lot of us with CS degrees that are definitely not engineering degrees in any shape, form, or fashion. My undergrad CS degree (1998) was mostly discrete math. Courses in graph theory, number theory, theory of computation, computational complexity, algorithm design, and symbolic logic comprised most of my curriculum. Understanding why Godel's Theorem put an absolutely road block on computational AI, and why the Church-Turing hypothesis and NP-completeness constrained the types of problems computers could and could not solve were strongly emphasized in my undergrad program. Coding was pretty much optional in most of those classes -- though, tbh, my algorithm professor (Udi Manber, of agrep fame) expressed some surprise and consternation that I had actually passed his course without submitting a single line of compiled code. Out of >60 units in the upper division classes of my CS major, I had exactly 12 units (three 4-unit classes) from the CS catalog that required me to code (compiler design, software engineering, and operating system design and development.) So, no, my CS degree was definitely not an engineering degree. It was about how to ask questions about computation that could be answered in a rational, reproducible way. Engineering, imho, is about taking those rational, reproducible answers and figuring out how to build a money-making widget with them.
Some Christians. I am not really the person to defend people whose only defense against the DSM IV definition of delusion is that they are explicitly exempt from it (because else any religion very much fits the definition perfectly), but it should be said that not all of them are THAT delusional. Only a rather tiny minority, and close to 100% of that minority residing in the USA, actually believes that.
That definition was changed in DSM-V. Significantly. The delusion no longer has to be demonstrably false. Now, they can believe that it is true, and still be diagnosed with a mental illness, if their behavior warrants it. But it also means that it is up to the clinician making the diagnosis. Parents who sincerely think praying is going to heal their child should not be penalized for holding that belief if the clinician determines there is no danger to the child. As long as their delusions are doing no harm in the opinion of the clinician, they fit the exemption. But it will be harder to ask for an insanity defense -- they will have to face their crime for what it is if the child dies.
Outside the US, new earth rubbish plays no significant role.
Ahh, yes. But it does play a significant role in the U.S. It is perhaps unlikely, but it is certainly possible, especially if any one of the current GOP candidates for president actually win, that somebody that (emphasis yours) delusional could achieve the highest office in the land. You really, really don't want an American president, a man who can call down a nuclear strike if he thinks it is necessary, to believe the earth is only 6000 years old, and to believe there is an invisible man in the sky telling him to do it... .
The other reality and I am not sure even Jeb! gets it is that Trump is the best thing that could have happened to him at least as far as the primaries go.
The whole "anchor baby" conversation the other day with him getting testy isn't good. What Jeb! needs to do if he wants to win is stay the hell out of the spot light. Let Trump continue to suck up all the oxygen.
Trump will flame out sooner or later, he has too. Trump is smart guy but the rules of the game are different in politics there is only one Trump, if one of hits bets does not pay off its over. Its not like the world he is accustom to where if one entity goes bankrupt he has ten more pull capital out of and try another new business. Outspoken as he is eventually he will say something people can't get passed in a careless moment.
As long as Trump stays front an center the votes won't hear jack about any of the other candidates. At some point after Trump craters the voters are going to be left with 14 other candidates they have hardly heard of and a name they know "Bush". That will be enough to win a primary. I don't like it but its true.
No, I don't think Trump will flame out. He is saying things that the xenophobic, racist, Evangelical Christian base of the Republican party wants to hear. The GOP helped create the conditions for a Trump-like candidate, starting with the Southern Strategy that put Nixon in the Whitehouse. Fox News helped too, by mainstreaming the same calculated paranoid, racial fear mongering to its audience. Fox News is the most widely watched program in the US, reaching tens of millions of voters every fucking night. So, no, the Donald is not going to flame out. In fact, the rest of the clown car that is the GOP nomination race are falling over themselves to move to Trump's right. Attacking the 14th Amendment seems to be the current tactic -- two-thirds of the GOP nominees are promising to end jus soli, which is the source of all the "anchor baby" angst that Trump is currently capitalizing on.
I used the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's System Advisor Model (SAM) tool when I designed my 16kWdc rooftop array. You can download SAM from the NREL site. They also have a web-based tool called PVWatts that is far less detailed, but is definitely easy to use and produces a very reliable estimate if you are thinking about a PV array.
For what it is worth, rooftop solar is facing stiff opposition from utility companies and energy producers because it directly affects their bottom line. Changes in net metering regulations that favor the existing energy production infrastructure over locally produced alternative energy are becoming more common as the fossil fuel industry fights to retain the status quo. Without going on a rant about it, I watched my seven year ROI on a $42k project evaporate because of changes to Arizona's net metering regulations put in place this year by the bought-and-paid-for-by-Koch Industries Arizona Corporation Commission.
Thanks to a complete failure of the media,
I don't know that it is the media's responsibility to report every bad side-effect that a minority of people experience to some common food additive. They'd be so busy reporting on what affects a minority that the main news would never get covered.
Indeed. The bar for food and drugs is 3 sigmas. That is pretty high, but not as high as it could be -- physicists need 5 if they want to claim they've discovered something "new." To put it in perspective: If, in your double blind clinical trials, subjects who use your food additive or drug report negative/adverse/null effects in only 1 case out of 3000 subjects, FDA approval is pretty much a done deal at this point. The FDA already requires disclosure of negative/adverse/null effects on all packaging, so why does the media need to get involved? If you aren't already interested enough in reading the label on the shit you are putting into your one and only body, there is no amount of media that can help you.
One of the things that has consistently mystified me about Americans' complacency with drone warfare is the underlying assumption that our current monopoly on drones is going to last forever. If it's ok for the U.S. to use drones to assassinate "terrorist" anti-American agitators in Yemen, what are we going to say when China starts using drones to assassinate "terrorist" Chinese dissidents on American soil, or Europe, or elsewhere? For all intents and purposes, we're already using killbots, and the really important point here is that airborne killbots can be used (for now) with impunity across borders.
"American Exceptionalism" basically means we allow ourselves to commit war crimes with impunity.
What is there to be mystified about? If any other state actor with drone technology does anything like what you are suggesting, they will cease to exist as a state, period. They know what would happen. The Romans used salt to make sure Carthago delenda est; America will use Strontium 90. America's social order may be iffy, but their ability to come together and destroy other nations when provoked is a matter of historical record. They have more than enough nukes left in their arsenal to pave any ten countries if provoked, and I am pretty certain random drone strikes killing Americans in Des Moines would be provocation enough. You are right about American exceptionalism, in the sense that "He who has the ability to destroy the planet, controls the planet." And before you point out that lots of nations have nukes, ask yourself this one question: In the seven decades since our species developed nuclear weapons, what was the nationality of the only human in history to use a nuclear weapon in anger? Here's a hint: He actually did it twice.
This is one of those "You only hear about the failures" situation. No one hears about the crazy kid that was given psychiatric counseling and decided NOT to use an ak47 to kill everyone.
There have not been 4 attempts to do this (Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, North Korea), but 400. We stopped well over 90% of them, but you don't hear about them
As for those people you mentioned, many of them were hamstrung by ethical people whose refusal to kill slowed down their crazy lessons.
Fail.
1) False equivalence. Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, and North Korea's dictator are equal to a kid with an assault rifle? Really?
2) Fallacy of the fourth term. You made a pretty interesting argument with your psychopathic tyrant with an army of amoral killers, but now you are suggesting that it was ethics that slowed them down, not morality. I can see why you made the switch -- unlike morality, ethics can be prescriptive -- but you need to revisit your premise since you introduced a new term.
The problem is not the rise of an AI revolution.
Instead, it is the rise of a human psychopathic tyrant working with a force of soldiers that obediently kill at his command, with no chance of moral rebellion within his own force.
morality is often cited as a reason to control technology when it enables behavior that somebody doesn't like. The same class of arguments was used against file sharing twenty years ago, the Pill fifty years ago, and alcohol a hundred years ago, and we all see how successful those arguments were. the problem with hanging your argument on morality is that morality is not a standard of behavior, it is just a description of a certain kind of behavior. So, indeed the problem is not the rise of an AI revolution, but nor is it the rise of a psychopathic tyrant with AI killers at his/her command. The problem is convincing people that living in a world with autonomous weapons is better than living in a world where autonomous weapons are banned.
Um, that's utter crap.
I beg to differ. clock for clock, AMD blows Intel out of the water. Clocks-per-instruction (CPI) is a useful metric when it comes to comparing CPU horsepower across differing architectures, and AMD is the clear winner when you do. In an understandable decision, Intel listened to their marketers, who told them, "we need higher clocks than our competitors, because that's what people want to buy." So Intel chose long instruction pipes so they could get higher clock frequencies, and then focussed on minimizing the inherent penalties (like having to flush said long pipeline on a branch instruction.) Intel's branch prediction algorithms are excellent, but they can't erase the branch penalty caused by those long instruction pipelines. That penalty is why an AMD running at half the clock speed of an Intel processor (and therefore costing 1/2 to 1/3 as much!) does as much or more actual computing (CPI) than the Intel.
Doom, but not Quake? Pac-man and Tetris, but not Space Invaders or Defender or Donkey Kong? WoW but not EQ or EVE? And no mention of any of the rogue-likes? Where is Civ, and Halo? I truly hope the curators are not going to commit the same kind of errors around inclusions and exclusions that rendered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame irrelevant. You know what I'm talking about -- The Who, but not Jethro Tull? Kiss, but not Deep Purple? Pink Floyd, but not The Moody Blues, ELP or Yes?
There is no solution to this problem that involves restricting drones, because that won't stop the bad guys. The only solution is to ensure the Killer Drone can't get to your high-value target.
Yes, but.... To the government's internal security apparatus, there is no useful distinction between a law abiding citizen with access to lethal technology (guns, explosives, drones, etc) and a terrorist --- they must assume the former can and will become the latter under the right circumstances (see T. McVeigh and T. Kaczinsky) -- so restricting public access to terrorist tools is is exactly what is going to happen, in the name of public security.
Distributed storage capacity has the potential to even out the prices over the day and match consumption and production. It also solves a major issue with most renewables. It would be even more interesting if people were allowed to store cheap electricity and sell it back during expensive hours for profit.
true, and in a free market, that is exactly what would happen. sadly, the US energy market is no where near free. In the last three years, Koch Industries has successfully lobbied legislative bodies in 17 states to impede the deployment of alternative energy, and to drastically roll back, if not outrightly abandon existing programs. Case in point: net metering, where the utility company monitors power use and credits a homeowner for power sent back to the grid. In 2014, right here in sunny Az, three Koch-funded candidates were elected to our five person Corporation Commission, which, among other duties, sets utility rates. in february this year, they announced two structural changes that effectively kill net metering. the first change eliminates the ability to bank your credits over the length of a year, meaning that the credits needed to offset months where your PV array doesnt cover your power use are no longer available. the second change reduces the amount of money the utility will pay for your excess production, from full retail to less than half of wholesale. Arizona was seeing fairly strong growth in rooftop solar, until that announcement. in march, new residential solar permits were down 42% over Mar 2014. so far in april, there have been zero new residential permits.