I never completely understood the need of launching massive ships from Earth whenever we want to leave it. Whenever we wanted to travel the seas, we did not build a massive caravel inland then painstakingly dragged it all the way to the coast. We reasoned it made more sense to build it in a dry dock, that way it only requires a tiny push to get it into the ocean.
Wouldn't anyone at NASA think that making a "Space Dock" made sense?. Make a bunch of tiny trips to lower earth orbit and build the ship there, so you can make a larger ships to travel further. Mass would not be such a big issue (granted, fuel would be), but at least the escape velocity problem would be non-existent.
Well, national space programs are not about exploring new frontiers. Military superiority and a corporate welfare program for defense contractors are about the only reasons that nation-states even pretend to have a "space program." NB: I'm not disagreeing with you -- if the US wanted a space program for exploration, that's what they should be doing, and as a tax-payer, I would be bitching loudly if they weren't. But exploration is not what the space program is for, so I don't bitch about it very much at all. With that said, if commercial exploitation of space-based resources ever becomes feasible, I would expect that nation-states will become interested in extending their ability to use force to protect claims on space-based resources. Should that happen, deep range manned missions might become a priority. Frankly, I'm hoping that Deep Space Industries succeeds in locating, mining, and returning valuable resources from space, and that some other commercial venture or nation-state sees their success and claim jumps them -- it's the only way I see to kick national space programs into gear.
They made a very limited amount of sense when unmanned spacecraft were really dumb, but they make just about no sense today. At best you'd be testing deep space tech for human spaceflight, but you can test it about as well and much more safely in high Earth orbit.
You are totally correct. How utterly pointless a flyby is.
Im sure doing something for the fact that nobody in human history has ever done it before, being in the history books, the prestige and kudos that comes with it, im sure none of those things have ever had anything to do with human exploration. Im also sure the engineering and science advances that come out of a flyby like this also has nothing to do with it. Nor would be the information gathered from doing 90% of a Mars landing be of any use too.
amiright?
...I'd be willing to bet that most of humanity don't know who Stafford and Cernan are (if you had to look them up to figure out why I mentioned them, I win). The names of Armstrong and Aldrin will be remembered by the average man on the street as long as our species survives.
Maintaining scarcity is a direct way to control the supply-side of the price v. supply curve. This is reason enough for companies like Elsevier to maintain a paywall. But there are other ways -- academic reputation has value as well, so it can be leveraged to help maintain the scarcity. It is conceivable that companies like Elsevier will begin to demand NDAs from submitters. Submitters will be faced with the choice of accepting the NDA in order to be published in a mainstream journal, or rejecting it and having to rely on non-mainstream journals as a vehicle for their academic credentials, which might put their academic careers at risk. NB: I'm not endorsing this tactic by saying it is conceivable, I'm only pointing it out as one way that Elsevier and their ilk could protect their business model.
Emasculation is the removal of the genitalia of a male, both the penis and the testicles. Removal of the testicles alone is castration.
By extension, the word has also come to mean to render a male less of a man, or to make a male feel less of a man by humiliation.
Women should be safe from the effect of smart phones
(yes, I understand that the most metaphorical sense would imply weakening in a generalized sexless sense. However... think how well the following expression sounds to you: she felt emasculated by...)
Well, considering the context in which it was used (A TED conference) it is unlikely it was misapplied to more than about 10 percent of the audience...an error rate that I find entirely acceptable.
This is vs staring into some one's face while you ignore them while reading something off your glasses?
Well, presuming dual-sided displays, wouldn't it be possible to assign a profile to the publicly-facing side of your AR gear that maps a display of feigned interest where your eye-balls are supposed to be while you are surfing pr0n? Hell, add a discreet speaker and an Eliza clone running in the background to reinforce the illusion of interest by simulating a conversation, and suddenly, we are freed from the obnoxious burden of one-sided socialization when we'd rather be doing something else.
In my limited understanding of these things, (mostly from articles meant for mass consumption, not scholarly journal papers), I imagine a black hole to be so massive not even light can escape its gravitational pull. Which technically means the escape velocity is the speed of light. So anything at the event horizon should be at the speed of light. This is of course, a naive view. The escape velocity is based on Newtonian, not Relativistic, physics.
In Einstein's theory of general relativity, the Newtonian concept of mass doesn't really exist, being spread out over the Einstein curvature tensor on one side of the general relativity equation and the stress energy tensor on the other. Calculating the radius of a gravitational field where the escape velocity is equal to c is straight forward in both Newtonian mechanics and general relativity, and produce the same value, the so called event horizon (Scharzschild radius, technically) but something interesting happens when the gravitational field is generated by a rotating object -- it drags spacetime around with it. This would cause the orbital plane of an object to precess, something that Newtonian mechanics completely misses but was predicted nearly a century ago when people first started exploring solutions to Einstein's equations. Being able to directly arrive at the rotational rates of a wide variety of blackholes (which is what this announcement is all about) means that both frame-dragging and the no-hair conjecture concerning the characterizability of blackholes with just three Newtonian values -- mass, charge, and angular momentum -- can in principle now be studied more rigorously.
...so you deal with him as an idealogue. I happen to agree with Schwaz's ideology when it comes to open and free access to information, especially information that was accumulated via tax-funded research. My tax dollars are also funding those prosecutors, though -- I want to make sure that if they are going after an ideologue (even one that I happen to agree with) they aren't hampered in the process, because there are other ideologues out there that I would like to see swing if they (like Schwarz did) trip up and violate a law. The defense's job is to get their client off the hook, and is given great leeway in doing so. But the prosecution's job is to keep him on the hook, and should have the same amount of leeway to build their case.
its no different than convincing the Navy that carriers will be if not already obsolete for most missions. Changing how people feel about something takes longer to catch up to technology than it takes for technology to advance.
The ability to project force is the only mission of an aircraft carrier that matters in any meaningful way. A US aircraft carrier sitting off the coast of a particular enemy is decidedly not obsolete if that particular enemy doesn't have the technology to drive it away, which is the case for every enemy the US has on the planet right now, and will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. And to put not too fine a point on it, it is the case with all of their allies as well, in case relations sour with one of them. That's what being a superpower means -- you can project force where you need to, including your own backyard. The possible exception is China, who is neither friend nor enemy to the US right now, and possibly has already achieved at least technological parity with the US, if not social or economic parity. China is the biggest hurdle the US faces in the forseeable future; it will be interesting to see what the US does to prevent them from achieving social and economic parity with the US.
People from cultures more attuned to bribery (euphemistically referred to as "gift-giving" in the study)
Or, as we call it, "tipping".
Tipping (or "gift-giving") is a degrading and corrupting practice. It implies that the receiver is temporarily whoring himself to the tipper.
In business, the bottom line is profit, not some ethical or moral standard. Isn't a person who receives money in exchange for using their skills and talents (whether acquired through education and training or experience) already a whore by definition? How does accepting a tip or a bribe intensify the whorishness of what we are already doing? From the POV of the gifter, it is value given for value received, and I assure you there is more value in a transaction than just the ch-ching of a cash register. Bribery is a cost of doing business, like taxes and license fees, and it is a factor anywhere and everywhere business is conducted. I ostentatiously over-tip to motivate competition among the hired help to ensure I get preferential treatment. I offer "gifts" to people in a position to facilitate my negotiations with potential customers, and happily accept gifts from people who want me to be their customer. Seriously -- how can anything that greases the wheels of commerce be degrading or corrupting?
"who's funding them"
Qatar. And their feud with Assad possibly dictates the Syria coverage. But there's no other money in the game. It's one family funding the operation from their oil-wealth. Not a plethora of commercial interests like Fox "News"
lol. The royal family of Saud owns one sixth of fox news, and their wealth is 100 percent oil derived. Care to revise your assertion about Fox News?
There's a reason the phone companies charge so much per text message, and a lot of it has to do with paying micropayments to themselves every time someone makes a micropayment on sending a text message. The transactional overhead is very high.
Anything you pay to a carrier for text messages is pure profit for the carrier, because there is no transactional overhead at all, either in terms of accounting or bandwidth. Incrementing a counter in your account every time you hit send and storing the result is trivial in terms of processing and data storage. Text messages are sent on an administrative channel that is separate from voice and data, and not over the bandwidth that they actually charge you for. The admin channel was built into the cellular network for control of the network hardware, and it was bought and paid for when the network was put into place decades ago. If you actually pay your carrier for text messaging, you are being exploited, period.
Also, VR will make a massive comback if, as I suspect, Google Glass takes off and competitors crop up. This isn't a new idea, since Steve Mann has been wired for VR since, what? The 80's? I think its time has come.
You are confusing VR with AR. Augmented reality systems like Google Glass simply overlay information about our environment in our visual field -- it doesn't replace reality like a VR system is supposed to, it just augments it. Augmenting reality *is* trivial, and the solutions are easily within the domain of current and near-term forseeable engineering technology. Functional VR, otoh, means directly interfacing with the proprioception/kinesthesia network in human neural anatomy that tells the brain what the body is doing in relation to other objects in the mental model of the environment. Modeling those other objects is trivial, as most VR researchers, including Carmack, will assert, but VR researchers are going to also have to figure out how to intercept, decode, modulate and retransmit the electrical impulses traversing the PK network that represent your body's position relative to those objects, which is decidedly non-trivial, especially while suppressing the original signals telling your brain that you are actually motionless, and even more especially doing it in a reversible way. These solutions, IMHO, require way more knowledge of human neural anatomy than we presently have, and will require the invention of new bio-engineering technologies to exploit it once we have that knowledge. AR has a distinct market advantage right now, so I'm certain Carmack and other VR researchers will turn their ingenuity to AR and away from VR, once they realize this.
A search engine is supposed to search and display what it finds. I'll be the one to do the filtering
You are half right. (100% right about the RIAA, btw, but only half right about search engines.) A search engine is a content delivery service, period. It is supposed to generate profit by delivering search results, the same way Netflix/Unbox/Hulu generates profit by delivering movies and TV shows. The minute you let your customers control their end of the delivery pipeline is the minute you've lost control of your business model and can start kissing your profits good-bye. Google makes money by selling advertising content mixed in with those search results -- if Google allowed you to arbitrarily filter those search results, companies would stop paying Google to insert their ads into your search result stream. End-to-end control of the delivery pipeline is absolutely necessary in this business model. The entertainment industry learned this the hard way, when their customers discovered they could get the same content via the simple expedient of finding somebody (hello, Google!) who had a copy of the content they wanted. This is the single most important lesson to be learned about content delivery via the net. Information may want to be free, but in order to make a profit on it, you have to constrain it by making it available only to those people who can pay for it, and you can only do that by making certain that your customers can't go elsewhere for it, which is what the entertainment industry epically failed to do (an error that it is fighting desperately, via the loathsome RIAA and MPAA, to correct.) If Google loses control of their delivery pipeline, which is what you are advocating, then their business model is doomed.
I am so tired of the 'Mankind's existence is valueless' bravado. We are a billion to one galactic coincidence that has risen to sentient thought and self-awareness. This astronomical concurrence alone is worthy of continuance. If we finally evolve beyond primal tribal and religious bickering, we can get on with off planet settlements... and we have still a cushion of ten billion years to settle other galaxies.
...and I'm so tired of theistic arguments from otherwise apparently rational people. Self-awareness certainly makes it possible to assign some specific destination or goal for the system. But self-awareness doesn't confer any magical status to the system, selecting out a specific goal or destination for it simply because it is self-aware.
Seriously -- self-awareness is within reach of any species capable of modeling its environment and then inserting a representation of itself into the model. Is a cat self-aware? Certainly. A horse? Absolutely. There is nothing noteworthy or astonishing about the existence of self-aware systems, so there is nothing astonishing or special about our species. A recursive function call is self-aware, for crying out loud. Well, it's self-aware 'til the stack overflows, anyway.:)
By assigning some kind of magical status to self-awareness, your otherwise reasonable plea for a species-level sanity becomes a religious argument, indistinguishable from the "religious bickering" you are directing yourself to "evolve beyond." I think you are capable of appreciating just how ironic this is. What if your self-aware goal results in the extinction of your species? So much for the magical status you assigned to self-awareness, eh?
p>People should be 100% entitled to keep the data/media they pay for. This should be required by law. They should be able to save it and hand it down to their kids or donate it to a library or a museum. Our culture and human history is being erased in the future so that people at present can theoretically make a few extra dollars.
There is nothing "theoretical" about it. Profits are maximized when a company successfully engages in rent-seeking behavior, something that Adam Smith himself acknowledged, but then deplored in almost the same breath, using almost the same terms you do. (Dude is seriously conflicted on this point, and it weakens much of his case for capitalism.) Capitalism is all about squeezing out those few extra dollars of profit, and you make more of those profit dollars when you just rent out or lease the property you own, over and over again. If you were to sell it, (ie, transfer ownership to the buyer) your buyer becomes a potential competitor (via resale of the product you created) and you have to go to the expense of finding a way to compete with your own product, one that you spent good money to create. You don't have to be a business guru to see how that is a fail business model. Denying resale to protect your business model and preserve your profits is a rational choice, *especially* if making copies of your product is trivial, which is the case with software-based products, like video games.
Is it so far fetched to imagine that there isn't a conspiracy, and his bias is just part of who he is? Humans are irrational. They form opinions and become entrenched in them. Millions of people are pretty biased in interpreting politics, not because they are part of some mass conspiracy, they are just stubborn and close minded.
You are correct, to a point. But a little knife work with Occam's Razor leaves your hypothesis bleeding on the floor. Broder's agenda was in the driver's seat; his entrenched opinions were just along for the ride.
What they are really afraid of is the fact that once cars become self-driving, no one will need to own one anymore.
Technology is actually upended the business model of the entire autoindustry. They might innovate themselves right out of business.
I mean seriously who cares about cloudplayer in a self-driving car? If it can drive itself I'll just leave my earbuds in.
The most common vehicle in 10 years will be the autonomous Dodge caravan, taxiing us all around. Rich people will have maybe their own auto-Bently's or something, but the rest of us will just share a car.
...like me, they'll own motorcycles, probably. Riding a bike (full disclosure: I love my Ducati 1098) is about as close to flying as you can get in two dimensions. The subset of the population that enjoys driving cars and riding bikes for the sheer exhilaration of it (vanishingly small, to be sure, but extant nonetheless) are immune to the marketing gimmicks you are basing your argument on. I have a BT-enabled comm system in my helmet that already lets me voice control my phone -- I can drag a knee at a buck-twenty while listening to Moby *and* send a sell order to my broker at the same time. No amount of autonomous vehicle goodness (and it is a goodness, btw) will alter that in the slightest.
Meh. You can be replaced by sufficiently advanced algorithms. I'm mathematician, FFS. There are already automated theorem provers which can solve undergrad-level problems. As computers evolve, they'll be just as good as people and loads cheaper than people at everything we do, up to and including the creation of art.
If we progress to the point where all of our jobs can be done by computers... what should we do? At the point where artificial intelligence becomes genuine intelligence, it will rapidly outpace human intelligence. This is evolution. We are breeding our replacements.
Hmmm...what if there is an irreducibly non-algorithmic component to human intelligence? That would invalidate the Church-Turing thesis that your assertion seems to be relying on. Roger Penrose thinks it would at least, and he makes a pretty good argument for that position, and against the Strong AI you are hypothesizing. He also defends his argument pretty well, too..
But their success is contingent upon them being able to defend their claims of ownership, and they really haven't addressed how they are going to do that, yet. Be interesting see what their defense is.
I suggest the option of de-orbiting chunks of the object onto the headquarters of those who threaten their claim would be part of their defense.
Yep -- seems like a viable option. Throw rocks at 'em -- wonder if anybody in the brain trust of our myriad national security apparatuses has read Heinlein, lately?
COBOL was the very first language I learned when I was a fourteen-year-old freshman in high school, way back during the Carter administration. I found out decades later that my great aunt, Grace Hopper (of "There's a bug in the system" fame,) helped develop it and it's successor, SNOBOL. It was used as the pedagogical platform in my school district for teaching data processing principles, which are (sadly) orthogonal to programming principles. I still have my Shelly & Cashman ANSI COBOL -- Introduction to Computer Programming text, which used examples from payroll processing and accounting report generation, the dominant paradigms of the mainframe world, to convey programming concepts like looping and conditionals. Ironically, it's sitting on my reference shelf right next to K&R. The book even came with a plastic flowchart symbol template, conveniently printed with a scale along the edge for measuring the physical width of an output column on your fanfold paper to help you determine your PICTURE clauses, and a list of the ASCII control codes for chain printers. Recursion was impossible in COBOL (the compiler tossed an error if a CALL referenced itself) and the idea of a UI was equally a non-starter, with dynamic input functionality at the INPUT $VAR level of BASIC. In retrospect, it was an amazingly poor way to introduce programming principles, and I'm not surprised that FORTRAN, then BASIC, and ultimately Java, took over from it. Still, I can claim (in my best Gerard Butler THIS-IS-SPARTA! voice) that I-PROGRAMMED-COBOL-ON-PUNCHCARDS!:)
The idea just struck me. If aliens didn't possess cloaking technology.. An asteroid such as this would make great cover to closely observe a species advanced enough to detect planets around other stars. You could even deploy small probes the size of a softball to fall to earth or into orbit.
heh, this idea already struck somebody -- David Brin. Check out his latest novel, Existence.
Whoever can land on it. Possession being 9/10s of the law and all that.
Heh -- you are almost right. It's the person who can defend a claim that owns it, not the first person to make the claim. I sincerely hope Deep Space Industries does live up to their potential by profiting from asteroid mining. But their success is contingent upon them being able to defend their claims of ownership, and they really haven't addressed how they are going to do that, yet. Be interesting see what their defense is. Claim-jumping is just as real a threat now as it was in California in 1849. Who will Deep Space Industries appeal to when a rival lands on their rock and reprograms all their mining bots -- Starfleet, perhaps? (I kid, I kid, but I think you see my point.)
Slashdot Mirror
I never completely understood the need of launching massive ships from Earth whenever we want to leave it. Whenever we wanted to travel the seas, we did not build a massive caravel inland then painstakingly dragged it all the way to the coast. We reasoned it made more sense to build it in a dry dock, that way it only requires a tiny push to get it into the ocean.
Wouldn't anyone at NASA think that making a "Space Dock" made sense?. Make a bunch of tiny trips to lower earth orbit and build the ship there, so you can make a larger ships to travel further. Mass would not be such a big issue (granted, fuel would be), but at least the escape velocity problem would be non-existent.
Well, national space programs are not about exploring new frontiers. Military superiority and a corporate welfare program for defense contractors are about the only reasons that nation-states even pretend to have a "space program." NB: I'm not disagreeing with you -- if the US wanted a space program for exploration, that's what they should be doing, and as a tax-payer, I would be bitching loudly if they weren't. But exploration is not what the space program is for, so I don't bitch about it very much at all. With that said, if commercial exploitation of space-based resources ever becomes feasible, I would expect that nation-states will become interested in extending their ability to use force to protect claims on space-based resources. Should that happen, deep range manned missions might become a priority. Frankly, I'm hoping that Deep Space Industries succeeds in locating, mining, and returning valuable resources from space, and that some other commercial venture or nation-state sees their success and claim jumps them -- it's the only way I see to kick national space programs into gear.
They made a very limited amount of sense when unmanned spacecraft were really dumb, but they make just about no sense today. At best you'd be testing deep space tech for human spaceflight, but you can test it about as well and much more safely in high Earth orbit.
You are totally correct. How utterly pointless a flyby is.
Im sure doing something for the fact that nobody in human history has ever done it before, being in the history books, the prestige and kudos that comes with it, im sure none of those things have ever had anything to do with human exploration. Im also sure the engineering and science advances that come out of a flyby like this also has nothing to do with it. Nor would be the information gathered from doing 90% of a Mars landing be of any use too.
amiright?
...I'd be willing to bet that most of humanity don't know who Stafford and Cernan are (if you had to look them up to figure out why I mentioned them, I win). The names of Armstrong and Aldrin will be remembered by the average man on the street as long as our species survives.
Maintaining scarcity is a direct way to control the supply-side of the price v. supply curve. This is reason enough for companies like Elsevier to maintain a paywall. But there are other ways -- academic reputation has value as well, so it can be leveraged to help maintain the scarcity. It is conceivable that companies like Elsevier will begin to demand NDAs from submitters. Submitters will be faced with the choice of accepting the NDA in order to be published in a mainstream journal, or rejecting it and having to rely on non-mainstream journals as a vehicle for their academic credentials, which might put their academic careers at risk. NB: I'm not endorsing this tactic by saying it is conceivable, I'm only pointing it out as one way that Elsevier and their ilk could protect their business model.
Emasculation
Emasculation is the removal of the genitalia of a male, both the penis and the testicles. Removal of the testicles alone is castration. By extension, the word has also come to mean to render a male less of a man, or to make a male feel less of a man by humiliation.
Women should be safe from the effect of smart phones
(yes, I understand that the most metaphorical sense would imply weakening in a generalized sexless sense. However... think how well the following expression sounds to you: she felt emasculated by...)
Well, considering the context in which it was used (A TED conference) it is unlikely it was misapplied to more than about 10 percent of the audience...an error rate that I find entirely acceptable.
This is vs staring into some one's face while you ignore them while reading something off your glasses?
Well, presuming dual-sided displays, wouldn't it be possible to assign a profile to the publicly-facing side of your AR gear that maps a display of feigned interest where your eye-balls are supposed to be while you are surfing pr0n? Hell, add a discreet speaker and an Eliza clone running in the background to reinforce the illusion of interest by simulating a conversation, and suddenly, we are freed from the obnoxious burden of one-sided socialization when we'd rather be doing something else.
In my limited understanding of these things, (mostly from articles meant for mass consumption, not scholarly journal papers), I imagine a black hole to be so massive not even light can escape its gravitational pull. Which technically means the escape velocity is the speed of light. So anything at the event horizon should be at the speed of light. This is of course, a naive view. The escape velocity is based on Newtonian, not Relativistic, physics.
In Einstein's theory of general relativity, the Newtonian concept of mass doesn't really exist, being spread out over the Einstein curvature tensor on one side of the general relativity equation and the stress energy tensor on the other. Calculating the radius of a gravitational field where the escape velocity is equal to c is straight forward in both Newtonian mechanics and general relativity, and produce the same value, the so called event horizon (Scharzschild radius, technically) but something interesting happens when the gravitational field is generated by a rotating object -- it drags spacetime around with it. This would cause the orbital plane of an object to precess, something that Newtonian mechanics completely misses but was predicted nearly a century ago when people first started exploring solutions to Einstein's equations. Being able to directly arrive at the rotational rates of a wide variety of blackholes (which is what this announcement is all about) means that both frame-dragging and the no-hair conjecture concerning the characterizability of blackholes with just three Newtonian values -- mass, charge, and angular momentum -- can in principle now be studied more rigorously.
...so you deal with him as an idealogue. I happen to agree with Schwaz's ideology when it comes to open and free access to information, especially information that was accumulated via tax-funded research. My tax dollars are also funding those prosecutors, though -- I want to make sure that if they are going after an ideologue (even one that I happen to agree with) they aren't hampered in the process, because there are other ideologues out there that I would like to see swing if they (like Schwarz did) trip up and violate a law. The defense's job is to get their client off the hook, and is given great leeway in doing so. But the prosecution's job is to keep him on the hook, and should have the same amount of leeway to build their case.
its no different than convincing the Navy that carriers will be if not already obsolete for most missions. Changing how people feel about something takes longer to catch up to technology than it takes for technology to advance.
The ability to project force is the only mission of an aircraft carrier that matters in any meaningful way. A US aircraft carrier sitting off the coast of a particular enemy is decidedly not obsolete if that particular enemy doesn't have the technology to drive it away, which is the case for every enemy the US has on the planet right now, and will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. And to put not too fine a point on it, it is the case with all of their allies as well, in case relations sour with one of them. That's what being a superpower means -- you can project force where you need to, including your own backyard. The possible exception is China, who is neither friend nor enemy to the US right now, and possibly has already achieved at least technological parity with the US, if not social or economic parity. China is the biggest hurdle the US faces in the forseeable future; it will be interesting to see what the US does to prevent them from achieving social and economic parity with the US.
People from cultures more attuned to bribery (euphemistically referred to as "gift-giving" in the study) Or, as we call it, "tipping". Tipping (or "gift-giving") is a degrading and corrupting practice. It implies that the receiver is temporarily whoring himself to the tipper.
In business, the bottom line is profit, not some ethical or moral standard. Isn't a person who receives money in exchange for using their skills and talents (whether acquired through education and training or experience) already a whore by definition? How does accepting a tip or a bribe intensify the whorishness of what we are already doing? From the POV of the gifter, it is value given for value received, and I assure you there is more value in a transaction than just the ch-ching of a cash register. Bribery is a cost of doing business, like taxes and license fees, and it is a factor anywhere and everywhere business is conducted. I ostentatiously over-tip to motivate competition among the hired help to ensure I get preferential treatment. I offer "gifts" to people in a position to facilitate my negotiations with potential customers, and happily accept gifts from people who want me to be their customer. Seriously -- how can anything that greases the wheels of commerce be degrading or corrupting?
"who's funding them" Qatar. And their feud with Assad possibly dictates the Syria coverage. But there's no other money in the game. It's one family funding the operation from their oil-wealth. Not a plethora of commercial interests like Fox "News"
lol. The royal family of Saud owns one sixth of fox news, and their wealth is 100 percent oil derived. Care to revise your assertion about Fox News?
There's a reason the phone companies charge so much per text message, and a lot of it has to do with paying micropayments to themselves every time someone makes a micropayment on sending a text message. The transactional overhead is very high.
Anything you pay to a carrier for text messages is pure profit for the carrier, because there is no transactional overhead at all, either in terms of accounting or bandwidth. Incrementing a counter in your account every time you hit send and storing the result is trivial in terms of processing and data storage. Text messages are sent on an administrative channel that is separate from voice and data, and not over the bandwidth that they actually charge you for. The admin channel was built into the cellular network for control of the network hardware, and it was bought and paid for when the network was put into place decades ago. If you actually pay your carrier for text messaging, you are being exploited, period.
You mean "Tock"?
Also, VR will make a massive comback if, as I suspect, Google Glass takes off and competitors crop up. This isn't a new idea, since Steve Mann has been wired for VR since, what? The 80's? I think its time has come.
You are confusing VR with AR. Augmented reality systems like Google Glass simply overlay information about our environment in our visual field -- it doesn't replace reality like a VR system is supposed to, it just augments it. Augmenting reality *is* trivial, and the solutions are easily within the domain of current and near-term forseeable engineering technology. Functional VR, otoh, means directly interfacing with the proprioception/kinesthesia network in human neural anatomy that tells the brain what the body is doing in relation to other objects in the mental model of the environment. Modeling those other objects is trivial, as most VR researchers, including Carmack, will assert, but VR researchers are going to also have to figure out how to intercept, decode, modulate and retransmit the electrical impulses traversing the PK network that represent your body's position relative to those objects, which is decidedly non-trivial, especially while suppressing the original signals telling your brain that you are actually motionless, and even more especially doing it in a reversible way. These solutions, IMHO, require way more knowledge of human neural anatomy than we presently have, and will require the invention of new bio-engineering technologies to exploit it once we have that knowledge. AR has a distinct market advantage right now, so I'm certain Carmack and other VR researchers will turn their ingenuity to AR and away from VR, once they realize this.
The RIAA can fuck off.
A search engine is supposed to search and display what it finds. I'll be the one to do the filtering
You are half right. (100% right about the RIAA, btw, but only half right about search engines.) A search engine is a content delivery service, period. It is supposed to generate profit by delivering search results, the same way Netflix/Unbox/Hulu generates profit by delivering movies and TV shows. The minute you let your customers control their end of the delivery pipeline is the minute you've lost control of your business model and can start kissing your profits good-bye. Google makes money by selling advertising content mixed in with those search results -- if Google allowed you to arbitrarily filter those search results, companies would stop paying Google to insert their ads into your search result stream. End-to-end control of the delivery pipeline is absolutely necessary in this business model. The entertainment industry learned this the hard way, when their customers discovered they could get the same content via the simple expedient of finding somebody (hello, Google!) who had a copy of the content they wanted. This is the single most important lesson to be learned about content delivery via the net. Information may want to be free, but in order to make a profit on it, you have to constrain it by making it available only to those people who can pay for it, and you can only do that by making certain that your customers can't go elsewhere for it, which is what the entertainment industry epically failed to do (an error that it is fighting desperately, via the loathsome RIAA and MPAA, to correct.) If Google loses control of their delivery pipeline, which is what you are advocating, then their business model is doomed.
I am so tired of the 'Mankind's existence is valueless' bravado. We are a billion to one galactic coincidence that has risen to sentient thought and self-awareness. This astronomical concurrence alone is worthy of continuance. If we finally evolve beyond primal tribal and religious bickering, we can get on with off planet settlements... and we have still a cushion of ten billion years to settle other galaxies.
...and I'm so tired of theistic arguments from otherwise apparently rational people. Self-awareness certainly makes it possible to assign some specific destination or goal for the system. But self-awareness doesn't confer any magical status to the system, selecting out a specific goal or destination for it simply because it is self-aware.
Seriously -- self-awareness is within reach of any species capable of modeling its environment and then inserting a representation of itself into the model. Is a cat self-aware? Certainly. A horse? Absolutely. There is nothing noteworthy or astonishing about the existence of self-aware systems, so there is nothing astonishing or special about our species. A recursive function call is self-aware, for crying out loud. Well, it's self-aware 'til the stack overflows, anyway. :)
By assigning some kind of magical status to self-awareness, your otherwise reasonable plea for a species-level sanity becomes a religious argument, indistinguishable from the "religious bickering" you are directing yourself to "evolve beyond." I think you are capable of appreciating just how ironic this is. What if your self-aware goal results in the extinction of your species? So much for the magical status you assigned to self-awareness, eh?
Well, apparently, they don't go *up* very well, anyway...
p>People should be 100% entitled to keep the data/media they pay for. This should be required by law. They should be able to save it and hand it down to their kids or donate it to a library or a museum. Our culture and human history is being erased in the future so that people at present can theoretically make a few extra dollars.
There is nothing "theoretical" about it. Profits are maximized when a company successfully engages in rent-seeking behavior, something that Adam Smith himself acknowledged, but then deplored in almost the same breath, using almost the same terms you do. (Dude is seriously conflicted on this point, and it weakens much of his case for capitalism.) Capitalism is all about squeezing out those few extra dollars of profit, and you make more of those profit dollars when you just rent out or lease the property you own, over and over again. If you were to sell it, (ie, transfer ownership to the buyer) your buyer becomes a potential competitor (via resale of the product you created) and you have to go to the expense of finding a way to compete with your own product, one that you spent good money to create. You don't have to be a business guru to see how that is a fail business model. Denying resale to protect your business model and preserve your profits is a rational choice, *especially* if making copies of your product is trivial, which is the case with software-based products, like video games.
Accordig to Phil, the objects observed in the US simultaneously with the Russian meteor can be explained by the Russian meteor being a bolide.
Is it so far fetched to imagine that there isn't a conspiracy, and his bias is just part of who he is? Humans are irrational. They form opinions and become entrenched in them. Millions of people are pretty biased in interpreting politics, not because they are part of some mass conspiracy, they are just stubborn and close minded.
You are correct, to a point. But a little knife work with Occam's Razor leaves your hypothesis bleeding on the floor. Broder's agenda was in the driver's seat; his entrenched opinions were just along for the ride.
What they are really afraid of is the fact that once cars become self-driving, no one will need to own one anymore.
Technology is actually upended the business model of the entire autoindustry. They might innovate themselves right out of business.
I mean seriously who cares about cloudplayer in a self-driving car? If it can drive itself I'll just leave my earbuds in.
The most common vehicle in 10 years will be the autonomous Dodge caravan, taxiing us all around. Rich people will have maybe their own auto-Bently's or something, but the rest of us will just share a car.
...like me, they'll own motorcycles, probably. Riding a bike (full disclosure: I love my Ducati 1098) is about as close to flying as you can get in two dimensions. The subset of the population that enjoys driving cars and riding bikes for the sheer exhilaration of it (vanishingly small, to be sure, but extant nonetheless) are immune to the marketing gimmicks you are basing your argument on. I have a BT-enabled comm system in my helmet that already lets me voice control my phone -- I can drag a knee at a buck-twenty while listening to Moby *and* send a sell order to my broker at the same time. No amount of autonomous vehicle goodness (and it is a goodness, btw) will alter that in the slightest.
Meh. You can be replaced by sufficiently advanced algorithms. I'm mathematician, FFS. There are already automated theorem provers which can solve undergrad-level problems. As computers evolve, they'll be just as good as people and loads cheaper than people at everything we do, up to and including the creation of art. If we progress to the point where all of our jobs can be done by computers... what should we do? At the point where artificial intelligence becomes genuine intelligence, it will rapidly outpace human intelligence. This is evolution. We are breeding our replacements.
Hmmm...what if there is an irreducibly non-algorithmic component to human intelligence? That would invalidate the Church-Turing thesis that your assertion seems to be relying on. Roger Penrose thinks it would at least, and he makes a pretty good argument for that position, and against the Strong AI you are hypothesizing. He also defends his argument pretty well, too..
But their success is contingent upon them being able to defend their claims of ownership, and they really haven't addressed how they are going to do that, yet. Be interesting see what their defense is.
I suggest the option of de-orbiting chunks of the object onto the headquarters of those who threaten their claim would be part of their defense.
Yep -- seems like a viable option. Throw rocks at 'em -- wonder if anybody in the brain trust of our myriad national security apparatuses has read Heinlein, lately?
Good point. As someone once observed, you don't own a piece of terrain until a 19-year old with a gun stands there and says you own it.
Lol -- that would have been RAH, I believe. :)
COBOL was the very first language I learned when I was a fourteen-year-old freshman in high school, way back during the Carter administration. I found out decades later that my great aunt, Grace Hopper (of "There's a bug in the system" fame,) helped develop it and it's successor, SNOBOL. It was used as the pedagogical platform in my school district for teaching data processing principles, which are (sadly) orthogonal to programming principles. I still have my Shelly & Cashman ANSI COBOL -- Introduction to Computer Programming text, which used examples from payroll processing and accounting report generation, the dominant paradigms of the mainframe world, to convey programming concepts like looping and conditionals. Ironically, it's sitting on my reference shelf right next to K&R. The book even came with a plastic flowchart symbol template, conveniently printed with a scale along the edge for measuring the physical width of an output column on your fanfold paper to help you determine your PICTURE clauses, and a list of the ASCII control codes for chain printers. Recursion was impossible in COBOL (the compiler tossed an error if a CALL referenced itself) and the idea of a UI was equally a non-starter, with dynamic input functionality at the INPUT $VAR level of BASIC. In retrospect, it was an amazingly poor way to introduce programming principles, and I'm not surprised that FORTRAN, then BASIC, and ultimately Java, took over from it. Still, I can claim (in my best Gerard Butler THIS-IS-SPARTA! voice) that I-PROGRAMMED-COBOL-ON-PUNCHCARDS! :)
The idea just struck me. If aliens didn't possess cloaking technology.. An asteroid such as this would make great cover to closely observe a species advanced enough to detect planets around other stars. You could even deploy small probes the size of a softball to fall to earth or into orbit.
heh, this idea already struck somebody -- David Brin. Check out his latest novel, Existence.
Whoever can land on it. Possession being 9/10s of the law and all that.
Heh -- you are almost right. It's the person who can defend a claim that owns it, not the first person to make the claim. I sincerely hope Deep Space Industries does live up to their potential by profiting from asteroid mining. But their success is contingent upon them being able to defend their claims of ownership, and they really haven't addressed how they are going to do that, yet. Be interesting see what their defense is. Claim-jumping is just as real a threat now as it was in California in 1849. Who will Deep Space Industries appeal to when a rival lands on their rock and reprograms all their mining bots -- Starfleet, perhaps? (I kid, I kid, but I think you see my point.)