How hard is it to not leave a hard-coded Administrator password in something as a backdoor? Also if you're so goddamned smart then why are you posting as an AC? Is it because you're actually an idiot who should have kept his mouth shut?
Fix your shit or be run out of business. I think I speak for the majority when I say we're all sick and bloody well tired of having every gods-be-damned thing on the planet hacked by whoever because the firmware/software is written poorly.
If I was running a restaurant or business and this called on the phone, I'd ask to speak to a live human being, and if that's not possible I'd hang up. I'd instruct my employees to do the same: it's either a live human being making the appointment or reservation or you hang up on it. Could be a prank, could be a malfunction, could be a mistake, could be someone hacked someone's digital assistant, could be any number of things. Therefore you need verification from the actual person who wants the appointment or reservation, no exceptions; may as well not use it at all and just make the call yourself. After all, it really could be someone pranking or hacking you by activating your 'digital assistant' with commands in the ultrasound range, and that could come from many different sources.
As others have pointed out, many new homes already are built with solar power generation, so that part of this isn't such a great leap.
However there's going to be some unintended consequences, very similar in nature to the rise of hybrid and plug-in electric vehicles.
What's going to happen, is rates from grid electricity providers will go up. The reason for this has actually already been discussed: the cost of maintaining the electric grid remains the same (or increases) while revenues from selling electricity goes down because homes will be generating some of their own (or in some cases, all) power -- and even selling the excess back to to the electric company. In fact I wouldn't at all be surprised if electric companies stop buying the excess back from homeowners, or at least reduce the rate per kWh they pay for it, in response to the 'glut' of electricity. Of course the response from some homeowners to that will be to buy a battery bank like Musk/SolarCity are selling -- which might just make electric companies charge even more. There might even be court battles over this, and 'protectionism' lobbying to try to block this or at least make it less cost-saving for homeowners, so the electric companies don't lose so much money.
How this parallels hybrid and electric vehicles, is this: substitute 'highway infrastructure maintenance' for 'the electric grid', and 'State gas tax revenues' for 'cost per kWh'. Less fuel used has meant less tax revenues which has meant less money in the State funds to maintain and repair highways. So they raise the gas tax to compensate.
Just like hybrid and electric vehicles, though, the addition of renewables has to happen and has been happening, and is overall a good thing, but there's going to be some hurdles to overcome and some growing pains during the transition. In the end though I think everyone will be better off. I can't see decentralization of at least a fair percentage of electric power generation as being a bad thing in the long run.
Philosophically speaking I don't disagree with you, if for no other reason than it's not unheard-of for a capital crime conviction to not be legitimate (either by accident or by design) therefore people have been executed who did not deserve it, but until we have a way of rehabilitating criminals that otherwise would be eligible for the death penalty, the alternatives aren't that great either. Incarcerating someone for life without possibility for parole is expensive and also kind of pointless, since it doesn't really seem to be much of a deterrent to the sorts of crimes one has to commit to be eligible for that sort of sentencing. Even if we developed the technology to 'rewire' or 'reprogram' someone's brain so they're not a criminal of that caliber anymore, that technology would have such a huge potential for abuse (if you can 'reprogram' a criminal, you can 'reprogram' anyone) that I'd prefer we never developed it in the first place.
o Jam drone signals, make them land
o Scoop them up, into the Faraday cage they go
o Transport them to my seekrit lab
o Drone chop-shop!
o ???
o Profit!
If I were running a restaurant or business and I got an 'automated' call from something like this, I'd hang up on it. If it called back I might try demanding to speak to an actual human being, but if that didn't work then I'd just keep hanging up on it. Why, you ask? Because I'd have no way of knowing for sure that the call was legitimate, not some sort of prank, and not the result of some malfunction, unintended activation, or someone hacking someone else's hardware. I'd insist on verification by an actual human being, and I don't think I'm alone on that, regardless of anything Google might have to say about their 'test calls'.
China can either become more like the West, or they can be overrun by their own citizens -- or, I suppose, go the al-Assad route and start slaughtering them wholesale for daring to want a different way of life. People don't want to live like this, no matter how much you try to indoctrinate them that it's 'normal' and 'right'.
Apparently you're still laboring under the incorrect assumption that the world is fair and people play fair, especially The Rich.
Buy up the technology Make everyone who understands it sign NDAs Patent/copyright the technology Refuse to license it to anyone for any price Sue the living daylights out of anyone who independently discovers the process/formula/protocol/whatever you want to call it Have less-than-credible-sounding people post on the Internet about it in such a way that you convince people it was never real, was always a hoax Fund 'research' that shows that it's a hoax, was never possible, was about as legit as all the 'cold fusion' claims of the last decade or so After a while nobody believes it was ever real, everyone stops talking about it Secret is now safe, only The Rich have access to it
That's roughly how it would work, and don't think for a minute that similar things haven't been done before. Corporations do hostile take-overs and buy-outs all the time and then bury whatever it is.
Oh okay, sure. Let's just cut to the chase and bomb them back into the Stone Age starting tomorrow, in fact let's be totally ironic about it and just toss a few ICMB fusion bombs at them and reprint all the maps to call Iran "Smoking Hole In The Ground" insfead. Great plan. Who need subtlety?
Yeah yeah yeah I know I know you're preaching to the choir on that one.
In another thread some jackass is crying about how stupid 'superhero' movies are and how they're dumbing down everyone. Fact of the matter is people need their heroes and we don't have any to speak of right now so they turn to movies. Same goes for the opioid crisis: the world sucks, it hurts to live for some, so they turn to whatever they can to make the pain stop -- even if it's killing them when they use it to escape.
Listen: I saw the Iran deal as 'giving them enough rope to hang themselves'; if they played it straight, then great, everyone wins, no more Iran nuclear threat to worry about. If however they decided to be sneaky, they'd get caught, then everyone involved could say "Oh well we tried, but you screwed up!" and then everyone could pile on Iran with a clear conscience and nobody could say a damned thing about it. Trump has ruined that now by being ham-fisted and completely lacking in any finesse or subtlety, like a bul in a china shop. Iran may well be pissed off enough now to step up their activities on all fronts, including developing nuclear weapons, but also funding/supporting terrorism and cyberattacks. Russia/Putin might even support them clandestinely, in the interests of fomenting more and more chaos in the world, which just seems to be beneficial to Putin and his ambitions for Russia. What's worse is I'm seriously not putting it past Trump to want to be a 'wartime President' because I think he thinks it'd make him 'legendary' or somesuch shit. Never mind what that does to the U.S. and the rest of the world, so long as his ego is satisfied.
Yeah sure because we're at the penultimate height of our technological development and won't be able to develop newer and better sensing and signal processing capabilities. Oh well okay we'll just sit here in our own shit until we run out of resources and die out, IT'S FINE, REALLY, no need to look elsewhere! Don't be stupid.
Unless some advanced (more than us) alien civilization either has faster-than-light ships, or is willing to commit hundreds of thousands of individuals on thousands of ships to invading the Earth, I don't think you need to worry too much about the latter of your two scenarios. The best outcome so far as I'm concerned is if we made contact with an alien civilization, even if it took decades for the signals to travel the distance. That in and of itself would be a game-changer for our species.
That's not an easy subject to study.
It could bring our entire species together, realizing we're not All There Is Out There, and we'd stop acting like idiots.
On the other hand it could start the War To End All Wars, and we'd snuff ourselves out.
Any way you look at it there would likely be massive socio-political upheavals over it -- as well as plenty of deniers, refusing to believe 'scientists' and their 'lies', especially I imagine religious types.
Hell, some people, if presented with an actual living breathing alien would stand there and say it's all fake.
Uncertainty aside I'd love to live long enough to find out we're not alone in the Universe.
Compared to all the other hideously expensive bullshit the government spends money on annually, SETI is a drop in the bucket and so worth it for what it could tell us. The only reasons Congresscritters don't like funding it is because uninformed and unimaginative taxpayers don't like it.
Now, the real question is: Why all of the sudden would they want to fund it? Even though the language is extremely vague, if they suddenly want to fund it again they must have an ulterior motive (being politicians and all).
If you looked at the Sol system from the Alpha Centauri system, and managed to pinpoint Earth, what would you see? Not a whole hell of a lot; you likely would not know whether there was any life on it at all, let alone sentient life with a technological 'civilization' (such as it is). On the other hand if you point a very sensitive radio telescope at us from that distance, and your signal processing is well advanced, you might very well pick up the remnants of our various wavelengths of radio communications.
That's why SETI is not a complete waste of time.
Furthermore: compared to all the stupid pointless bullshit that has literally orders of magnitude spent on it annually? SETI is a bargain.
If you're going to dump on SETI, then you have to dump all over all the hideously expensive space telescope programs going all the way back to Hubble.
Bullshit. He was advised by other signatories to NOT to back out of it, and by the way how does it make the U.S. look to the rest of the world when we can't be bothered AS A COUNTRY to stand by our agreements regardless of having a narcissist with Tourette's in the Whitehouse? All he's doing is peeing all over everything he can so it stinks like he does so he can satisfy his ego and 'make his mark on history', which by the way will be as the WORST POTUS in our history -- assuming there's even a country left when he's finally run out of Washington on a rail.
Slashdot Mirror
How hard is it to not leave a hard-coded Administrator password in something as a backdoor? Also if you're so goddamned smart then why are you posting as an AC? Is it because you're actually an idiot who should have kept his mouth shut?
Fix your shit or be run out of business. I think I speak for the majority when I say we're all sick and bloody well tired of having every gods-be-damned thing on the planet hacked by whoever because the firmware/software is written poorly.
If I was running a restaurant or business and this called on the phone, I'd ask to speak to a live human being, and if that's not possible I'd hang up. I'd instruct my employees to do the same: it's either a live human being making the appointment or reservation or you hang up on it. Could be a prank, could be a malfunction, could be a mistake, could be someone hacked someone's digital assistant, could be any number of things. Therefore you need verification from the actual person who wants the appointment or reservation, no exceptions; may as well not use it at all and just make the call yourself. After all, it really could be someone pranking or hacking you by activating your 'digital assistant' with commands in the ultrasound range, and that could come from many different sources.
Hybrids, electrics, and high-efficiency ICE vehicles have all been cited in the past as contributing to lower tax revenues for highway maintenance.
This isn't about religion and I'm not bringing religion into it, so don't even go there.
As others have pointed out, many new homes already are built with solar power generation, so that part of this isn't such a great leap.
However there's going to be some unintended consequences, very similar in nature to the rise of hybrid and plug-in electric vehicles.
What's going to happen, is rates from grid electricity providers will go up. The reason for this has actually already been discussed: the cost of maintaining the electric grid remains the same (or increases) while revenues from selling electricity goes down because homes will be generating some of their own (or in some cases, all) power -- and even selling the excess back to to the electric company. In fact I wouldn't at all be surprised if electric companies stop buying the excess back from homeowners, or at least reduce the rate per kWh they pay for it, in response to the 'glut' of electricity. Of course the response from some homeowners to that will be to buy a battery bank like Musk/SolarCity are selling -- which might just make electric companies charge even more. There might even be court battles over this, and 'protectionism' lobbying to try to block this or at least make it less cost-saving for homeowners, so the electric companies don't lose so much money.
How this parallels hybrid and electric vehicles, is this: substitute 'highway infrastructure maintenance' for 'the electric grid', and 'State gas tax revenues' for 'cost per kWh'. Less fuel used has meant less tax revenues which has meant less money in the State funds to maintain and repair highways. So they raise the gas tax to compensate.
Just like hybrid and electric vehicles, though, the addition of renewables has to happen and has been happening, and is overall a good thing, but there's going to be some hurdles to overcome and some growing pains during the transition. In the end though I think everyone will be better off. I can't see decentralization of at least a fair percentage of electric power generation as being a bad thing in the long run.
Philosophically speaking I don't disagree with you, if for no other reason than it's not unheard-of for a capital crime conviction to not be legitimate (either by accident or by design) therefore people have been executed who did not deserve it, but until we have a way of rehabilitating criminals that otherwise would be eligible for the death penalty, the alternatives aren't that great either. Incarcerating someone for life without possibility for parole is expensive and also kind of pointless, since it doesn't really seem to be much of a deterrent to the sorts of crimes one has to commit to be eligible for that sort of sentencing. Even if we developed the technology to 'rewire' or 'reprogram' someone's brain so they're not a criminal of that caliber anymore, that technology would have such a huge potential for abuse (if you can 'reprogram' a criminal, you can 'reprogram' anyone) that I'd prefer we never developed it in the first place.
o Jam drone signals, make them land
o Scoop them up, into the Faraday cage they go
o Transport them to my seekrit lab
o Drone chop-shop!
o ???
o Profit!
Oh look, PRNK has done a complete about-face!
TOTALLY LEGIT
Yeah, sure...
If I were running a restaurant or business and I got an 'automated' call from something like this, I'd hang up on it. If it called back I might try demanding to speak to an actual human being, but if that didn't work then I'd just keep hanging up on it. Why, you ask? Because I'd have no way of knowing for sure that the call was legitimate, not some sort of prank, and not the result of some malfunction, unintended activation, or someone hacking someone else's hardware. I'd insist on verification by an actual human being, and I don't think I'm alone on that, regardless of anything Google might have to say about their 'test calls'.
China can either become more like the West, or they can be overrun by their own citizens -- or, I suppose, go the al-Assad route and start slaughtering them wholesale for daring to want a different way of life. People don't want to live like this, no matter how much you try to indoctrinate them that it's 'normal' and 'right'.
Buy up the technology
Make everyone who understands it sign NDAs
Patent/copyright the technology
Refuse to license it to anyone for any price
Sue the living daylights out of anyone who independently discovers the process/formula/protocol/whatever you want to call it
Have less-than-credible-sounding people post on the Internet about it in such a way that you convince people it was never real, was always a hoax
Fund 'research' that shows that it's a hoax, was never possible, was about as legit as all the 'cold fusion' claims of the last decade or so
After a while nobody believes it was ever real, everyone stops talking about it
Secret is now safe, only The Rich have access to it
That's roughly how it would work, and don't think for a minute that similar things haven't been done before. Corporations do hostile take-overs and buy-outs all the time and then bury whatever it is.
Oh okay, sure. Let's just cut to the chase and bomb them back into the Stone Age starting tomorrow, in fact let's be totally ironic about it and just toss a few ICMB fusion bombs at them and reprint all the maps to call Iran "Smoking Hole In The Ground" insfead. Great plan. Who need subtlety?
Yeah yeah yeah I know I know you're preaching to the choir on that one.
In another thread some jackass is crying about how stupid 'superhero' movies are and how they're dumbing down everyone. Fact of the matter is people need their heroes and we don't have any to speak of right now so they turn to movies. Same goes for the opioid crisis: the world sucks, it hurts to live for some, so they turn to whatever they can to make the pain stop -- even if it's killing them when they use it to escape.
If I and others won't accept it then they won't be around long.
Oh FFS.. we can do ALL THE ABOVE SIMULTANEOUSLY. SETI budget is a drop in the bucket compared to so many other things! JUST FUND IT FFS.
Listen: I saw the Iran deal as 'giving them enough rope to hang themselves'; if they played it straight, then great, everyone wins, no more Iran nuclear threat to worry about. If however they decided to be sneaky, they'd get caught, then everyone involved could say "Oh well we tried, but you screwed up!" and then everyone could pile on Iran with a clear conscience and nobody could say a damned thing about it. Trump has ruined that now by being ham-fisted and completely lacking in any finesse or subtlety, like a bul in a china shop. Iran may well be pissed off enough now to step up their activities on all fronts, including developing nuclear weapons, but also funding/supporting terrorism and cyberattacks. Russia/Putin might even support them clandestinely, in the interests of fomenting more and more chaos in the world, which just seems to be beneficial to Putin and his ambitions for Russia. What's worse is I'm seriously not putting it past Trump to want to be a 'wartime President' because I think he thinks it'd make him 'legendary' or somesuch shit. Never mind what that does to the U.S. and the rest of the world, so long as his ego is satisfied.
Yeah sure because we're at the penultimate height of our technological development and won't be able to develop newer and better sensing and signal processing capabilities. Oh well okay we'll just sit here in our own shit until we run out of resources and die out, IT'S FINE, REALLY, no need to look elsewhere! Don't be stupid.
Unless some advanced (more than us) alien civilization either has faster-than-light ships, or is willing to commit hundreds of thousands of individuals on thousands of ships to invading the Earth, I don't think you need to worry too much about the latter of your two scenarios. The best outcome so far as I'm concerned is if we made contact with an alien civilization, even if it took decades for the signals to travel the distance. That in and of itself would be a game-changer for our species.
That's not an easy subject to study.
It could bring our entire species together, realizing we're not All There Is Out There, and we'd stop acting like idiots.
On the other hand it could start the War To End All Wars, and we'd snuff ourselves out.
Any way you look at it there would likely be massive socio-political upheavals over it -- as well as plenty of deniers, refusing to believe 'scientists' and their 'lies', especially I imagine religious types.
Hell, some people, if presented with an actual living breathing alien would stand there and say it's all fake.
Uncertainty aside I'd love to live long enough to find out we're not alone in the Universe.
Compared to all the other hideously expensive bullshit the government spends money on annually, SETI is a drop in the bucket and so worth it for what it could tell us. The only reasons Congresscritters don't like funding it is because uninformed and unimaginative taxpayers don't like it.
Now, the real question is: Why all of the sudden would they want to fund it? Even though the language is extremely vague, if they suddenly want to fund it again they must have an ulterior motive (being politicians and all).
If you looked at the Sol system from the Alpha Centauri system, and managed to pinpoint Earth, what would you see? Not a whole hell of a lot; you likely would not know whether there was any life on it at all, let alone sentient life with a technological 'civilization' (such as it is). On the other hand if you point a very sensitive radio telescope at us from that distance, and your signal processing is well advanced, you might very well pick up the remnants of our various wavelengths of radio communications.
That's why SETI is not a complete waste of time.
Furthermore: compared to all the stupid pointless bullshit that has literally orders of magnitude spent on it annually? SETI is a bargain.
If you're going to dump on SETI, then you have to dump all over all the hideously expensive space telescope programs going all the way back to Hubble.
Maybe they're trying to find the planet Trump is originally from and beg them to take him back home and keep him there. xD
Bullshit. He was advised by other signatories to NOT to back out of it, and by the way how does it make the U.S. look to the rest of the world when we can't be bothered AS A COUNTRY to stand by our agreements regardless of having a narcissist with Tourette's in the Whitehouse? All he's doing is peeing all over everything he can so it stinks like he does so he can satisfy his ego and 'make his mark on history', which by the way will be as the WORST POTUS in our history -- assuming there's even a country left when he's finally run out of Washington on a rail.
Am I the only one who feels like a certain orange-haired jackass with Tourette's Syndrome is trying to gear us up for open war against Iran?