Well, you'd need to have more people run out than the number in the car. But, you raise a good point. Still, isn't suicide illegal? Do you really want the car aiding and abetting?:)
The example was not a great one. How about driving into a wall vs driving into a group of pedestrians? Or cook up whatever scenario you want in which the life of the driver is pitted against the lives of a bunch of others. And be sure to read the wikipedia article on the Trolley Problem before doing so.
So, should we have the cars have electronic signs so that you can stay away from people who enabled the option to run people over if it will get them to work faster?
Well, the solution to liability is legal - grant immunity as long as the car performs above some safety standard on the whole, and that standard can be raised as the industry progresses. There is no reason that somebody should be punished for making a car 10X safer than any car on the road today.
As far as programming morality - I think that will be the easy part. The real issue is defining it in the first place. Once you define it, getting a computer to behave morally is likely to be far EASIER than getting a human to do so, since a computer need not have self-interest in the decision making. You'd be hard pressed to find people who would swerve off a bridge to avoid a crowd of pedestrians, but a computer would make that decision without breaking a sweat if that were how it were designed. Computers commit suicide every day - how many smart bombs does the US drop in a year?
But I agree, the current legal structure will be a real impediment. It will take leadership from the legislature to fix that.
Well, if the ordnance pertains to fuel tanks specifically, why not put waterproof tanks in the basement, and run sealed lines (including venting) up from there, locating the pumps somewhat higher. Obviously you're limited as to how much higher the pumps can be, but you can draw fuel a fair bit upwards on vacuum (maybe 20 feet?). If you're allowed to send pressurized air down the vent you could put the pumps up higher - I'm not sure what the laws are around that. If there are concerns with pressurized air mixing with fuel, another option might be a tank with a rubber bladder inside where the space between can be pressurized with either air or fluid - that's how they do it in liquid fueled rockets. As long as the tank and lines are waterproof you could keep it in the basement and operate indefinitely - but you'd need to work out all the details (like refueling - if the tank has to operate under pressure then you need to have pressure on the fueling lines as well, and suitable couplings and all that, unless you have more than one tank and can operate on one while fueling another).
All of that entails certain hazards - you'd want well-trained personnel to operate it - you're starting to resemble operations on a jet or spacecraft...
No, you're just a victim of the fact that the jurisdictions of federal agencies make no sense whatsoever. Just the name of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms exemplifies this problem.
You'd need special equipment to solder something like a CPU, especially if they start reducing the package size since only robots will be doing the work anyway (not sure what the relative constraints of soldered vs pin connections are).
I usually stick with mid end all the way, and just upgrade MB+CPU more often. I rarely spend more than $200 or so on both. Take whatever your budget is per year and spend it $200 at a time, and you'll have a better computer more of the time than if you save up and spend it in larger increments less often.
You mention mythtv. My mythtv box has two PCI video capture cards in it. So, getting a motherboard with two PCI slots would be a bare minimum (don't take that for granted these days). Oh, and I have RAID for storage, so it better have a few SATA ports.
The tech sites haven't been doing benchmarks on motherboards like they used to, but I'm sure that there is still variation. The last time I saw a good head-to-head review you could have performance varying by 10-20% with your motherboard. People will spend an extra $200 on a CPU to get 10% more performance, and you might get the same by spending $20 more on your motherboard.
Oh, how much RAM do you want to support? Do you want on-board video?
There are a million reasons to spend a little time picking out a motherboard. If you don't care, then get something cheap from a reputable brand (if you don't want dead capacitors in a few years). That is, assuming that there is a cheap motherboard welded to your CPU of choice in Intel's future.
Sure it can matter in a fileserver. How many SATA/SCSI ports does it have. Does it support hot-swap? If you're just sticking one drive in a box for NAS it isn't a big deal, but somebody with a fileserver could certainly want certain features in their motherboard.
This is what everybody seems to be missing. You're giving up options when you start bundling and don't allow mix/match.
Suppose I'm building a cluster, and I just need REALLY fast CPUs with good memory/LAN benchmarks, and I could care less whether it even has a PCIe slot in it at all. However, all the fast CPUs get bundled with expensive motherboard with 14 slots, 6 SATA ports, and so on. Or, suppose I'm building a data acquisition box that needs 6 PCI slots but not much CPU - again I'm stuck buying the i7 or whatever since that got classed as a high-end board.
That is what frustrates me about things like cell phones - I can't pick the CPU/RAM/flash combo I want, but only what some marketer decided I should have. So, getting the extra 1GB of RAM isn't an option - at most you might get some choice with flash.
Yes, but what if the motherboard you want only comes sold with a CPU you don't want, or vice-versa? This bundling will in practice reduce choice, as I doubt every combination will be offered.
While I have never upgraded one without upgrading the other, I do make a decision on which CPU/motherboard I buy.
What if I want a 4-core system, but the motherboard I want is only sold with more expensive 6-core CPUs? Or, vice-versa? Motherboard manufacturers are already selling to a bit of a niche market - will having to further reduce their selection by only pairing certain CPUs with certain motherboards push them over the edge into unprofitability?
Yup, use taxes are unconsitutional and regressive besides. They've also been upheld by the supreme court, so you can be punished if anybody bothers to catch you not paying them, though most likely you'd be sent a bill penalty-free since the folks in charge don't want to be tarred and feathered.
And yes, I'm using a definition of unconstitutional that is not equal to the state of being ruled as unconstitutional by the supreme court. And yes, I realize that the state can punish you even if the supreme court didn't support it, though in that case the punishment is limited to doing whatever they want to you until you manage to get in your appeals and bankrupt yourself in the process.
I've noticed the same thing, though not all items on Amazon qualify for free return shipping (as far as I'm aware - unless this is a Prime thing).
Newegg is much better for product locating - they do a WAY better job with their keywords and search, though not a perfect job. If I want 7200 RPM SATA 3 1TB drives I can get an accurate list from Newegg in a few clicks, and with Amazon if I'm not lucky I'll end up going through 14 pages of cables unless I do a price filter.
Now, Newegg could stand to do better with their motherboards - that is the one product category where it is really painful to find things by desired feature set. If I want 2 PCI slots, a PCIEx1 slot, and a PCIEx16 slot I end up having to go into power search and check about 30 bazillion permutations of the above. Their job isn't made easier by the huge diversity of products, of course. I'm happy they at least try - Amazon usually is limited to keyword searching only.
Uh, if you're using an electric space heater, sure. If you're using something better than one of the most expensive forms of heating, not so much.
It might be the case that the offset from the value of the bitcoins does make it a net profit, but I tend to think this won't be the case. A big part of modern mining costs are in the hardware. You either use general-purpose hardware which has other use but which depreciates fast in value, or you use much more cost-effective dedicated hardware that has no other use.
If you happen to be building a large-scale flight simulator in your basement and mining bitcoins helps keep it warm in the winter and pay for the 4 PCs and 8 video cards then it makes sense. If you just have a typical $400 PC it is much less likely to be cost-effective.
I actually was thinking about that when I wrote my comment. However, that war did not involve direct attacks on civilian populations, at least not by the US on Britain. The US didn't really obtain the ability to attack British cities until WWII, and obviously has never used it.
I think there are many reasons - some of which have already been offered up.
Sure, many Jews live in the US. Sure, the US has a ton of evangelicals, and a fair portion of those have a sense of manifest destiny where Israel is concerned.
However, I think where many mainstream US voters come in is that you basically have a Westernized country in the middle of Arab territory that is constantly being beset by terrorist bombings and all that. People look at a bunch of refugees living in camps and making bombs, and a bunch of people living in apartments and shopping in malls and serving in the military, and they can identify with the latter FAR more.
When Hamas launches rockets, they aim them at cities, not at military installations. Granted, where rockets are concerned the former are far easier to hit. However, before the wall went up there were suicide bombing attacks in Israel all the time. The targets of these attacks were almost always civilian in nature. It was pretty rare to see them going after army checkpoints or whatever.
I think the average person looks at an organization like Hamas as one that goes after civilians any time it gets the chance. That gets them almost zero sympathy in the world's eyes.
The Israeli military operates in a manner similar to the US military. Obviously that is going to get them a lot of US sympathy, since nobody thinks that their cousin who is in the US military is doing anything wrong. Their weapons are far more powerful, which means that in the end they kill a lot more civilians. However, the fact that they aim at military targets is about all the justification needed.
I'm not saying Israel has all the answers. I am saying that nobody should be surprised that they get pretty solid US backing, and to a lesser extent European backing in general.
It is telling that even the Egyptians have been blockading the border with Gaza. Most of the arms are smuggled in my ship or by tunnels under the Egyptian border. It isn't just Israel which thinks that things have been getting out of hand.
I remember back when people were complaining endlessly about the wall Israel was building and how it wouldn't work anyway. Well, until they started launching rockets it was actually working fairly well, and the rockets are killing far fewer people than suicide bombers sneaking into crowds were.
The problem isn't unique to Palestine. I think a big part of the problem is that when people look to establish governments they tend to pick the same people who were the cell leaders of the resistance movements and all that. The issue is that people who are good at killing the enemy aren't always the best people to lead a lasting peace. It worked OK when people were throwing off European Imperialism because everybody involved was separated from mainland Europe by an ocean or two. It doesn't work as well when the people you hate are within easy reach. By the time countries like the USA had the power to really hurt countries like Great Britain, generations had passed and the wounds had healed.
So, you propose solving the problem of presumption of racial incompetence by instituting a system that requires you to hire people of a certain race without regard to competence?
If I were trying to socially engineer a society which thinks that people named Cletus were poor athletes I'd start by requiring every professional team to have at least 10 people named Cletus on it.
I'm all for ensuring that anybody with ability is given the opportunity to utilize it. What I'm not for is basing the availability of that assistance on race.
You're comparing 3G EVDO on Verizon (which was barely 3G) to LTE. The Nexus 4 supports 4G HSPA+ which is WAY faster than Verizon's 3G service (as is HSPA, which my 2 year old android phone has). LTE is a bit faster than HSPA+, but not by much.
LTE is important on Verizon as it is the only 4G service they offer, and their 3G service was fairly slow. This is due to the fact that Verizon rolled out EVDO ages ago, when it was new.
So, yes, if you're on Verizon not having LTE is a non-starter, but the Nexus 4 won't run on Verizon anyway - it is GSM only. On ATT HSPA(+) isn't quite as fast as on T-Mobile so LTE is helpful there. On T-Mobile there isn't LTE, but their HSPA+ service is about as fast as LTE is on the other networks.
Bottom line, in practice the lack of LTE doesn't matter much, any more than Verizon phones lacking HSPA+ matters.
Yup. Also, I've found that it is much easier to hit reply-all and then trim the list down, than to just hit reply and try to think of everybody who really should be copied.
Emails can be annoying, but what's the alternative? Walk down the hall? Uh, good luck with that - I can't remember the last time I was on a project where more than about two people on the team were even in the same building. Schedule a meeting? Good luck - everybody is booked through to next Friday in meetings. Pick up the phone? Good luck - they're not going to answer because they're all in those meetings that I just mentioned.
Email and IM work. The former is asynchronous, and the latter can be discretely used while in meetings.
It is photoshopped, well, of a sort. Apparently "satellite" view in Google Maps has black anywhere that isn't photographed, which includes most of the oceans. However, areas that are known to be ocean get photoshopped as blue on the map. So, since this spot isn't marked as ocean the blue goes away, but it isn't actually photographed, so it just shows up as black.
They don't actually use photoshop, but you get the idea...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you'd need to have more people run out than the number in the car. But, you raise a good point. Still, isn't suicide illegal? Do you really want the car aiding and abetting? :)
The example was not a great one. How about driving into a wall vs driving into a group of pedestrians? Or cook up whatever scenario you want in which the life of the driver is pitted against the lives of a bunch of others. And be sure to read the wikipedia article on the Trolley Problem before doing so.
Thanks, you made my day.
So, should we have the cars have electronic signs so that you can stay away from people who enabled the option to run people over if it will get them to work faster?
Well, the solution to liability is legal - grant immunity as long as the car performs above some safety standard on the whole, and that standard can be raised as the industry progresses. There is no reason that somebody should be punished for making a car 10X safer than any car on the road today.
As far as programming morality - I think that will be the easy part. The real issue is defining it in the first place. Once you define it, getting a computer to behave morally is likely to be far EASIER than getting a human to do so, since a computer need not have self-interest in the decision making. You'd be hard pressed to find people who would swerve off a bridge to avoid a crowd of pedestrians, but a computer would make that decision without breaking a sweat if that were how it were designed. Computers commit suicide every day - how many smart bombs does the US drop in a year?
But I agree, the current legal structure will be a real impediment. It will take leadership from the legislature to fix that.
Good ideas. I wonder if you could use a rubber bladder to store the fuel and avoid the need to vent it, and thus the buoyancy problem.
Well, if the ordnance pertains to fuel tanks specifically, why not put waterproof tanks in the basement, and run sealed lines (including venting) up from there, locating the pumps somewhat higher. Obviously you're limited as to how much higher the pumps can be, but you can draw fuel a fair bit upwards on vacuum (maybe 20 feet?). If you're allowed to send pressurized air down the vent you could put the pumps up higher - I'm not sure what the laws are around that. If there are concerns with pressurized air mixing with fuel, another option might be a tank with a rubber bladder inside where the space between can be pressurized with either air or fluid - that's how they do it in liquid fueled rockets. As long as the tank and lines are waterproof you could keep it in the basement and operate indefinitely - but you'd need to work out all the details (like refueling - if the tank has to operate under pressure then you need to have pressure on the fueling lines as well, and suitable couplings and all that, unless you have more than one tank and can operate on one while fueling another).
All of that entails certain hazards - you'd want well-trained personnel to operate it - you're starting to resemble operations on a jet or spacecraft...
No, you're just a victim of the fact that the jurisdictions of federal agencies make no sense whatsoever. Just the name of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms exemplifies this problem.
:)
You'd need special equipment to solder something like a CPU, especially if they start reducing the package size since only robots will be doing the work anyway (not sure what the relative constraints of soldered vs pin connections are).
I usually stick with mid end all the way, and just upgrade MB+CPU more often. I rarely spend more than $200 or so on both. Take whatever your budget is per year and spend it $200 at a time, and you'll have a better computer more of the time than if you save up and spend it in larger increments less often.
You mention mythtv. My mythtv box has two PCI video capture cards in it. So, getting a motherboard with two PCI slots would be a bare minimum (don't take that for granted these days). Oh, and I have RAID for storage, so it better have a few SATA ports.
The tech sites haven't been doing benchmarks on motherboards like they used to, but I'm sure that there is still variation. The last time I saw a good head-to-head review you could have performance varying by 10-20% with your motherboard. People will spend an extra $200 on a CPU to get 10% more performance, and you might get the same by spending $20 more on your motherboard.
Oh, how much RAM do you want to support? Do you want on-board video?
There are a million reasons to spend a little time picking out a motherboard. If you don't care, then get something cheap from a reputable brand (if you don't want dead capacitors in a few years). That is, assuming that there is a cheap motherboard welded to your CPU of choice in Intel's future.
Sure it can matter in a fileserver. How many SATA/SCSI ports does it have. Does it support hot-swap? If you're just sticking one drive in a box for NAS it isn't a big deal, but somebody with a fileserver could certainly want certain features in their motherboard.
This is what everybody seems to be missing. You're giving up options when you start bundling and don't allow mix/match.
Suppose I'm building a cluster, and I just need REALLY fast CPUs with good memory/LAN benchmarks, and I could care less whether it even has a PCIe slot in it at all. However, all the fast CPUs get bundled with expensive motherboard with 14 slots, 6 SATA ports, and so on. Or, suppose I'm building a data acquisition box that needs 6 PCI slots but not much CPU - again I'm stuck buying the i7 or whatever since that got classed as a high-end board.
That is what frustrates me about things like cell phones - I can't pick the CPU/RAM/flash combo I want, but only what some marketer decided I should have. So, getting the extra 1GB of RAM isn't an option - at most you might get some choice with flash.
Yes, but what if the motherboard you want only comes sold with a CPU you don't want, or vice-versa? This bundling will in practice reduce choice, as I doubt every combination will be offered.
While I have never upgraded one without upgrading the other, I do make a decision on which CPU/motherboard I buy.
What if I want a 4-core system, but the motherboard I want is only sold with more expensive 6-core CPUs? Or, vice-versa? Motherboard manufacturers are already selling to a bit of a niche market - will having to further reduce their selection by only pairing certain CPUs with certain motherboards push them over the edge into unprofitability?
Yup, use taxes are unconsitutional and regressive besides. They've also been upheld by the supreme court, so you can be punished if anybody bothers to catch you not paying them, though most likely you'd be sent a bill penalty-free since the folks in charge don't want to be tarred and feathered.
And yes, I'm using a definition of unconstitutional that is not equal to the state of being ruled as unconstitutional by the supreme court. And yes, I realize that the state can punish you even if the supreme court didn't support it, though in that case the punishment is limited to doing whatever they want to you until you manage to get in your appeals and bankrupt yourself in the process.
I've noticed the same thing, though not all items on Amazon qualify for free return shipping (as far as I'm aware - unless this is a Prime thing).
Newegg is much better for product locating - they do a WAY better job with their keywords and search, though not a perfect job. If I want 7200 RPM SATA 3 1TB drives I can get an accurate list from Newegg in a few clicks, and with Amazon if I'm not lucky I'll end up going through 14 pages of cables unless I do a price filter.
Now, Newegg could stand to do better with their motherboards - that is the one product category where it is really painful to find things by desired feature set. If I want 2 PCI slots, a PCIEx1 slot, and a PCIEx16 slot I end up having to go into power search and check about 30 bazillion permutations of the above. Their job isn't made easier by the huge diversity of products, of course. I'm happy they at least try - Amazon usually is limited to keyword searching only.
Uh, if you're using an electric space heater, sure. If you're using something better than one of the most expensive forms of heating, not so much.
It might be the case that the offset from the value of the bitcoins does make it a net profit, but I tend to think this won't be the case. A big part of modern mining costs are in the hardware. You either use general-purpose hardware which has other use but which depreciates fast in value, or you use much more cost-effective dedicated hardware that has no other use.
If you happen to be building a large-scale flight simulator in your basement and mining bitcoins helps keep it warm in the winter and pay for the 4 PCs and 8 video cards then it makes sense. If you just have a typical $400 PC it is much less likely to be cost-effective.
I actually was thinking about that when I wrote my comment. However, that war did not involve direct attacks on civilian populations, at least not by the US on Britain. The US didn't really obtain the ability to attack British cities until WWII, and obviously has never used it.
Ah, my most noteworthy comment of the year is a typo. Figures. :)
Now if only I could have those arms smuggling cases full of money all the movies portray.
I think there are many reasons - some of which have already been offered up.
Sure, many Jews live in the US. Sure, the US has a ton of evangelicals, and a fair portion of those have a sense of manifest destiny where Israel is concerned.
However, I think where many mainstream US voters come in is that you basically have a Westernized country in the middle of Arab territory that is constantly being beset by terrorist bombings and all that. People look at a bunch of refugees living in camps and making bombs, and a bunch of people living in apartments and shopping in malls and serving in the military, and they can identify with the latter FAR more.
When Hamas launches rockets, they aim them at cities, not at military installations. Granted, where rockets are concerned the former are far easier to hit. However, before the wall went up there were suicide bombing attacks in Israel all the time. The targets of these attacks were almost always civilian in nature. It was pretty rare to see them going after army checkpoints or whatever.
I think the average person looks at an organization like Hamas as one that goes after civilians any time it gets the chance. That gets them almost zero sympathy in the world's eyes.
The Israeli military operates in a manner similar to the US military. Obviously that is going to get them a lot of US sympathy, since nobody thinks that their cousin who is in the US military is doing anything wrong. Their weapons are far more powerful, which means that in the end they kill a lot more civilians. However, the fact that they aim at military targets is about all the justification needed.
I'm not saying Israel has all the answers. I am saying that nobody should be surprised that they get pretty solid US backing, and to a lesser extent European backing in general.
It is telling that even the Egyptians have been blockading the border with Gaza. Most of the arms are smuggled in my ship or by tunnels under the Egyptian border. It isn't just Israel which thinks that things have been getting out of hand.
I remember back when people were complaining endlessly about the wall Israel was building and how it wouldn't work anyway. Well, until they started launching rockets it was actually working fairly well, and the rockets are killing far fewer people than suicide bombers sneaking into crowds were.
The problem isn't unique to Palestine. I think a big part of the problem is that when people look to establish governments they tend to pick the same people who were the cell leaders of the resistance movements and all that. The issue is that people who are good at killing the enemy aren't always the best people to lead a lasting peace. It worked OK when people were throwing off European Imperialism because everybody involved was separated from mainland Europe by an ocean or two. It doesn't work as well when the people you hate are within easy reach. By the time countries like the USA had the power to really hurt countries like Great Britain, generations had passed and the wounds had healed.
So, you propose solving the problem of presumption of racial incompetence by instituting a system that requires you to hire people of a certain race without regard to competence?
If I were trying to socially engineer a society which thinks that people named Cletus were poor athletes I'd start by requiring every professional team to have at least 10 people named Cletus on it.
I'm all for ensuring that anybody with ability is given the opportunity to utilize it. What I'm not for is basing the availability of that assistance on race.
You're comparing 3G EVDO on Verizon (which was barely 3G) to LTE. The Nexus 4 supports 4G HSPA+ which is WAY faster than Verizon's 3G service (as is HSPA, which my 2 year old android phone has). LTE is a bit faster than HSPA+, but not by much.
LTE is important on Verizon as it is the only 4G service they offer, and their 3G service was fairly slow. This is due to the fact that Verizon rolled out EVDO ages ago, when it was new.
So, yes, if you're on Verizon not having LTE is a non-starter, but the Nexus 4 won't run on Verizon anyway - it is GSM only. On ATT HSPA(+) isn't quite as fast as on T-Mobile so LTE is helpful there. On T-Mobile there isn't LTE, but their HSPA+ service is about as fast as LTE is on the other networks.
Bottom line, in practice the lack of LTE doesn't matter much, any more than Verizon phones lacking HSPA+ matters.
Yup. Also, I've found that it is much easier to hit reply-all and then trim the list down, than to just hit reply and try to think of everybody who really should be copied.
Emails can be annoying, but what's the alternative? Walk down the hall? Uh, good luck with that - I can't remember the last time I was on a project where more than about two people on the team were even in the same building. Schedule a meeting? Good luck - everybody is booked through to next Friday in meetings. Pick up the phone? Good luck - they're not going to answer because they're all in those meetings that I just mentioned.
Email and IM work. The former is asynchronous, and the latter can be discretely used while in meetings.
It is photoshopped, well, of a sort. Apparently "satellite" view in Google Maps has black anywhere that isn't photographed, which includes most of the oceans. However, areas that are known to be ocean get photoshopped as blue on the map. So, since this spot isn't marked as ocean the blue goes away, but it isn't actually photographed, so it just shows up as black.
They don't actually use photoshop, but you get the idea...