I think that usage-based billing does make sense, since the costs go up with usage.
However, the issue is the rate. If the cost of a broadband connection is a $10 admin fee per month flat (to cover billing/wiring/etc), and then maybe 2cents/GB out and maybe 1cent/GB in or something like that, then I don't have a big problem with it. That's like $10/month/TB for data retrieved.
The problem is that companies like Comcast would charge something like $1/GB but exempt their own products, which would basically make multimedia impractical to obtain from anybody but them. Then they'd point to wireless data rates and call it a bargain.
If Amazon can make a profit at 2cents/GB, why can't a company the size of Comcast? Simple: it isn't about the cost of providing service, it is about getting rid of competition.
That is not entirely true. I was just vaccinated against smallpox a year and a half ago (due to missing shot records). Before that, I was vaccinated in 2005 because the last time I was vaccinated against smallpox was when I was a very young child.
Smallpox Vaccine Availability Routine smallpox vaccination among the American public stopped in 1972 after the disease was eradicated in the United States. Until recently, the U.S. government provided the vaccine only to a few hundred scientists and medical professionals working with smallpox and similar viruses in a research setting.
After the events of September and October, 2001, however, the U.S. government took further actions to improve its level of preparedness against terrorism. One of many such measures—designed specifically to prepare for an intentional release of the smallpox virus—included updating and releasing a smallpox response plan. In addition, the U.S. government has enough vaccine to vaccinate every person in the United States in the event of a smallpox emergency.
I can't of course vouch for every country on the planet. The smallpox vaccine is fairly problematic compared to more modern ones, so there is reluctance to just have everybody keep taking it.
If you're in the US and you think you've been vaccinated against Smallpox after 1972, chances are you're thinking of some other vaccine.
Fair enough. Apparently whether you agree that people originated from an ape-like ancestor has little bearing on whether you can answer the other question in accordance with scientific consensus.
the study did not establish - at all - what is or is not part of scientific literacy.
Scientific literacy is just a term - what it does or doesn't mean is a matter of definition. Obviously it is a loaded term, but if you define "scientific literacy" as the believe that the sun goes around the earth and "unwashed masses" as the belief that the best way to figure out the answer to a question is to apply the scientific method, then I'll gladly count myself among the unwashed masses.
My point is just that no study can define a term.
So, if somebody happens to come up with a workable theory of quantum gravity but happens to believe that people were created by the spaghetti monster then I'll leave it to others to try to figure out whether they're scientifically literate or not. Many like to think that such a person could never come up with a brilliant theory, but there is certainly no science backing up such a claim, and all it takes is a single counter-example so it is a rather bold claim to make. People are capable of holding all kinds of contradictory or strange notions in their head - just look at Linus Pauling's obsession with Vitamin C.
Can't endorse that enough. Youtube has improved on FIOS quite a bit, but my browser doesn't always consistently keep up with HD, so I routinely pre-download stuff using youtube-dl. For longer content I can also store it and then watch it in the living room via MythVideo (or whatever you want to use).
Google's clear motive here is to push the ISPs to provide consistently high bandwidth, so that YouTube works better.
Consistency is the key. I use FIOS and going back a year or two I can't say I was thrilled with Youtube performance. It would frequently pause/buffer. I got into the habit of preloading everything with youtube-dl and then just playing it back from my HD as a result, but that isn't so convenient if you're on a tablet/etc.
Things seem to have gotten a lot better since then. My plan hasn't really changed in that time.
ISPs love advertising bandwidth to the last mile, and then they inevitably oversubscribe everything above that to death so that about the only ISP-hosted content actually gets the advertised treatment.
Smallpox and Polio are not the same thing. Smallpox is erradicated. The only existing samples of it are locked away, though there is concern about it being used as a bio-weapon.
DVDs are generally fine - a given DVD will always work on any DVD player around at the time it is created, and any newer player.
Blu-Ray is different - those can potentially be retroactively revoked, but in practice this isn't implemented. Otherwise discs will always work on newer players, but potentially not in older ones. At least, not until the master keys are determined (I don't think they are yet, but if enough get discovered they apparently can be found).
Stross's glasshouse uses assemblers for transportation as well, positing that sending just a stream of data FTL is cheaper than sending entire people, though in that novel the technology exists to do both.
As an added bonus you get backed up anytime you use this mechanism, and if you're unlucky you might catch a neurological-computer-hybrid virus from one.
I'm certain we've mastered space-time enough to "fold around" before the "printing" of humans and incepting them with their old memory again is doable. Seriously.
Charles Stross in Glasshouse suggests that we'll be doing both (your first example being a T gate, and your second example being an A gate, with the possibility of using them in tandem (reducing you to data, using space warping to send just the data FTL, and then putting you back together again)).
No way to know which one will come about first - we're a LONG way from being able to do either. The main physical limitation with replicating somebody is whether the uncertainty effect comes into play - nobody knows if memory depends on quantum-level detail. There are of course a bunch of other problems to surmount (how to map the position/state of all of your molecules at a moment in time, transfer all that data, and reverse that process). However, nothing in physics makes that impossible. Space folding may or may not be possible as well - there really is little proven theory around that and many theories have a lot of constraints, like wormholes being primordial/etc.
It is impossible to rationally debate a policy for technology that far in advance, stick with SciFi. If you are confused by that, see my comment regarding discussing military power above.
No confusion here - I stated my feelings about what current policy should be in the last 2-3 posts (it is banned, and should be banned). You stated the above 2-3 posts ago. I'm not sure why we're still having this conversation.
I think this is a bit of a straw-man though, as nobody is arguing that self-driving cars are ready to operate on the roads autonomously today with no further developments.
All diseases range in severity from individual to individual, and chicken pox and shingles are no different. Generally speaking it is worse for adults. That doesn't mean that every adult infection is guaranteed to be life-threatening, nor does it mean that a childhood infection can't kill somebody.
It really is in the public interest to reduce the incidence of these diseases all-around. For every few hundred cases of whooping cough that cause discomfort to a teenager there could be a case that kills a 4 month old child (who is still too young to vaccinate I might add).
Sure, the vaccines can also cause their own problems, but for any vaccine on the market the risks of side-effects and the risks of not being vaccinated are well known, and they wouldn't be on the market and on the vaccine schedules of virtually every developed nation if the one didn't greatly outweigh the other...
The only problem with your logic is that if you are immunized then the un-immunized people don't pose a threat against you. That's the point of you being immunized. So your argument is pretty much moot...
Vaccinations are not 100% successful. We rely on everyone having the vaccinations so the chance of ever even being exposed to the pathogens is very remote.
In addition to this, with enough vaccination it becomes possible to eradicate a disease entirely. Today nobody has to take Smallpox vaccine and suffer the side effects of it (as an older vaccine it has quite a few). We wouldn't be free of the vaccine today if everybody didn't take it like they were supposed to decades ago.
You think the car driving itself for repairs (refusing to be satisfied with DiY work) would solve the problem?
It works fine for aircraft. Just make whoever signs off on the repair liable for any resulting mechanical failures if the work wasn't done in accordance with the certified procedure. Repair shops would be required to be insured as well, and insurers could of course do whatever they want to maintain quality, much as is done for commercial fire insurance.
Bullshit. Democrats are crap, but when it comes to ruling for the interest of moneyed interests there's no comparison.
While the Republicans seem to pull in more money, there are certainly moneyed interests that invest heavily in the Democrats. The **AA and unions come to mind for starters. Then you have stuff like ethanol additives to the fuel which is something both parties can agree to as long as it means paying more for corn.
The internet should be spun off into a subsidiary that leases access to the infrastructure to make it clear. Of course that would lead to others getting less restricted access and cause competition.
While I agree I'd go a step further. I'd completely split the last mile off of any kind of service provision. Have a utility provide a fiber/wire/whatever to each house from a central office. They would charge each house a flat rate if it is used at a rate based on cost - just like your water bill/etc.
Within the central office the utility would maintain coloc facilities and would charge a basic fee structure for anybody who wanted to put equipment in there, and for the attachment of connections to individual homes.
I'd also have a standardized protocol for multiplexing multiple services over the cable.
Beyond that it is anything goes. If somebody wants to deliver video/phone/internet/whatever over that wire they can have at it and charge whatever they want to for the service. That side of the business would be completely de-regulated, and the last-mile would be completely common carrier. For the cost of a router and the colo fee and uplink you could run your own ISP for a small town if you wanted to.
Public utilities had to deal with all of these regulatory authorities, and then calculatedly lobbied to create US Federal control so that they'd only have to bribe-- I mean lobby and render campaign contributions-- to one target instead of so many.
So, I'm the first to agree that we need to rein in the telcos. However, one of the problems of local control is a lack of standardization. Look how hard it is to collect sales tax when every little town with 12 houses in the US can establish a local tax policy. Now, imagine this town wants everything to be charged by the kilobyte paid by the sender, another town wants the costs shared between sender and recipient, and another town wants everything to be flat-rate-unlimited. Some town wants usage for each customer reported to some central authority on 6-copy carbon paper. Another city buys a fancy 911 system from some vendor and the onus is on the telco to make it work with their systems despite it not adhering to any particular standard.
Local regulation made a lot of sense back when most commerce was fairly local. These days it seems like even national-level regulation can barely keep up with stuff like the internet. Could you imagine the decency standards for the internet imposed by every little town in the deep south?
They produce them, they are not building them. It's obvious that brains can exist, but we have no clue how despite our advances so far. And if we figure out how it could be some kind of quantum stuff that makes it just as impossible for us, for any foreseeable time, as building galaxies is - which also were produced.
Foreseeable simply means that something is able to be predicted. People have been predicting the construction of AI for ages now, it is hardly unforeseeable. We just can't do it today. Considering that you don't know how consciousness works it seems a bit arrogant to claim that you know that it can't be manufactured. You need to understand something before you can be sure it is impossible to do.
For the few percent of the mass-energy of a galaxy that we think we understand the nature of we can be fairly confident that it will be a long time before we can manufacture one simply due to the scales involved.
Put another way, it's quite possible that biological intelligence is the most efficient way of organizing intelligence, and that any digital simulation of it, even if it went down to the atomic level, would be more wasteful in application.
So, who says that artificial intelligence needs to be digital, or non-biological?
Actually, _all_ credible results from AI research point into the direction that AI may well be impossible in this universe.
How do you figure? Just build an molecular-level duplicate of a human brain from chemical ingredients, and you've just created an artificial intelligence.
Doing it that way is inconvenient, so we're trying to find other ways of doing it, with the likely benefit of coming up with something better in the process. It just takes time to figure it all out...
If you asked someone today what the first computer capable of designing an improved version of itself would look like, you'd say it would be a true AI. This is not necessarily true. You are assuming that designing a new, more powerful computer requires true intelligence. Maybe in reality it'll be a few million node neural network optimized with a genetic algorithm such that the only output is a new transistor design or a new neural network layout or a new brain-computer interface.
Well, that begs the question of what true intelligence actually is. Is a cat intelligent? All a cat does is eat, sporadically sleep, and make copies of itself. It wouldn't bother with eating or sleeping but for the fact that it apparently helps with making copies of itself.
The evolution of human intelligence took billions of years. It seems these days that the development of artificial intelligence will be measured in decades.
Neither TFA nor myself were referring to a utopian vision for self driving cars, both were based on current technology and limitations.
Well, then this whole discussion is just one big, "Duh!" Seriously, who thinks that the current self-driving cars which have steering wheels that anybody can grab and override the control of the car using would be wise to put in the hands of a kid?
This debate really only makes sense in the context of a future automated car which is demonstrably safe...
So if you were a rational person, it is likely you would seldom have good reason to converting cash to $100 worth of Bitcoin. Unless you wanted to make an anonymous online transaction.
No argument there, but people exchange currencies all the time for the sole purpose of performing transactions.
When I travel to Europe it is helpful to have Euros in my wallet and not US Dollars. So, I go to a local exchange (at my bank or in an airport) to exchange my Dollars for Euros. That's all an exchange is - somebody willing to trade one thing for another. It doesn't have to be as part of an investment, though people will always trade commodities of any kind.
Further, unlike most commodities even, its "value" determination was built in.
Its supply is built-in. The value of a commodity depends on both its supply, AND its demand. So, the value of Bitcoin would be expected to go up and down since there is no way to regulate its supply to maintain a constant value. Value is also relative - compared to fiat currency the value would certainly be expected to change as the supply of those currencies changes.
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I think that usage-based billing does make sense, since the costs go up with usage.
However, the issue is the rate. If the cost of a broadband connection is a $10 admin fee per month flat (to cover billing/wiring/etc), and then maybe 2cents/GB out and maybe 1cent/GB in or something like that, then I don't have a big problem with it. That's like $10/month/TB for data retrieved.
The problem is that companies like Comcast would charge something like $1/GB but exempt their own products, which would basically make multimedia impractical to obtain from anybody but them. Then they'd point to wireless data rates and call it a bargain.
If Amazon can make a profit at 2cents/GB, why can't a company the size of Comcast? Simple: it isn't about the cost of providing service, it is about getting rid of competition.
That is not entirely true. I was just vaccinated against smallpox a year and a half ago (due to missing shot records). Before that, I was vaccinated in 2005 because the last time I was vaccinated against smallpox was when I was a very young child.
From: http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/sm...
I can't of course vouch for every country on the planet. The smallpox vaccine is fairly problematic compared to more modern ones, so there is reluctance to just have everybody keep taking it.
If you're in the US and you think you've been vaccinated against Smallpox after 1972, chances are you're thinking of some other vaccine.
the study showed only that the question about evolution was a relatively independent component. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Fair enough. Apparently whether you agree that people originated from an ape-like ancestor has little bearing on whether you can answer the other question in accordance with scientific consensus.
the study did not establish - at all - what is or is not part of scientific literacy.
Scientific literacy is just a term - what it does or doesn't mean is a matter of definition. Obviously it is a loaded term, but if you define "scientific literacy" as the believe that the sun goes around the earth and "unwashed masses" as the belief that the best way to figure out the answer to a question is to apply the scientific method, then I'll gladly count myself among the unwashed masses.
My point is just that no study can define a term.
So, if somebody happens to come up with a workable theory of quantum gravity but happens to believe that people were created by the spaghetti monster then I'll leave it to others to try to figure out whether they're scientifically literate or not. Many like to think that such a person could never come up with a brilliant theory, but there is certainly no science backing up such a claim, and all it takes is a single counter-example so it is a rather bold claim to make. People are capable of holding all kinds of contradictory or strange notions in their head - just look at Linus Pauling's obsession with Vitamin C.
Can't endorse that enough. Youtube has improved on FIOS quite a bit, but my browser doesn't always consistently keep up with HD, so I routinely pre-download stuff using youtube-dl. For longer content I can also store it and then watch it in the living room via MythVideo (or whatever you want to use).
Google's clear motive here is to push the ISPs to provide consistently high bandwidth, so that YouTube works better.
Consistency is the key. I use FIOS and going back a year or two I can't say I was thrilled with Youtube performance. It would frequently pause/buffer. I got into the habit of preloading everything with youtube-dl and then just playing it back from my HD as a result, but that isn't so convenient if you're on a tablet/etc.
Things seem to have gotten a lot better since then. My plan hasn't really changed in that time.
ISPs love advertising bandwidth to the last mile, and then they inevitably oversubscribe everything above that to death so that about the only ISP-hosted content actually gets the advertised treatment.
Smallpox and Polio are not the same thing. Smallpox is erradicated. The only existing samples of it are locked away, though there is concern about it being used as a bio-weapon.
DVDs are generally fine - a given DVD will always work on any DVD player around at the time it is created, and any newer player.
Blu-Ray is different - those can potentially be retroactively revoked, but in practice this isn't implemented. Otherwise discs will always work on newer players, but potentially not in older ones. At least, not until the master keys are determined (I don't think they are yet, but if enough get discovered they apparently can be found).
Stross's glasshouse uses assemblers for transportation as well, positing that sending just a stream of data FTL is cheaper than sending entire people, though in that novel the technology exists to do both.
As an added bonus you get backed up anytime you use this mechanism, and if you're unlucky you might catch a neurological-computer-hybrid virus from one.
I'm certain we've mastered space-time enough to "fold around" before the "printing" of humans and incepting them with their old memory again is doable. Seriously.
Charles Stross in Glasshouse suggests that we'll be doing both (your first example being a T gate, and your second example being an A gate, with the possibility of using them in tandem (reducing you to data, using space warping to send just the data FTL, and then putting you back together again)).
No way to know which one will come about first - we're a LONG way from being able to do either. The main physical limitation with replicating somebody is whether the uncertainty effect comes into play - nobody knows if memory depends on quantum-level detail. There are of course a bunch of other problems to surmount (how to map the position/state of all of your molecules at a moment in time, transfer all that data, and reverse that process). However, nothing in physics makes that impossible. Space folding may or may not be possible as well - there really is little proven theory around that and many theories have a lot of constraints, like wormholes being primordial/etc.
It is impossible to rationally debate a policy for technology that far in advance, stick with SciFi. If you are confused by that, see my comment regarding discussing military power above.
No confusion here - I stated my feelings about what current policy should be in the last 2-3 posts (it is banned, and should be banned). You stated the above 2-3 posts ago. I'm not sure why we're still having this conversation.
I think this is a bit of a straw-man though, as nobody is arguing that self-driving cars are ready to operate on the roads autonomously today with no further developments.
Bye bye
Adios
All diseases range in severity from individual to individual, and chicken pox and shingles are no different. Generally speaking it is worse for adults. That doesn't mean that every adult infection is guaranteed to be life-threatening, nor does it mean that a childhood infection can't kill somebody.
It really is in the public interest to reduce the incidence of these diseases all-around. For every few hundred cases of whooping cough that cause discomfort to a teenager there could be a case that kills a 4 month old child (who is still too young to vaccinate I might add).
Sure, the vaccines can also cause their own problems, but for any vaccine on the market the risks of side-effects and the risks of not being vaccinated are well known, and they wouldn't be on the market and on the vaccine schedules of virtually every developed nation if the one didn't greatly outweigh the other...
The only problem with your logic is that if you are immunized then the un-immunized people don't pose a threat against you. That's the point of you being immunized. So your argument is pretty much moot...
Vaccinations are not 100% successful. We rely on everyone having the vaccinations so the chance of ever even being exposed to the pathogens is very remote.
In addition to this, with enough vaccination it becomes possible to eradicate a disease entirely. Today nobody has to take Smallpox vaccine and suffer the side effects of it (as an older vaccine it has quite a few). We wouldn't be free of the vaccine today if everybody didn't take it like they were supposed to decades ago.
You think the car driving itself for repairs (refusing to be satisfied with DiY work) would solve the problem?
It works fine for aircraft. Just make whoever signs off on the repair liable for any resulting mechanical failures if the work wasn't done in accordance with the certified procedure. Repair shops would be required to be insured as well, and insurers could of course do whatever they want to maintain quality, much as is done for commercial fire insurance.
TFA and every comment I see (and have made) is regarding the logical merits of a policy.
Sure, but I'm talking about a policy that we'll create 5-20 years from now - not one that should be signed into law next week...
Bullshit. Democrats are crap, but when it comes to ruling for the interest of moneyed interests there's no comparison.
While the Republicans seem to pull in more money, there are certainly moneyed interests that invest heavily in the Democrats. The **AA and unions come to mind for starters. Then you have stuff like ethanol additives to the fuel which is something both parties can agree to as long as it means paying more for corn.
The internet should be spun off into a subsidiary that leases access to the infrastructure to make it clear. Of course that would lead to others getting less restricted access and cause competition.
While I agree I'd go a step further. I'd completely split the last mile off of any kind of service provision. Have a utility provide a fiber/wire/whatever to each house from a central office. They would charge each house a flat rate if it is used at a rate based on cost - just like your water bill/etc.
Within the central office the utility would maintain coloc facilities and would charge a basic fee structure for anybody who wanted to put equipment in there, and for the attachment of connections to individual homes.
I'd also have a standardized protocol for multiplexing multiple services over the cable.
Beyond that it is anything goes. If somebody wants to deliver video/phone/internet/whatever over that wire they can have at it and charge whatever they want to for the service. That side of the business would be completely de-regulated, and the last-mile would be completely common carrier. For the cost of a router and the colo fee and uplink you could run your own ISP for a small town if you wanted to.
Public utilities had to deal with all of these regulatory authorities, and then calculatedly lobbied to create US Federal control so that they'd only have to bribe-- I mean lobby and render campaign contributions-- to one target instead of so many.
So, I'm the first to agree that we need to rein in the telcos. However, one of the problems of local control is a lack of standardization. Look how hard it is to collect sales tax when every little town with 12 houses in the US can establish a local tax policy. Now, imagine this town wants everything to be charged by the kilobyte paid by the sender, another town wants the costs shared between sender and recipient, and another town wants everything to be flat-rate-unlimited. Some town wants usage for each customer reported to some central authority on 6-copy carbon paper. Another city buys a fancy 911 system from some vendor and the onus is on the telco to make it work with their systems despite it not adhering to any particular standard.
Local regulation made a lot of sense back when most commerce was fairly local. These days it seems like even national-level regulation can barely keep up with stuff like the internet. Could you imagine the decency standards for the internet imposed by every little town in the deep south?
Science fiction is great for entertainment. Science fiction is not very good for passing laws, creating policies, or holding rational dialogues.
So, who is advocating changing any laws or creating any policies? Certainly not I.
They produce them, they are not building them. It's obvious that brains can exist, but we have no clue how despite our advances so far. And if we figure out how it could be some kind of quantum stuff that makes it just as impossible for us, for any foreseeable time, as building galaxies is - which also were produced.
Foreseeable simply means that something is able to be predicted. People have been predicting the construction of AI for ages now, it is hardly unforeseeable. We just can't do it today. Considering that you don't know how consciousness works it seems a bit arrogant to claim that you know that it can't be manufactured. You need to understand something before you can be sure it is impossible to do.
For the few percent of the mass-energy of a galaxy that we think we understand the nature of we can be fairly confident that it will be a long time before we can manufacture one simply due to the scales involved.
Put another way, it's quite possible that biological intelligence is the most efficient way of organizing intelligence, and that any digital simulation of it, even if it went down to the atomic level, would be more wasteful in application.
So, who says that artificial intelligence needs to be digital, or non-biological?
OK, but same could be true for brains, no?
How do you figure? People produce brains every time they have children.
Actually, _all_ credible results from AI research point into the direction that AI may well be impossible in this universe.
How do you figure? Just build an molecular-level duplicate of a human brain from chemical ingredients, and you've just created an artificial intelligence.
Doing it that way is inconvenient, so we're trying to find other ways of doing it, with the likely benefit of coming up with something better in the process. It just takes time to figure it all out...
If you asked someone today what the first computer capable of designing an improved version of itself would look like, you'd say it would be a true AI. This is not necessarily true. You are assuming that designing a new, more powerful computer requires true intelligence. Maybe in reality it'll be a few million node neural network optimized with a genetic algorithm such that the only output is a new transistor design or a new neural network layout or a new brain-computer interface.
Well, that begs the question of what true intelligence actually is. Is a cat intelligent? All a cat does is eat, sporadically sleep, and make copies of itself. It wouldn't bother with eating or sleeping but for the fact that it apparently helps with making copies of itself.
The evolution of human intelligence took billions of years. It seems these days that the development of artificial intelligence will be measured in decades.
Neither TFA nor myself were referring to a utopian vision for self driving cars, both were based on current technology and limitations.
Well, then this whole discussion is just one big, "Duh!" Seriously, who thinks that the current self-driving cars which have steering wheels that anybody can grab and override the control of the car using would be wise to put in the hands of a kid?
This debate really only makes sense in the context of a future automated car which is demonstrably safe...
So if you were a rational person, it is likely you would seldom have good reason to converting cash to $100 worth of Bitcoin. Unless you wanted to make an anonymous online transaction.
No argument there, but people exchange currencies all the time for the sole purpose of performing transactions.
When I travel to Europe it is helpful to have Euros in my wallet and not US Dollars. So, I go to a local exchange (at my bank or in an airport) to exchange my Dollars for Euros. That's all an exchange is - somebody willing to trade one thing for another. It doesn't have to be as part of an investment, though people will always trade commodities of any kind.
Further, unlike most commodities even, its "value" determination was built in.
Its supply is built-in. The value of a commodity depends on both its supply, AND its demand. So, the value of Bitcoin would be expected to go up and down since there is no way to regulate its supply to maintain a constant value. Value is also relative - compared to fiat currency the value would certainly be expected to change as the supply of those currencies changes.