Sure, it's *totally* different than when almost everybody just trusted the evening news or their favourite newspaper columnist to tell them what to think.
The information age made the raw information available. Many people use it directly. It's not terribly surprising that most people don't have the time, skill, or inclination to do that, so they do as they always have and rely on someone else to interpret it for them. The availability of information has made a change in that area though: now just about anybody can become a reputable source of opinion, no capital broadcasting or publishing infrastructure required. Whether that's a good thing or not depends on who you are and how much faith you have in people.
I was once walking out of a marina at night and saw a couple of teenagers parked across the parking lot. I finished loading stuff in my car, locked the gate, and noticed that they weren't making out anymore, they were standing behind the car and she looked irritated. So I walked over and asked if everything was okay. He said the car wouldn't start, and demonstrated. I said it sounded an awful lot like a dead battery, but he vehemently denied that could be the case. I talked him into letting me hook up a booster anyway. Car starts, she rolls her eyes.
When a couple of F-16 pilots dropped a bomb on allies in Afghanistan, part of their defence was that they were high on speed (as ordered), so possibly not that far off.
Apple has specifically addressed that particular item. The encryption keys necessary to get a phone to recognize a new fingerprint sensor are not publicly available (or available to any repair agent, IIRC) because then anyone could defeat the security on the phone.
I guess that's the only example? If that's it, this seems like not much more than a government grab for circumvention devices, in which case I hope manufacturers create special publicly available keys for California.
Yeah, I have a friend who has a decent record resoldering BGAs. I was never able to do it at all.
I think the cases have much more in common than you suggest. BGAs, and more inconvenient packages in general, *were* introduced to make things more compact. They have the side effect of making boards essentially unrepairable. You can replace through hole components no problem; surface mount is usually okay, for someone with some expertise; BGA... not even close to worth it.
Phones never had ZIF sockets and through hole components because those things aren't really compatible with something you carry around with you. Manufacturers traded repairability for form factor. Phones used to have swappable batteries too. Most manufacturers quit making them because they weren't compatible with more compact and energy hungry devices. I think LG made the last swappable battery smartphone... it wasn't terribly successful and they discontinued it.
Sorry? Maybe you're not following. The law proposes that manufacturers will have to provide tools to repair their devices. Someone mentioned that cars were subject to similar regulations. I mentioned (in passing) that I can't buy an oil filter wrench from my car dealer. You stated that only "proprietary" tools are required. If true (do you have anything to back up that statement?) then it nicely covers the oil filter wrench example. So I asked you, which proprietary tools are required to fix a smartphone?
By your hostility I'm thinking maybe you can't think of one?
I've repaired Apple devices and later taken them for Apple warranty service. If you do your own repairs they CAN void the warranty, but that doesn't mean they do, unless the damage is likely due to your repair job. Running over your phone repeatedly with a steam roller also voids the warranty.
And yet I can't buy an oil filter wrench from my car dealer. I'm all for a law that says a manufacturer can't *impede* a third party (including individuals) who want to do FSM knows what to their property, but requiring that every company actually provide a full suite of tools and instructions for how to do so seems a bit far.
Also, where do you draw the line? Do all electronics manufacturers have to sell desolder stations and BGA soldering instructions?
There's a fair amount of scientific study of sexuality, and homosexuality in particular. The fact that homosexuality is very widespread among other species suggests the trait has some fairly general survival utility (i.e. it's normal, as asserted by the OP). Your observation that the basis of homosexuality is complex tends to agree with the idea that it plays some fairly important role.
Your observation that if a preventative supplement existed "every mother would be popping it down" is an observation about your society. Which is why we usually prefer that medical definitions follow science, rather than fashion. Admittedly, that idea isn't very old, and it's certainly not universal yet.
I repeat, you're still using timezones, but setting your watch to a single standard like UTC. People's schedules are what they are because of the nature of society, circadian rhythms, and the Earth's rotation, not what their watches say. You would still have the same jumps between timezones where political entities on the edge chose to align their customary time with their closest trading partners. Basically, everything would look like it does now, except people would wander around with different numbers on their watches.
Except they wouldn't. There are people who keep UTC or some other timezone on their watches now. But not many. It's very convenient to have a common numerical system for keeping time. When you travel to a new place, all you have to do is adjust your watch to local time, and most of your knowledge about general schedules works fine: when stores are likely to open and close, when meals are likely to be served, when daylight is, etc.
I suspect this UTC suggestion is more likely to be made by people who don't travel much. Wouldn't it be great if the whole world just used the same time (read: my time) and nobody (read: I) had to worry about adjusting for timezones?
You're just using time zones but specifying times in a reference zone. Lots of people already do that:
"Let's meet at 8 am UTC!" "Yeah, no."
This suggestion always makes me smile. You're absolutely free to do it any time you like. Americans, just set your clock to UTC. Very few people do this, because there's no point, unless you frequently interact with people in other time zones, in which case you have to do the math whichever way your watch is set.
Economically practical fusion plants were designed in the fifties. Problem is, nobody wanted to actually build one. They wanted them small, with no proliferation risks, and neighbour friendly.
Generating electricity might be a niche use case for fusion. A source of controllable (and self-sustaining) plasma could be very handy for, example, refining ore.
Deep Mind designed a system that can learn to play pretty much any Nintendo game. It learns to play a new game much more quickly if it has previously learned to play another game.
The sentence you mention is kind of an over simplification about a particular kind of training method. You're absolutely right, you could train an AI system all those things individually, and that would help it. But we're impatient monkeys and we want to be able to just give it a game (or a task) and say figure it out. Amazingly, it usually can.
It's strange how people you'd expect to be fairly logical revert to magical thinking when AI is mentioned. Or maybe I just give Slashdot too much credit.
You've made a bunch of statements, none of which you've backed up with any kind of evidence. Your entire second sentence is demonstrably false. And the last two posts sound like an old Star Trek episode or something telling us how special we are.
You can train a person to drive in around a decade and a half, much of it spent training them to see and perform those spatial tasks, the actual manipulating the controls of a car takes much less.
Fortunately modern AI algorithms can learn more in parallel, don't need to sleep, etc., so we probably won't need to wait a decade and a half for one to learn to drive.
You don't have any "inherent ability for grouping by spatial relationships" either. You learned it through experience. A modern AI system acquires the ability (and they can acquire it) the same way.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it's *totally* different than when almost everybody just trusted the evening news or their favourite newspaper columnist to tell them what to think.
The information age made the raw information available. Many people use it directly. It's not terribly surprising that most people don't have the time, skill, or inclination to do that, so they do as they always have and rely on someone else to interpret it for them. The availability of information has made a change in that area though: now just about anybody can become a reputable source of opinion, no capital broadcasting or publishing infrastructure required. Whether that's a good thing or not depends on who you are and how much faith you have in people.
You must have had a very different 386 than I did. I remember thinking the 40 mHz AMD ones were pretty cool, not like those paltry 33 mHz Intel ones.
I was once walking out of a marina at night and saw a couple of teenagers parked across the parking lot. I finished loading stuff in my car, locked the gate, and noticed that they weren't making out anymore, they were standing behind the car and she looked irritated. So I walked over and asked if everything was okay. He said the car wouldn't start, and demonstrated. I said it sounded an awful lot like a dead battery, but he vehemently denied that could be the case. I talked him into letting me hook up a booster anyway. Car starts, she rolls her eyes.
Poor guy. Understanding hardware is important.
When a couple of F-16 pilots dropped a bomb on allies in Afghanistan, part of their defence was that they were high on speed (as ordered), so possibly not that far off.
I've got a 3G. What do I win?
Apple has specifically addressed that particular item. The encryption keys necessary to get a phone to recognize a new fingerprint sensor are not publicly available (or available to any repair agent, IIRC) because then anyone could defeat the security on the phone.
I guess that's the only example? If that's it, this seems like not much more than a government grab for circumvention devices, in which case I hope manufacturers create special publicly available keys for California.
Agreed. That's my point. Generally requiring that a manufacturer provide all the tools necessary to repair their product is silly.
So can you give an example of a specialized repair tool you think the smartphone manufacturers should provide?
Yeah, I have a friend who has a decent record resoldering BGAs. I was never able to do it at all.
I think the cases have much more in common than you suggest. BGAs, and more inconvenient packages in general, *were* introduced to make things more compact. They have the side effect of making boards essentially unrepairable. You can replace through hole components no problem; surface mount is usually okay, for someone with some expertise; BGA... not even close to worth it.
Phones never had ZIF sockets and through hole components because those things aren't really compatible with something you carry around with you. Manufacturers traded repairability for form factor. Phones used to have swappable batteries too. Most manufacturers quit making them because they weren't compatible with more compact and energy hungry devices. I think LG made the last swappable battery smartphone... it wasn't terribly successful and they discontinued it.
Sorry? Maybe you're not following. The law proposes that manufacturers will have to provide tools to repair their devices. Someone mentioned that cars were subject to similar regulations. I mentioned (in passing) that I can't buy an oil filter wrench from my car dealer. You stated that only "proprietary" tools are required. If true (do you have anything to back up that statement?) then it nicely covers the oil filter wrench example. So I asked you, which proprietary tools are required to fix a smartphone?
By your hostility I'm thinking maybe you can't think of one?
So which proprietary tools are required to make reasonable repairs to a smartphone, that aren't readily obtained elsewhere?
I've repaired Apple devices and later taken them for Apple warranty service. If you do your own repairs they CAN void the warranty, but that doesn't mean they do, unless the damage is likely due to your repair job. Running over your phone repeatedly with a steam roller also voids the warranty.
And yet I can't buy an oil filter wrench from my car dealer. I'm all for a law that says a manufacturer can't *impede* a third party (including individuals) who want to do FSM knows what to their property, but requiring that every company actually provide a full suite of tools and instructions for how to do so seems a bit far.
Also, where do you draw the line? Do all electronics manufacturers have to sell desolder stations and BGA soldering instructions?
What an odd dichotomy you've invented!
Amen. More Linux, physics, and tech. And hot grits.
There's a fair amount of scientific study of sexuality, and homosexuality in particular. The fact that homosexuality is very widespread among other species suggests the trait has some fairly general survival utility (i.e. it's normal, as asserted by the OP). Your observation that the basis of homosexuality is complex tends to agree with the idea that it plays some fairly important role.
Your observation that if a preventative supplement existed "every mother would be popping it down" is an observation about your society. Which is why we usually prefer that medical definitions follow science, rather than fashion. Admittedly, that idea isn't very old, and it's certainly not universal yet.
I repeat, you're still using timezones, but setting your watch to a single standard like UTC. People's schedules are what they are because of the nature of society, circadian rhythms, and the Earth's rotation, not what their watches say. You would still have the same jumps between timezones where political entities on the edge chose to align their customary time with their closest trading partners. Basically, everything would look like it does now, except people would wander around with different numbers on their watches.
Except they wouldn't. There are people who keep UTC or some other timezone on their watches now. But not many. It's very convenient to have a common numerical system for keeping time. When you travel to a new place, all you have to do is adjust your watch to local time, and most of your knowledge about general schedules works fine: when stores are likely to open and close, when meals are likely to be served, when daylight is, etc.
I suspect this UTC suggestion is more likely to be made by people who don't travel much. Wouldn't it be great if the whole world just used the same time (read: my time) and nobody (read: I) had to worry about adjusting for timezones?
It's been decades since Slashdot had an electric universe story. Brings me back to the early '00s. Thanks for the memories Slashdot!
Generally we prefer that the medical definitions follow the science, as opposed to the other way around....
You're just using time zones but specifying times in a reference zone. Lots of people already do that:
"Let's meet at 8 am UTC!" "Yeah, no."
This suggestion always makes me smile. You're absolutely free to do it any time you like. Americans, just set your clock to UTC. Very few people do this, because there's no point, unless you frequently interact with people in other time zones, in which case you have to do the math whichever way your watch is set.
Economically practical fusion plants were designed in the fifties. Problem is, nobody wanted to actually build one. They wanted them small, with no proliferation risks, and neighbour friendly.
Generating electricity might be a niche use case for fusion. A source of controllable (and self-sustaining) plasma could be very handy for, example, refining ore.
Your post is now required reading for my students.
Deep Mind designed a system that can learn to play pretty much any Nintendo game. It learns to play a new game much more quickly if it has previously learned to play another game.
The sentence you mention is kind of an over simplification about a particular kind of training method. You're absolutely right, you could train an AI system all those things individually, and that would help it. But we're impatient monkeys and we want to be able to just give it a game (or a task) and say figure it out. Amazingly, it usually can.
It's strange how people you'd expect to be fairly logical revert to magical thinking when AI is mentioned. Or maybe I just give Slashdot too much credit.
You've made a bunch of statements, none of which you've backed up with any kind of evidence. Your entire second sentence is demonstrably false. And the last two posts sound like an old Star Trek episode or something telling us how special we are.
You can train a person to drive in around a decade and a half, much of it spent training them to see and perform those spatial tasks, the actual manipulating the controls of a car takes much less.
Fortunately modern AI algorithms can learn more in parallel, don't need to sleep, etc., so we probably won't need to wait a decade and a half for one to learn to drive.
You don't have any "inherent ability for grouping by spatial relationships" either. You learned it through experience. A modern AI system acquires the ability (and they can acquire it) the same way.