I doubt it. Say you're putting a $10,000 downpayment on a car. Suppose you could use Apple Pay (I don't think you can) or you can save 0.15% and pay cash.
That Apple Pay transaction costs you $15. It saves you going to a bank, getting a cashier's cheque, then going to the dealer with $10,000 cash in your pocket.
I'd pay it, no problem. The 2% or so that comes with a credit card transaction is more of an issue.
Blockchain is going to save us all! Because it will surely be essential to creating a place for people to chat with their friends and share pictures (i.e. virtually all of social media). And people will flock to these new saviours because they haven't had the option to use open social media systems before. But wait! These have blockchain!
Someone the other day was all excited about using blockchain for scientific publishing. I suggested they use git, since it's an already existing blockchain based document tracking system with a well proven record. Huh?
I've arrived at the conclusion that the vast majority of people, including all the ones writing articles, actually have no idea what blockchains are.
Your imagination is toast. It happens. Notice how kids (and cats) can be wildly entertained playing with an empty cardboard box for hours? Not a lot of adults can do that.
Rehabilitation consists of building a blanket fort and sitting in it reading Calvin and Hobbes.
There's just as much iron in regolith as there is aluminum, so you get iron too. And also loads of magnesium, which is itself a pretty useful material.
Why would you want to build cars in orbit? You'd start with structural materials. Likely that would involve scooping up lunar regolith and smelting it to make iron, aluminum and magnesium (and oxygen, which you want too). Electric bulldozers and solar smelters should work fine on the moon. You'd use those to make structural beams, hulls, whatever you can, shipping up everything else from Earth.
If you read about the things that the Soviets did during WWII, or that China did during the Great Leap Forward, you might get come to the conclusion that totalitarian communism has much more capacity for great projects, especially highly risky ones, than does capitalism.
The way totalitarian communism accomplished those things isn't pretty, but then unfettered capitalism isn't really any better.
Building a hyperloop is a small enough project that a sufficiently rich and convincing person, like Branson or Musk, can start a company and pull it off. But a company internally is pretty much a totalitarian regime with a centrally planned economy anyway.
Sorry, that seems like a pretty marginal objection. I'm sure you could find the cameras with a five minute walk around of your car. Or crack the manual. Or ask the dealer. Or Google it.
The actual cleaning you could accomplish with a fingertip. I don't know where you live, but where I am cleaning off a non-heated mirror involves locating an ice scraper that can reach into the mounting to the mirror. Thank god for heated ones. Having said that, a camera lens could be cleared very effectively using a single loop of wire around it.
I'm not sure what this system adds over a mirror either. It seems like a whiz bang look what we can do with deep learning project without much though to the actual utility. But "OMG clearing frost off fingernail sized camera lenses!" strikes me as being equally silly.
Lots of research shows that good drivers are constantly moving their attention, from far ahead to closer objects, mirrors, instruments, and back. The ones who gaze one thing, including the distance, are dangerous.
"Persevered for centuries. It literally took centuries for our technology to get where it is. There is no rational reason to believe it will not take more centuries to get to the point where space based manufacturing is economically viable."
Yes, there is. Technology development has been exponential, not linear.
In terms of mining in space, you don't even really need to invent that much. There are some engineering problems to work out, but nothing that really looks like it would be terribly difficult. It requires some initial investment to bootstrap, but even that isn't really that big by modern engineering project standards.
The problem is that there's currently very little reason to do it. You'd certainly sell some mega-telescopes, and a few other things, but that's not going to fund an entire industry. However, if launch costs came down enough so that the space-based population could grow to a reasonable size, then you'd have a market, and industrial development would be pretty much automatic. Alternately, you could develop the industry to build things like orbital rings that would bring "launch" costs down, but that requires more up-front capital.
Some people think SpaceX might bring launch costs down to the magic threshold with the BFR. Personally, I think bootstrapping orbital industry is a good next project for NASA. Quit fiddling with Mars and bootstrap building material production on the moon with the goals constructing a lunar space elevator / orbital ring complex for practice, followed by an Earth elevator/ring.
The James Webb telescope isn't much bigger than the 1948 Hale telescope. One of the things that makes it remarkable (and expensive) is that it folds up small enough to fit in a fairing for launch. If you could build one in space from raw materials you could make it enormous.
Living volume in space is pretty cheap in terms of materials. So why is it so cramped in the ISS? Because all those modules had to fit into fairings for launch. There are proposals to manufacture enormous stations in orbit basically welding together boxes made of girders manufactured in space.
If you could source the material in space as well, then you could build *really* enormous things. With space-based manufacture and raw material you could probably make things like O'Neil cylinders and orbital rings without much trouble.
The lethality of crime (and also suicide) in the US is far above any other western nation, and the only reasonable explanation anyone's ever found is that the availability of guns makes that happen. The NY Times article included an example: a Londoner and a New Yorker are at fairly equal risk of being robbed. But the New Yorker is 50 times more likely to die in the encounter.
Surprisingly, the rate of mental illness in the US, including the rate of untreated mental illness, isn't really much higher than it is in other western nations. That's why it doesn't explain the gun deaths.
By "the old terminology" do you mean prior to the 1950s? AI has always referred to a somewhat fuzzy collection of techniques that produce machine behaviour that is adaptive or not entirely deterministic.
The pop culture definition of AI is pretty wildly variable and usually changes depending on the current success-to-promises ratio.
Computer-related endeavours have a bit of a habit of assuming everything is deterministic and basing conclusions off one run. How many benchmarks have you seen where they ran the thing once (or maybe a couple of times) and that's it? If it's important, run it enough times, with random initial conditions, for some statistical validity.
If I need your code, data, exact hardware and precise random seed to replicate your result, your result is a fluke.
I agree with you, but I think it's the same problem at the root.
A robust result, whether it's a psych study, something in a petrie dish, or some machine learning tweak, must be replicable on new data. If it's not... what's the point really?
That's more obvious and easily demonstrable in machine learning; a research group asked for my help last year because they were having trouble with their deep learning model. They trained it on one dataset and it wouldn't work on another, similar dataset. Not surprising... you have to train it on diverse data to have it generalize well. Yeah, that's harder.
Other fields are no different. Tightly controlled studies make things easier and cheaper. But if that result is to be used generally then the necessary controls need to be quantified.
Having said that, the scientific literature is not supposed to be "truth." They're reports of observations. Individual papers are supposed to be the starting point for further investigation by other groups. Problem is, we've forgotten that, and don't reward it.
I like the idea of open data, but it concerns me that it might just exacerbate the problem: I do something and publish the result and the data; you come along, confirm my result (in the same data) and we call it replicated.
That's been looked at, actually. Various measures of mental illness don't explain the preponderance of mass shootings in the US. People really have looked carefully at a lot of possible explanations. The only one that really works is the availability of firearms.
The US seems to be an odd outlier in that regard. Other countries in the world, notably the UK and Australia, have used the aftermath of mass shootings to enact strong gun control and slash their violent crime and shooting rates.
Mmm. Those are maybe on-duty military or police? Isreal has pretty strict gun control laws (as well as compulsory military service). They even started restricting access to firearms for off-duty military personnel and saw suicide rates fall.
It might not be a terrible idea to amend your constitution. There are only three countries in the world where owning a gun is a right to be infringed rather than a privilege to be possibly earned. Those are the US, Mexico and Guatemala.
And yet countries with gun control have far fewer mass shootings. That one in Norway had a high death toll, but it was very rare.
The NY Times reprinted an article today going over the stats. The number of guns (total, per capita, whatever) correlates with the number of mass shootings. It also correlates with the number of gun deaths (and violent deaths in general), which you're correct, is a bigger problem.
Mass shootings get the press because they're dramatic. But if you can use that impact to do something about the gun problem, go for it. It will help all around.
Two out of your four are "storage got cheaper" which was happening long before Google came around and kept happening. Google might have sped things up a bit by being aggressive, but that's all.
Searching being full of advertising... well, it still is, but thanks to Google 90% of it is hidden beneath the surface. Like an iceberg.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt it. Say you're putting a $10,000 downpayment on a car. Suppose you could use Apple Pay (I don't think you can) or you can save 0.15% and pay cash.
That Apple Pay transaction costs you $15. It saves you going to a bank, getting a cashier's cheque, then going to the dealer with $10,000 cash in your pocket.
I'd pay it, no problem. The 2% or so that comes with a credit card transaction is more of an issue.
Blockchain is going to save us all! Because it will surely be essential to creating a place for people to chat with their friends and share pictures (i.e. virtually all of social media). And people will flock to these new saviours because they haven't had the option to use open social media systems before. But wait! These have blockchain!
Someone the other day was all excited about using blockchain for scientific publishing. I suggested they use git, since it's an already existing blockchain based document tracking system with a well proven record. Huh?
I've arrived at the conclusion that the vast majority of people, including all the ones writing articles, actually have no idea what blockchains are.
Yes. Everything prior to the current epoch, generally defined as beginning sometime in 2016, was pure racist evil. Nothing good happened, ever.
Your imagination is toast. It happens. Notice how kids (and cats) can be wildly entertained playing with an empty cardboard box for hours? Not a lot of adults can do that.
Rehabilitation consists of building a blanket fort and sitting in it reading Calvin and Hobbes.
There's just as much iron in regolith as there is aluminum, so you get iron too. And also loads of magnesium, which is itself a pretty useful material.
Why would you want to build cars in orbit? You'd start with structural materials. Likely that would involve scooping up lunar regolith and smelting it to make iron, aluminum and magnesium (and oxygen, which you want too). Electric bulldozers and solar smelters should work fine on the moon. You'd use those to make structural beams, hulls, whatever you can, shipping up everything else from Earth.
Perhaps the definition of "could" (as in you *could* clean it off with a fingertip) is also something you might want to Google?
If you read about the things that the Soviets did during WWII, or that China did during the Great Leap Forward, you might get come to the conclusion that totalitarian communism has much more capacity for great projects, especially highly risky ones, than does capitalism.
The way totalitarian communism accomplished those things isn't pretty, but then unfettered capitalism isn't really any better.
Building a hyperloop is a small enough project that a sufficiently rich and convincing person, like Branson or Musk, can start a company and pull it off. But a company internally is pretty much a totalitarian regime with a centrally planned economy anyway.
Sorry, that seems like a pretty marginal objection. I'm sure you could find the cameras with a five minute walk around of your car. Or crack the manual. Or ask the dealer. Or Google it.
The actual cleaning you could accomplish with a fingertip. I don't know where you live, but where I am cleaning off a non-heated mirror involves locating an ice scraper that can reach into the mounting to the mirror. Thank god for heated ones. Having said that, a camera lens could be cleared very effectively using a single loop of wire around it.
I'm not sure what this system adds over a mirror either. It seems like a whiz bang look what we can do with deep learning project without much though to the actual utility. But "OMG clearing frost off fingernail sized camera lenses!" strikes me as being equally silly.
Same thing, but less area to clean? Mirrors don't work well if they're covered with frost or mud. Neither do camera lenses. Solutions are the same.
Lots of research shows that good drivers are constantly moving their attention, from far ahead to closer objects, mirrors, instruments, and back. The ones who gaze one thing, including the distance, are dangerous.
"Persevered for centuries. It literally took centuries for our technology to get where it is. There is no rational reason to believe it will not take more centuries to get to the point where space based manufacturing is economically viable."
Yes, there is. Technology development has been exponential, not linear.
In terms of mining in space, you don't even really need to invent that much. There are some engineering problems to work out, but nothing that really looks like it would be terribly difficult. It requires some initial investment to bootstrap, but even that isn't really that big by modern engineering project standards.
The problem is that there's currently very little reason to do it. You'd certainly sell some mega-telescopes, and a few other things, but that's not going to fund an entire industry. However, if launch costs came down enough so that the space-based population could grow to a reasonable size, then you'd have a market, and industrial development would be pretty much automatic. Alternately, you could develop the industry to build things like orbital rings that would bring "launch" costs down, but that requires more up-front capital.
Some people think SpaceX might bring launch costs down to the magic threshold with the BFR. Personally, I think bootstrapping orbital industry is a good next project for NASA. Quit fiddling with Mars and bootstrap building material production on the moon with the goals constructing a lunar space elevator / orbital ring complex for practice, followed by an Earth elevator/ring.
The James Webb telescope isn't much bigger than the 1948 Hale telescope. One of the things that makes it remarkable (and expensive) is that it folds up small enough to fit in a fairing for launch. If you could build one in space from raw materials you could make it enormous.
Living volume in space is pretty cheap in terms of materials. So why is it so cramped in the ISS? Because all those modules had to fit into fairings for launch. There are proposals to manufacture enormous stations in orbit basically welding together boxes made of girders manufactured in space.
If you could source the material in space as well, then you could build *really* enormous things. With space-based manufacture and raw material you could probably make things like O'Neil cylinders and orbital rings without much trouble.
The lethality of crime (and also suicide) in the US is far above any other western nation, and the only reasonable explanation anyone's ever found is that the availability of guns makes that happen. The NY Times article included an example: a Londoner and a New Yorker are at fairly equal risk of being robbed. But the New Yorker is 50 times more likely to die in the encounter.
Surprisingly, the rate of mental illness in the US, including the rate of untreated mental illness, isn't really much higher than it is in other western nations. That's why it doesn't explain the gun deaths.
By "the old terminology" do you mean prior to the 1950s? AI has always referred to a somewhat fuzzy collection of techniques that produce machine behaviour that is adaptive or not entirely deterministic.
The pop culture definition of AI is pretty wildly variable and usually changes depending on the current success-to-promises ratio.
That's why we have statistics.
Computer-related endeavours have a bit of a habit of assuming everything is deterministic and basing conclusions off one run. How many benchmarks have you seen where they ran the thing once (or maybe a couple of times) and that's it? If it's important, run it enough times, with random initial conditions, for some statistical validity.
If I need your code, data, exact hardware and precise random seed to replicate your result, your result is a fluke.
I agree with you, but I think it's the same problem at the root.
A robust result, whether it's a psych study, something in a petrie dish, or some machine learning tweak, must be replicable on new data. If it's not... what's the point really?
That's more obvious and easily demonstrable in machine learning; a research group asked for my help last year because they were having trouble with their deep learning model. They trained it on one dataset and it wouldn't work on another, similar dataset. Not surprising... you have to train it on diverse data to have it generalize well. Yeah, that's harder.
Other fields are no different. Tightly controlled studies make things easier and cheaper. But if that result is to be used generally then the necessary controls need to be quantified.
Having said that, the scientific literature is not supposed to be "truth." They're reports of observations. Individual papers are supposed to be the starting point for further investigation by other groups. Problem is, we've forgotten that, and don't reward it.
I like the idea of open data, but it concerns me that it might just exacerbate the problem: I do something and publish the result and the data; you come along, confirm my result (in the same data) and we call it replicated.
That's been looked at, actually. Various measures of mental illness don't explain the preponderance of mass shootings in the US. People really have looked carefully at a lot of possible explanations. The only one that really works is the availability of firearms.
The US seems to be an odd outlier in that regard. Other countries in the world, notably the UK and Australia, have used the aftermath of mass shootings to enact strong gun control and slash their violent crime and shooting rates.
Just gonna leave this here...
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy...
Mmm. Those are maybe on-duty military or police? Isreal has pretty strict gun control laws (as well as compulsory military service). They even started restricting access to firearms for off-duty military personnel and saw suicide rates fall.
It might not be a terrible idea to amend your constitution. There are only three countries in the world where owning a gun is a right to be infringed rather than a privilege to be possibly earned. Those are the US, Mexico and Guatemala.
And yet countries with gun control have far fewer mass shootings. That one in Norway had a high death toll, but it was very rare.
The NY Times reprinted an article today going over the stats. The number of guns (total, per capita, whatever) correlates with the number of mass shootings. It also correlates with the number of gun deaths (and violent deaths in general), which you're correct, is a bigger problem.
Mass shootings get the press because they're dramatic. But if you can use that impact to do something about the gun problem, go for it. It will help all around.
Two out of your four are "storage got cheaper" which was happening long before Google came around and kept happening. Google might have sped things up a bit by being aggressive, but that's all.
Searching being full of advertising... well, it still is, but thanks to Google 90% of it is hidden beneath the surface. Like an iceberg.
They did Google Docs right.
Who knows about Skype. This is the updater app that has massive code.