Interesting way of looking at it. How hard would it be to train a horse, or even a dog to obey a computer that tells it what to do. A dog might work better depending on the size of the payload. Depending on the task at hand, you might even want to use a really dumb animal. Have the computer dangle some food in front of it's face, and just have the animal follow the food.
How do we really define "provides a basic level of acceptable living"? 100 years ago, even 50 years ago, it was acceptable to not have indoor toilets (my mom didn't when she was a kid, in Canada). Is it considered OK if people can't afford internet or cell phones? Because neither of those are really necessary, and I know plenty of people who go without them, but there's also a huge group of people who think they can't live without them. Same goes for a lot of other luxury items, like cars and designer clothes. Defining that "basic level" is extremely difficult because in a free market, the people making stuff that people buy continually raise prices to the point where people can't just barely afford to buy the necessities. Also, there's the question about people who simply don't need to make an "acceptable living" with their job. High school kids who live at home, sometimes want a few extra dollar to spend on movie tickets and skateboards don't need to be making as much as a someone supporting themselves. Sure you can make the minimum wage lower for those under 18, but that discriminates against young people who for whatever reason don't have dependable parents and need to earn their own money, while continuing to attend highschool classes. There are other ideas, like garuanteed income supplements, where you let the employers pay whatever they and the employee agree on, no minimums, and the government tops up the difference between what the person is making, and the acceptable minimum. But very few governments want to have these services, because it looks like a free hand out, even though in many cases it would be cheaper to operate than the current welfare systems.
Also, tech may create new jobs, but they may not be jobs you're qualified to do. Imagine the job market in which all manual labour is carried out by robots. You could also automate a lot of service jobs. I swear the only reason they keep people staffed at a bank is to appease the older generation. There are many banks now that don't even have physical customer facing locations. How long until all (or the majority) of banks operate that way? The only jobs left will be jobs that actually required a lot of intelligence, creativity, and original thought. There's a lot of people, who for one reason or another, simply don't have those skills, and probably can't even learn the skills necessary to maintain a job.
Well, if one could travel to a point between the stars, you would effectively be in 0 gravity. The closest start to ours is about 4 light years away. If you were in between the 2 stars, you would be 2 light years away from the nearest object. Although technically, gravity doesn't have a boundary, I'm pretty sure the force of gravity at that location acting on something the size of a person would be pretty much unmeasurable.
Why not just use actual RAM for caching? It wouldn't even have to be particularly fast RAM. and then put some kind of battery on the drive in the case of a power outage. Currently drives have something like 64 MB of cache, but RAM is pretty cheap. Why not just put 8 GB of RAM on the drive, and use that for caching? Personally, I find my computer plenty fast, even with a spinning hard drive, as I have lots of RAM and modern systems are pretty good at doing their own caching. Sure it's a little slow if I need to do a whole lot of writes, but that's not a major use case of mine.
Yeah, and there's lithium batteries. Lithium + Water = Big Explosions. The only useful information here is that fire crews need to be better trained to deal with electric cars.
Perhaps it would be OK if users could delete files they themselves uploaded. I've always thought it would be interesting to have a programmable ftp server. Similar to dynamic pages on the web, using PHP/JSP/Python/CGI/Ruby, but served over the FTP protocol. You could control access to the files using scripts, and serve dynamic files, so for instance people downloading data sets over FTP would always be downloading a current version of the data.
I know that FTP exists, but I'm not aware of any servers that would limit the users in quite the necessary ways. It would have to allow for anonymous uploads, and yet somehow still have quotas. Something basic would assign a quota to each MAC address, but even that is quite easily changed. How does one enforce a quota when the people connecting are anonymous. You can't just track the IP of the end point, because it's an ad hoc network, and the clients could pick any address they wanted to on the subnet.
I've always wondered if that comic is a static image, or if it actually accurately represents the number of times Voyager 1 has left the solar system, and gets updated.
I was just thinking of doing something similar with a Raspberry Pi (or other similar cheap computer, Beaglebone etc.) Add a wireless dongle, create a network that people can connect to, and allow them to add files. It would be pretty easy to set up a firewall, so they couldn't do much damage. I'm not sure what the best software would be though. It would be nice if you could allow people to upload, but not delete files, and set up some kind of quota system so that someone doesn't just fill it with junk.
I'm not sure that's the best solution either. With the current desktop offerings, all applications run with the full permissions of the user. Things are a little bit better on the mobile side. At least with Android I can see which permissions an app has, and by default they are very limited in what they can do. With Windows/Linux, any application I run can go and delete my entire home folder, or send it all out to some site on the web, or wreak all kinds of havoc. Currently, running in a web browser, if the only pseudo-sandbox that exists for desktop systems. I'd much rather run a web app from some random company then install some application on my computer.
Actually, it's length vs. area. If you wanted to start talking volume, you'd have to start cutting up 3D shapes, like cubes and spheres. That would be even more complicated. If you're dealing with cubes or other 3 dimensional shapes, there's quite a few ways to split it in half. using lines to demonstrate fractions, at least when introducing them could help out. But after they have the basic idea of fractions, it's important that the student move on to fractions of more complex things.
Just a correction, in Canada, the health care systems are run by the province. It is not at the federal level. (I think) The federal government sets standards for who services must be provided, but each province manages their own health care system. Not sure how it works in Europe, but it's entirely possible than healthcare could be managed at the state level.
A few million hits in the same day, or even same hour isn't really all that much. Stackoverflow has 15 million page views a day and last I checked they still had everything hosted on a single rack. I would say that if it's down on the first day, there's probably not much they can do within a week to resolve it. Especially with the government bureaucracy that takes multiple meeting just to get any kind of change approved.
That being said, I'm pretty sure they already have a trademark on "Half-Life" and they really don't need to trademark the more specific Half-Life 3. It's not like you could just put out a game called "Half-Life 3" or "GTA 6" next month because the trademark holders on the previous game with a very similar title haven't bothered to file a trademark for the next game in the series.
RMS is very "Tinfoil-Hat". Some people will most likely disagree, or take offense with a statement like that. But I think that things like that are going a bit too far. I mean, you can even load your own software onto certain cell phones if you want. Sure, there could always be some kind of covert stuff hidden in the firmware, but the same could be done with your laptop, network card, or TV. I think that open source is a good idea, not because I think all the other companies are out to get me, but because it's a good way of disseminating information, and to ensure the knowledge of how these systems work is not lost. Most people don't even compile the source themselves, and instead just take the binaries handed to them by their distro maintainers, which isn't really any safer than using closed source software anyway.
He seems to have gone a little too "tinfoil-hat" for my tastes. He doesn't carry a cell phone anymore. I think that says a lot more than becoming an open source user.
My thoughts exactly. GPS has been around long enough. I don't believe for a second that Non-Friendly governments, or even hobbyists haven't already reverse engineered all the security protocols put into place to stop others from getting an precise location.
The only Otter box that's waterproof is the "Armor" series, which costs $100, and which (currently) isn't even available for the iPhone 5s (it is available for the 5).
As far as the Oregon goes, I think it was a pretty good device for what I paid ($200). The maps that came with it are terrible (and that's being nice, even the few roads they do have on the base map are extremely inaccurate). but you can get free maps from OpenStreetMap that can be easily loaded onto it with a little bit of Googling. The screen is pretty low res, but that's part of the tradeoff for having a screen that's easily readable in sunlight, usable with gloves, and durable without adding another case on top.
Also, my experience is that a phone is no replacement for a proper GPS. I got a proper GPS (Garmin Oregon 450) and the difference between using this and my phone (or any phone I've used) is quite significant. The time to acquire and maintain a signal, the ability to read the screen in sunlight, the ruggedness (+! for actually being waterproof), and many other aspects make the phone seem like a poor substitute. Sure a phone will do in a pinch, but given the option, I'll always bring my actual GPS with me when there's a chance it could be useful. I think the same goes for a lot of other things you can use a cell phone for. Most of them can use the LED as a flashlight, but it's a poor substitute for an actual flashlight. They work as a camera, but I'd rather use a real camera (even a point and shoot) over a phone any day. I still can't comprehend why they can't just put an actual flash on a phone. I think they are kind of like having the ultimate Swiss Army knife. Technically it has 87 tools, but in the effort to add more and more tools into the thing, the tools themselves have been all but useless.
As long as you can type at a good speed (30+ WPM) without looking at the keyboard, then I think that's generally fast enough. The problem I see with a lot of people is that they can do the 30+ WPM thing, but only if they are looking at the keyboard. This causes all sorts of problems, such as when people thing they are typing in one window or field, but the cursor is actually somewhere else, or a dialog has popped up on the screen. Also, they tend to make more spelling mistakes and typos since you don't catch them when you're actually typing them. This means that you have to go re-read the text after you've already typed it in, whereas someone who was typing while looking at the screen would have seen the errors as they happened, and doesn't have to re-read the whole text to look for errors. So you either end up with errors, or your over all speed slows down because you have to stop and re-read what you're already written every so often. Also, edits take much longer if you're more than a couple backspaces away from fixing the problem.
Technically, you are right, except for blackjack. Blackjack odds are so close to being 50/50 that even a little bit of knowledge about which cards are left in the deck can actually tip the odds in your favour. You can do this by keeping track of how many high cards vs low cards have been dealt. Counting cards is not illegal or even cheating, providing you can accomplish it just using your own brain. They can still kick you out, but it isn't cheating. You can't get charged with any crime, and you get to keep any winnings. Of course counting cards isn't quite as easy as some think, so they don't even make that big of a deal about it, until you make a very large amount of cash, because for every person who really can count cards properly, there's hundreds or thousands who can't count properly and who will keep on losing money where they think that if they just refine their skill that little bit more, they will come out on top. Also even those who can count will sometimes get greedy and irrational and make the wrong bet. Lastly, having someone win big is it's own kind of advertising. The rest of the people at the table will see somebody winning, and think it's possible for them to do the same.
I agree. All the waste is really in the charger itself, not in the cable. As much as I would like Apple to switch to a standard USB connection, I have no problem with their choice. Laptop charges on the other hand are a completely different story. They should also look into standardized replaceable batteries if they are really focused on cutting waste.
I think the problem is that the cars are in some dangerous point where they are mostly autonomous, but the driver is still expected to pay attention. If the car can do 90% of the driving, but expects the person to be paying attention 100% of the time, like in a conventional car, then it can indeed be dangerous. I wouldn't buy one specifically for this reason. Either the car is autonomous, and I don't have to pay attention at all, don't have to buy insurance (manufacturer should cover that, I'm in no control of what the car does), or I might as well just have a conventional car, which will be cheaper, and, since it doesn't try to drive, will actually require me to pay attention to what's going on.
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Interesting way of looking at it. How hard would it be to train a horse, or even a dog to obey a computer that tells it what to do. A dog might work better depending on the size of the payload. Depending on the task at hand, you might even want to use a really dumb animal. Have the computer dangle some food in front of it's face, and just have the animal follow the food.
How do we really define "provides a basic level of acceptable living"? 100 years ago, even 50 years ago, it was acceptable to not have indoor toilets (my mom didn't when she was a kid, in Canada). Is it considered OK if people can't afford internet or cell phones? Because neither of those are really necessary, and I know plenty of people who go without them, but there's also a huge group of people who think they can't live without them. Same goes for a lot of other luxury items, like cars and designer clothes. Defining that "basic level" is extremely difficult because in a free market, the people making stuff that people buy continually raise prices to the point where people can't just barely afford to buy the necessities. Also, there's the question about people who simply don't need to make an "acceptable living" with their job. High school kids who live at home, sometimes want a few extra dollar to spend on movie tickets and skateboards don't need to be making as much as a someone supporting themselves. Sure you can make the minimum wage lower for those under 18, but that discriminates against young people who for whatever reason don't have dependable parents and need to earn their own money, while continuing to attend highschool classes. There are other ideas, like garuanteed income supplements, where you let the employers pay whatever they and the employee agree on, no minimums, and the government tops up the difference between what the person is making, and the acceptable minimum. But very few governments want to have these services, because it looks like a free hand out, even though in many cases it would be cheaper to operate than the current welfare systems.
Also, tech may create new jobs, but they may not be jobs you're qualified to do. Imagine the job market in which all manual labour is carried out by robots. You could also automate a lot of service jobs. I swear the only reason they keep people staffed at a bank is to appease the older generation. There are many banks now that don't even have physical customer facing locations. How long until all (or the majority) of banks operate that way? The only jobs left will be jobs that actually required a lot of intelligence, creativity, and original thought. There's a lot of people, who for one reason or another, simply don't have those skills, and probably can't even learn the skills necessary to maintain a job.
Well, if one could travel to a point between the stars, you would effectively be in 0 gravity. The closest start to ours is about 4 light years away. If you were in between the 2 stars, you would be 2 light years away from the nearest object. Although technically, gravity doesn't have a boundary, I'm pretty sure the force of gravity at that location acting on something the size of a person would be pretty much unmeasurable.
The mission is to make lots of money. I'm sure lots of people could get on board with that one.
Why not just use actual RAM for caching? It wouldn't even have to be particularly fast RAM. and then put some kind of battery on the drive in the case of a power outage. Currently drives have something like 64 MB of cache, but RAM is pretty cheap. Why not just put 8 GB of RAM on the drive, and use that for caching? Personally, I find my computer plenty fast, even with a spinning hard drive, as I have lots of RAM and modern systems are pretty good at doing their own caching. Sure it's a little slow if I need to do a whole lot of writes, but that's not a major use case of mine.
Yeah, and there's lithium batteries. Lithium + Water = Big Explosions. The only useful information here is that fire crews need to be better trained to deal with electric cars.
Perhaps it would be OK if users could delete files they themselves uploaded. I've always thought it would be interesting to have a programmable ftp server. Similar to dynamic pages on the web, using PHP/JSP/Python/CGI/Ruby, but served over the FTP protocol. You could control access to the files using scripts, and serve dynamic files, so for instance people downloading data sets over FTP would always be downloading a current version of the data.
I know that FTP exists, but I'm not aware of any servers that would limit the users in quite the necessary ways. It would have to allow for anonymous uploads, and yet somehow still have quotas. Something basic would assign a quota to each MAC address, but even that is quite easily changed. How does one enforce a quota when the people connecting are anonymous. You can't just track the IP of the end point, because it's an ad hoc network, and the clients could pick any address they wanted to on the subnet.
I've always wondered if that comic is a static image, or if it actually accurately represents the number of times Voyager 1 has left the solar system, and gets updated.
I was just thinking of doing something similar with a Raspberry Pi (or other similar cheap computer, Beaglebone etc.) Add a wireless dongle, create a network that people can connect to, and allow them to add files. It would be pretty easy to set up a firewall, so they couldn't do much damage. I'm not sure what the best software would be though. It would be nice if you could allow people to upload, but not delete files, and set up some kind of quota system so that someone doesn't just fill it with junk.
I'm not sure that's the best solution either. With the current desktop offerings, all applications run with the full permissions of the user. Things are a little bit better on the mobile side. At least with Android I can see which permissions an app has, and by default they are very limited in what they can do. With Windows/Linux, any application I run can go and delete my entire home folder, or send it all out to some site on the web, or wreak all kinds of havoc. Currently, running in a web browser, if the only pseudo-sandbox that exists for desktop systems. I'd much rather run a web app from some random company then install some application on my computer.
Actually, it's length vs. area. If you wanted to start talking volume, you'd have to start cutting up 3D shapes, like cubes and spheres. That would be even more complicated. If you're dealing with cubes or other 3 dimensional shapes, there's quite a few ways to split it in half. using lines to demonstrate fractions, at least when introducing them could help out. But after they have the basic idea of fractions, it's important that the student move on to fractions of more complex things.
Just a correction, in Canada, the health care systems are run by the province. It is not at the federal level. (I think) The federal government sets standards for who services must be provided, but each province manages their own health care system. Not sure how it works in Europe, but it's entirely possible than healthcare could be managed at the state level.
A few million hits in the same day, or even same hour isn't really all that much. Stackoverflow has 15 million page views a day and last I checked they still had everything hosted on a single rack. I would say that if it's down on the first day, there's probably not much they can do within a week to resolve it. Especially with the government bureaucracy that takes multiple meeting just to get any kind of change approved.
That being said, I'm pretty sure they already have a trademark on "Half-Life" and they really don't need to trademark the more specific Half-Life 3. It's not like you could just put out a game called "Half-Life 3" or "GTA 6" next month because the trademark holders on the previous game with a very similar title haven't bothered to file a trademark for the next game in the series.
RMS is very "Tinfoil-Hat". Some people will most likely disagree, or take offense with a statement like that. But I think that things like that are going a bit too far. I mean, you can even load your own software onto certain cell phones if you want. Sure, there could always be some kind of covert stuff hidden in the firmware, but the same could be done with your laptop, network card, or TV. I think that open source is a good idea, not because I think all the other companies are out to get me, but because it's a good way of disseminating information, and to ensure the knowledge of how these systems work is not lost. Most people don't even compile the source themselves, and instead just take the binaries handed to them by their distro maintainers, which isn't really any safer than using closed source software anyway.
He seems to have gone a little too "tinfoil-hat" for my tastes. He doesn't carry a cell phone anymore. I think that says a lot more than becoming an open source user.
My thoughts exactly. GPS has been around long enough. I don't believe for a second that Non-Friendly governments, or even hobbyists haven't already reverse engineered all the security protocols put into place to stop others from getting an precise location.
The only Otter box that's waterproof is the "Armor" series, which costs $100, and which (currently) isn't even available for the iPhone 5s (it is available for the 5).
As far as the Oregon goes, I think it was a pretty good device for what I paid ($200). The maps that came with it are terrible (and that's being nice, even the few roads they do have on the base map are extremely inaccurate). but you can get free maps from OpenStreetMap that can be easily loaded onto it with a little bit of Googling. The screen is pretty low res, but that's part of the tradeoff for having a screen that's easily readable in sunlight, usable with gloves, and durable without adding another case on top.
Also, my experience is that a phone is no replacement for a proper GPS. I got a proper GPS (Garmin Oregon 450) and the difference between using this and my phone (or any phone I've used) is quite significant. The time to acquire and maintain a signal, the ability to read the screen in sunlight, the ruggedness (+! for actually being waterproof), and many other aspects make the phone seem like a poor substitute. Sure a phone will do in a pinch, but given the option, I'll always bring my actual GPS with me when there's a chance it could be useful. I think the same goes for a lot of other things you can use a cell phone for. Most of them can use the LED as a flashlight, but it's a poor substitute for an actual flashlight. They work as a camera, but I'd rather use a real camera (even a point and shoot) over a phone any day. I still can't comprehend why they can't just put an actual flash on a phone. I think they are kind of like having the ultimate Swiss Army knife. Technically it has 87 tools, but in the effort to add more and more tools into the thing, the tools themselves have been all but useless.
As long as you can type at a good speed (30+ WPM) without looking at the keyboard, then I think that's generally fast enough. The problem I see with a lot of people is that they can do the 30+ WPM thing, but only if they are looking at the keyboard. This causes all sorts of problems, such as when people thing they are typing in one window or field, but the cursor is actually somewhere else, or a dialog has popped up on the screen. Also, they tend to make more spelling mistakes and typos since you don't catch them when you're actually typing them. This means that you have to go re-read the text after you've already typed it in, whereas someone who was typing while looking at the screen would have seen the errors as they happened, and doesn't have to re-read the whole text to look for errors. So you either end up with errors, or your over all speed slows down because you have to stop and re-read what you're already written every so often. Also, edits take much longer if you're more than a couple backspaces away from fixing the problem.
Technically, you are right, except for blackjack. Blackjack odds are so close to being 50/50 that even a little bit of knowledge about which cards are left in the deck can actually tip the odds in your favour. You can do this by keeping track of how many high cards vs low cards have been dealt. Counting cards is not illegal or even cheating, providing you can accomplish it just using your own brain. They can still kick you out, but it isn't cheating. You can't get charged with any crime, and you get to keep any winnings. Of course counting cards isn't quite as easy as some think, so they don't even make that big of a deal about it, until you make a very large amount of cash, because for every person who really can count cards properly, there's hundreds or thousands who can't count properly and who will keep on losing money where they think that if they just refine their skill that little bit more, they will come out on top. Also even those who can count will sometimes get greedy and irrational and make the wrong bet. Lastly, having someone win big is it's own kind of advertising. The rest of the people at the table will see somebody winning, and think it's possible for them to do the same.
I agree. All the waste is really in the charger itself, not in the cable. As much as I would like Apple to switch to a standard USB connection, I have no problem with their choice. Laptop charges on the other hand are a completely different story. They should also look into standardized replaceable batteries if they are really focused on cutting waste.
I think the problem is that the cars are in some dangerous point where they are mostly autonomous, but the driver is still expected to pay attention. If the car can do 90% of the driving, but expects the person to be paying attention 100% of the time, like in a conventional car, then it can indeed be dangerous. I wouldn't buy one specifically for this reason. Either the car is autonomous, and I don't have to pay attention at all, don't have to buy insurance (manufacturer should cover that, I'm in no control of what the car does), or I might as well just have a conventional car, which will be cheaper, and, since it doesn't try to drive, will actually require me to pay attention to what's going on.