It's conceivable that we could arrive in a situation where we generated enough heat to cause severe problems, but this isn't it. The problem is CO2 emissions, which trap more of the Sun's heat inside the atmosphere.
The media has not been trying to keep Trump honest. Perhaps the magnitude of the job daunts them. The media has been happy to run with anti-Clinton stories.
In the case of the classified emails, as far as anyone's shown me, Clinton got the same treatment anyone who did essentially the same thing (negligently allowed some classified documents to be on a system they shouldn't be) did. Clinton haters have been happy to show that people who deliberately put classified materials on a non-classified system, which Clinton didn't do, have worse penalties applied than Clinton got. Big deal.
The original Windows was a graphic interface on top of MS-DOS, and a lot of the stuff was slow to change for compatibility reasons. MS-DOS was a takeoff on CP/M, so the ancestry goes back to the mid to late 70s.
Emaciated CLI.
You had MS-DOS commands, typically, which were good enough to run the machine.
File paths contain backslash, which is also a string special character and just pointlessly different than the existing standard.
There was a standard back then? CP/M used slash for command arguments, much like Unix uses hyphen. In what languages besides C was backslash a string special character back then? You're looking at Windows and saying they should have made it the same as Unix, which would have been nice, but there was no reason to do it early on.
8.3 filenames were pointlessly out of date at the start and absurd for how long it lasted. Likewise, isn't it/more/ work to annoyingly ignore and/or remove case in filenames?
8.3 filenames were standard in CP/M, and removing case is easy and fast in ASCII. Monocase was fairly common way back then, and typically capitalization doesn't change meaning in English, so case-smashing had advantages. Later versions of Windows hid the 8.3 names so you didn't have to worry about them except when diving into the internals.
Fully reinstall the OS once or twice a year, watching it slowly fall apart each time.
I typically have more issues than usual with Microsoft software, and I didn't run into that.
Something about a "registry". I don't really recall why I had to keep going back to that, but I associate the word with deep feelings of dissatisfaction.
Basically, an overcentralized and fragile substitute for config files. Definitely worth complaining about.
A lot of your complaints seem to be that Windows isn't Unix, which doesn't seem reasonable to me.
AI isn't ready to be on the roads today, so it doesn't matter whether it's vehicular homicide or not. When it is ready, it's likely to be somewhat safer than a human, so going out and driving your own car will be a little more like vehicular homicide. You seem to be assuming that humans never kill each other in accidents, which means you never looked at the statistics. If self-driving cars take over and kill ten thousand people a year in the US, that's a big improvement over the status quo.
We have laws governing legal liability for traffic accidents. Self-driving cars will fit into that legal framework. We have drunk drivers killing people and not apologizing to the survivors, even though they deliberately did something unsafe towards everyone on and near the road.
You seem to have a delusional belief that human drivers don't kill people, and therefore that an AI that kills someone will be some sort of unprecedented atrocity. You're wrong.
There's no comparison here between cars and jumbo jets. Figure that the cost of operating a vehicle is something like fifty cents per mile, so at freeway speeds the car costs about $30/hour. You're not going to get many good drivers for less than $15/hour (including all the indirect expenses here), so a driver is at least one-third of the expense.
Airliners are far more expensive, so even though the flight crew is paid more the cost savings in removing them would be small.
We have reliable software in many areas where safety matters. There's still some bugs, but they rarely have serious effects. (We learned from the Therac-25 incident.) We know how to do reliable software; it's just that it costs a lot more than letting your customers beta-test it.
We have simulated environments with simulated humans available right now for relatively little money. We can improve these simulations over time, and by using increased processing power.
In the Age of Discovery, everywhere people went there was oxygen. There wasn't much land that shipwrecked Europeans couldn't survive on in a pinch (except if there were hostile natives), and colonies weren't vitally dependent on supplies from home.
I say we start on the Moon, where if we screw up we probably have time to get whatever's necessary to the colonists before their emergency measures fail.
If everybody around you appears to have the same delusion, think carefully. In this case, you are insisting on referring to someone by a name that isn't her legal name, and which she doesn't want to be addressed by, and that's positively rude.
I have a basic principle here. I usually call people what they want me to, which is usually their name. Their name was not fixed as of the birth certificate, but can be changed (formally or informally) afterwards. Similarly, if I don't know what sex someone is and it becomes important, I go by what they identify as. Typically, this is male or female depending on brain structure, but I've also met some who identified as non-binary. I consider this basic politeness in social discourse.
It still seems to me like the operations are largely cosmetic. They don't change a male body into a female body. They change the genitals to resemble a woman's in some ways, giving the woman the ability to have better recreational sex, which has obvious good effects. (In the case I am most familiar with, she also got cosmetic surgery on her face to look more female.) I don't see it as significant if the person's underwear stays on. It isn't a vanity thing, and it's clear that people who get the surgeries really really want them, but it isn't clear to me that they're necessary in this case.
I'm writing partly from ignorance, and I know darn well that there are people around here who know much more about this than I do (Hi, Barbara!), so I'd welcome correction.
There was a hazard area, and getting bystanders out of it ASAP was the right thing to do. This means that someone in the hazard area should have had priority over someone who isn't, and so surge prices for people outside the hazard area has the right effect.
If you can afford to take a $50 Uber, you already aren't poor, and you can also afford to take a $120 Uber
I've been in situations where I could spare $50 for something important but not $120. Your statement makes sense only if wealth came as a binary attribute: poor or not-poor.
This provides a moral outcome in cases where the cost is approximately the same per rider. If you make half of what I do, you may need a ride more than I do and only be able to offer $30, while I offer $40, which is a smaller amount of what I'm paid. I pay less (in terms of how much I have to work to get the money) and get priority treatment.
You seem to be assuming that there's automatically enough ambulances in a disaster like this. If not, it's going to be better to transport the less injured by other means, and they should still get priority.
Last I was told, Uber insurance doesn't cover Uber drivers all the time, so that if a driver hits a pedestrian while on the way to a pickup Uber doesn't cover it. Since personal auto insurance won't cover it, that leaves a big hole. Does Uber now cover the driver all the time the driver is on the road working?
Uber drivers have been reported not getting commercial driver's licenses and commercial auto insurance, for example. This means they may be unlicensed drivers without insurance.
Commercial licenses are harder to get than personal licenses, because in the US personal driver's licenses are often necessary, and hence made easy to get. Any additional training and license costs are part of business expenses, both for tax and accounting purposes. Consider it one of the costs of doing business, and since a commercial driver is likely to be driving more than a personal driver, tougher licensing does serve a legitimate purpose.
As far as insurance goes, you'll have to talk to the insurance companies about that. There's a lot of competition there, so if insurance companies found that they were getting roughly the same claims on commercial as personal insurance, somebody would be offering it about as cheaply. There is no government interference here, other than the requirement that people operating vehicles weighing a ton or more traveling pretty fast have some sort of way of compensating victims if they screw up.
Developer liability is something of a chicken-and-egg problem.
Civil/Software Engineer: This design is dangerous/illegal in use. I won't do it.
Manager: So I'll just fire you and hire someone who will do what I want.
Civil Engineer: Good luck, because any professional engineer you hire will be legally liable, and they're not going to put their neck in the noose for you. OR Software Engineer: Uh, why don't I just implement the design, since someone else will have the legal liability.
There's also the fact that bridges designed by decent engineers don't collapse under normal use, while software is always buggy. At what level is the code normally buggy, and what level is illegally buggy?
So far, I haven't notice iOS devices becoming harder to do things on, and I've been away from Mac OSX for some time (I started using Ubuntu for what I would have used OSX for). Microsoft has indeed been making things harder to use than in Windows 7.
The gcode programs I've seen are basically recipes for moving stuff around in the mill. A casual knowledge of cooking will give someone enough experience with the ideas behind programming gcode.
Thing is, you were claiming things that I can't believe in the summary. Any evidence supporting the idea that the Glorious Revolution is pretty much the same sort of thing as WWII is suspect at best. Add to this my basic distrust of cyclical history, and it doesn't look worth following up to me.
Assume that Somalia had been independent and under a reasonable government 200 years ago, and how wealthy it would be. Now, assume that Somalia had a reasonable government today, and how wealthy it would be. The difference there is technology.
In the meantime, lots of people in Africa have cheap Android phones or tablets and access to the Internet, and that's a good first step.
There's much more to how parents raise their children at play here, and it's at least arguable that the best way to raise children in the bad parts of town is different from the best way to raise them in, say, my neighborhood. Some things that aren't really in the parents' control anyway are quality of education, health care, and security and stability.
Relative to the upper classes, the working poor have lost ground, at a time when health care expenses are growing (and the usual working poor jobs don't come with group insurance) and college is becoming more necessary and more expensive. This isn't good.
Slashdot Mirror
It's conceivable that we could arrive in a situation where we generated enough heat to cause severe problems, but this isn't it. The problem is CO2 emissions, which trap more of the Sun's heat inside the atmosphere.
Where I live, when my son was underage I had very limited access to his portal, and so did he. There are privacy considerations.
The media has not been trying to keep Trump honest. Perhaps the magnitude of the job daunts them. The media has been happy to run with anti-Clinton stories.
In the case of the classified emails, as far as anyone's shown me, Clinton got the same treatment anyone who did essentially the same thing (negligently allowed some classified documents to be on a system they shouldn't be) did. Clinton haters have been happy to show that people who deliberately put classified materials on a non-classified system, which Clinton didn't do, have worse penalties applied than Clinton got. Big deal.
The original Windows was a graphic interface on top of MS-DOS, and a lot of the stuff was slow to change for compatibility reasons. MS-DOS was a takeoff on CP/M, so the ancestry goes back to the mid to late 70s.
You had MS-DOS commands, typically, which were good enough to run the machine.
There was a standard back then? CP/M used slash for command arguments, much like Unix uses hyphen. In what languages besides C was backslash a string special character back then? You're looking at Windows and saying they should have made it the same as Unix, which would have been nice, but there was no reason to do it early on.
8.3 filenames were standard in CP/M, and removing case is easy and fast in ASCII. Monocase was fairly common way back then, and typically capitalization doesn't change meaning in English, so case-smashing had advantages. Later versions of Windows hid the 8.3 names so you didn't have to worry about them except when diving into the internals.
I typically have more issues than usual with Microsoft software, and I didn't run into that.
Basically, an overcentralized and fragile substitute for config files. Definitely worth complaining about.
A lot of your complaints seem to be that Windows isn't Unix, which doesn't seem reasonable to me.
AI isn't ready to be on the roads today, so it doesn't matter whether it's vehicular homicide or not. When it is ready, it's likely to be somewhat safer than a human, so going out and driving your own car will be a little more like vehicular homicide. You seem to be assuming that humans never kill each other in accidents, which means you never looked at the statistics. If self-driving cars take over and kill ten thousand people a year in the US, that's a big improvement over the status quo.
We have laws governing legal liability for traffic accidents. Self-driving cars will fit into that legal framework. We have drunk drivers killing people and not apologizing to the survivors, even though they deliberately did something unsafe towards everyone on and near the road.
You seem to have a delusional belief that human drivers don't kill people, and therefore that an AI that kills someone will be some sort of unprecedented atrocity. You're wrong.
There's no comparison here between cars and jumbo jets. Figure that the cost of operating a vehicle is something like fifty cents per mile, so at freeway speeds the car costs about $30/hour. You're not going to get many good drivers for less than $15/hour (including all the indirect expenses here), so a driver is at least one-third of the expense.
Airliners are far more expensive, so even though the flight crew is paid more the cost savings in removing them would be small.
We have reliable software in many areas where safety matters. There's still some bugs, but they rarely have serious effects. (We learned from the Therac-25 incident.) We know how to do reliable software; it's just that it costs a lot more than letting your customers beta-test it.
We have simulated environments with simulated humans available right now for relatively little money. We can improve these simulations over time, and by using increased processing power.
In the Age of Discovery, everywhere people went there was oxygen. There wasn't much land that shipwrecked Europeans couldn't survive on in a pinch (except if there were hostile natives), and colonies weren't vitally dependent on supplies from home.
I say we start on the Moon, where if we screw up we probably have time to get whatever's necessary to the colonists before their emergency measures fail.
If everybody around you appears to have the same delusion, think carefully. In this case, you are insisting on referring to someone by a name that isn't her legal name, and which she doesn't want to be addressed by, and that's positively rude.
I have a basic principle here. I usually call people what they want me to, which is usually their name. Their name was not fixed as of the birth certificate, but can be changed (formally or informally) afterwards. Similarly, if I don't know what sex someone is and it becomes important, I go by what they identify as. Typically, this is male or female depending on brain structure, but I've also met some who identified as non-binary. I consider this basic politeness in social discourse.
It still seems to me like the operations are largely cosmetic. They don't change a male body into a female body. They change the genitals to resemble a woman's in some ways, giving the woman the ability to have better recreational sex, which has obvious good effects. (In the case I am most familiar with, she also got cosmetic surgery on her face to look more female.) I don't see it as significant if the person's underwear stays on. It isn't a vanity thing, and it's clear that people who get the surgeries really really want them, but it isn't clear to me that they're necessary in this case.
I'm writing partly from ignorance, and I know darn well that there are people around here who know much more about this than I do (Hi, Barbara!), so I'd welcome correction.
For those who dislike Swedish law, it's also rape under UK law, or the extradition would have been denied.
There was a hazard area, and getting bystanders out of it ASAP was the right thing to do. This means that someone in the hazard area should have had priority over someone who isn't, and so surge prices for people outside the hazard area has the right effect.
Evacuation mode sounds like a good idea to me.
I've been in situations where I could spare $50 for something important but not $120. Your statement makes sense only if wealth came as a binary attribute: poor or not-poor.
This provides a moral outcome in cases where the cost is approximately the same per rider. If you make half of what I do, you may need a ride more than I do and only be able to offer $30, while I offer $40, which is a smaller amount of what I'm paid. I pay less (in terms of how much I have to work to get the money) and get priority treatment.
You seem to be assuming that there's automatically enough ambulances in a disaster like this. If not, it's going to be better to transport the less injured by other means, and they should still get priority.
Last I was told, Uber insurance doesn't cover Uber drivers all the time, so that if a driver hits a pedestrian while on the way to a pickup Uber doesn't cover it. Since personal auto insurance won't cover it, that leaves a big hole. Does Uber now cover the driver all the time the driver is on the road working?
Uber drivers have been reported not getting commercial driver's licenses and commercial auto insurance, for example. This means they may be unlicensed drivers without insurance.
Commercial licenses are harder to get than personal licenses, because in the US personal driver's licenses are often necessary, and hence made easy to get. Any additional training and license costs are part of business expenses, both for tax and accounting purposes. Consider it one of the costs of doing business, and since a commercial driver is likely to be driving more than a personal driver, tougher licensing does serve a legitimate purpose.
As far as insurance goes, you'll have to talk to the insurance companies about that. There's a lot of competition there, so if insurance companies found that they were getting roughly the same claims on commercial as personal insurance, somebody would be offering it about as cheaply. There is no government interference here, other than the requirement that people operating vehicles weighing a ton or more traveling pretty fast have some sort of way of compensating victims if they screw up.
Developer liability is something of a chicken-and-egg problem.
Civil/Software Engineer: This design is dangerous/illegal in use. I won't do it.
Manager: So I'll just fire you and hire someone who will do what I want.
Civil Engineer: Good luck, because any professional engineer you hire will be legally liable, and they're not going to put their neck in the noose for you. OR Software Engineer: Uh, why don't I just implement the design, since someone else will have the legal liability.
There's also the fact that bridges designed by decent engineers don't collapse under normal use, while software is always buggy. At what level is the code normally buggy, and what level is illegally buggy?
So far, I haven't notice iOS devices becoming harder to do things on, and I've been away from Mac OSX for some time (I started using Ubuntu for what I would have used OSX for). Microsoft has indeed been making things harder to use than in Windows 7.
The gcode programs I've seen are basically recipes for moving stuff around in the mill. A casual knowledge of cooking will give someone enough experience with the ideas behind programming gcode.
Thing is, you were claiming things that I can't believe in the summary. Any evidence supporting the idea that the Glorious Revolution is pretty much the same sort of thing as WWII is suspect at best. Add to this my basic distrust of cyclical history, and it doesn't look worth following up to me.
Assume that Somalia had been independent and under a reasonable government 200 years ago, and how wealthy it would be. Now, assume that Somalia had a reasonable government today, and how wealthy it would be. The difference there is technology.
In the meantime, lots of people in Africa have cheap Android phones or tablets and access to the Internet, and that's a good first step.
There's much more to how parents raise their children at play here, and it's at least arguable that the best way to raise children in the bad parts of town is different from the best way to raise them in, say, my neighborhood. Some things that aren't really in the parents' control anyway are quality of education, health care, and security and stability.
Relative to the upper classes, the working poor have lost ground, at a time when health care expenses are growing (and the usual working poor jobs don't come with group insurance) and college is becoming more necessary and more expensive. This isn't good.