I don't trust the safety features on my car. I'm fine with adaptive cruise control, because I've always got a couple of seconds warning of impending collision. I keep the vehicle more or less in the lane by myself, and I brake myself rather than letting the car do it. On the other hand, if I screw up, the car may do the right thing anyway, so that's good.
I've become used to my adaptive cruise control. One of the neat things is that, given a reasonable interval, there's time for me to notice any failure and take over myself. My Forester theoretically has some sort of lane-keeping ability, but if that fails I may not have a full second to avoid an accident, so I don't rely on it. (The one time I tried it, fingers a centimeter from the wheel, I didn't like how it did it anyway.)
That is because everything the government has "fixed" so far is worse then when they started!:)
When put that absolutely, it sounds like a religious belief rather than an empirical one. It would help if we could get a general attitude that we should improve how government works, rather than having a lot of people who'd rather break it so they can argue against government.
You're married to this company, dependent on them to make a living.
That's not necessarily any different than the perpetual license model. There aren't plug-in replacements for a lot of things. Even if you can get a replacement that does the same things, you've got to convert your data, retrain everyone, perhaps make collaborating with others harder, and take a productivity hit. If my company had to move our internal software to another OS, it would be a massive project. It would stop forward movement for a long time, and make our users' lives miserable.
One thing that helps maximize profits is producing stuff the customers want. Apple was very good at that for a long time.
There's no reason not to get a smart TV even if you don't want the extra capability. It's likely cheaper to provide you with one choice (smart) than two (smart and not smart).
Things like the headphone jack and user-removable battery are definitely based on what the customers are going to want. If Apple makes iPhones nobody wants, Apple is in trouble. You may want them, but people like you are apparently a small segment of the market. Apple cares what the customers are going to want. Apple doesn't give a crap what you individually want.
As local processing and storage become cheaper, the relative cost of people who know what they're doing goes up. For places that already run sufficiently large server farms to requite decent admins, this is a cost savings. For someone who is getting started in a small way, something like AWS or Azure is likely to work a lot better than the server being run by somebody who's fuzzy on this backup idea.
Spending $600 every 5 years is only a little more expensive than $100/year, although the latter is easier to budget for. The real downside of subscriptions is that, if your payments lapse, you can wind up with a lot of unusable files. The advantage of MS Office here is that you can usually switch to LibreOffice without problems.
You can access YouTube just fine from a browser, no matter what that browser is running on. Some products can access YouTube in other ways, and Google is rather fussy about those.
As an iPhone user, let me point out that Google has few if any contractual obligations to people who upload video. YouTube isn't the content owner unless there's an explicit transfer of copyright, but YouTube can distribute the video as it pleases, not as the content owner pleases.
I understand what you're saying. You're wrong about a lot of things.
Decimal floating-point isn't really different from binary floating-point. Having control over each digit buys you nothing once you start calculating. Calculations that work out exactly in decimal will be exact, but most won't. If you're working in decimal, try 1.0/3.0 + 1.0/3.0 + 1.0/3.0. If you get 1.0, then the computer is using hidden digits, which by definition you don't have control over, because with fixed numbers of decimal digits you get 0. followed by infinitely many 3s, and adding three 3s together gives you 9.
If you don't understand this, you know very little of floating-point, and you should learn more. I posted a cite of a classic article.
Actually, if it were self-refuting, you could construct an argument based on what it says that would make it wrong. I'm pretty sure you can't do that.
Power is an inherently dangerous thing, and so are citizens who want authoritarian rulers. It doesn't matter what the other politics are, but when people are looking for someone to tell everybody what to do things can get ugly real fast. Right now, we seem to have a fair number of Republican authoritarians, enough to influence Republican internal workings and hence enough to make trouble.
Lots of countries have avoided such violence and avoided Communism.
You are using non-standard definitions of right and left. Could you clarify?
I may have read something that wasn't so, but it was from sources I generally trust. Your cite is from December, and isn't relevant to the present situation.
Right, but this isn't the same thing. I was trying to point out that nobody in the US has direct access to an Irish safe deposit box, but that Microsoft apparently has direct access to data in Irish servers. It is possible for people in the US to access data overseas, but not physical objects.
A US court can't order people in Ireland around. It can issue orders to people in the US. It can tell people in the US to say things to people in Ireland, but those people are going to be subject to Irish courts rather than US courts. It can tell people in the US to access servers in Ireland that they have access to, and there's nobody in Ireland who has to do anything, so there's no automatic way to invoke Irish law.
Clearly, a US court can order people in the US to turn over stuff in US servers. Can a US court order people in the US to do the exact same thing on Irish servers?
"I believe we have to start somewhere" is an open-ended statement, suggesting more and more tariffs on imports, and not suggesting an end to it. As a prelude, it's setting up a slippery slope. Classifying solar panels as "essentials" and not defining "essentials" suggests that lots of things would be "essentials", leaving me with no idea what you wouldn't want to slap tariffs on. If you're recommending temporary tariffs for a few things, that's another thing.
It could include solar from other places on the grid. Whatever it is, it's less likely to be coal all along. Natural gas is cheaper and we've got that in abundance. There's no point in building a new coal plant when gas is less expensive and less likely to be heavily regulated in 2021.
Saying we need to start somewhere sounds like you're advocating shutting down imports so we have to produce everything ourselves, driving prices up. If you can classify solar panels as essentials, you can classify almost anything as an essential. You're setting up a slippery-slope argument by yourself.
Provide incentives to work. I haven't seen any UBI proposal with an income I'm willing to live on, and I have a choice here. I can work at a fairly high-paying job and get more money than I really want to live on.
Just because we need some people working doesn't mean we need some specific people to be working. This isn't slavery.
Why do we need to colonize the oceans? If we have too many people, we might want to put some underwater, but colonist isn't really a job.
We still don't have deep space hotels or asteroid mining colonies.
We're not going to get deep space hotels any time soon. Getting off this rock into LEO is really, really expensive, and it will stay that way for the foreseeable future. Asteroid mining colonies? Sure, that's fairly plausible, if not in the near future, but since very few people will get off-planet, there won't be many jobs there.
If everyone is prosperous and has access to good healthcare they won't have enough kids.
Is this a basic law of nature, or is it a result of economics? It used to be that children were economically useful, and now they're quite expensive. Perhaps we should put some research and resources into solving this.
A robot might be better at changing diapers, feeding, and burping. It won't be a good parent for a long, long time.
The baby needs human interaction for speech or emotional development pretty much from the start. If the parents are too impoverished to provide that, that's a problem we need to solve.
By not being able to think like humans do, the machines aren't going to be able to address our needs.
You'd be surprised at how many things were in the category of "machines will never be able to do that" and are now performed by machines. (Besides, tough judgment calls are only tough because they're between choices that are roughly equally desirable or equally undesirable. You don't get a trolley problem if you can divert the trolley somewhere it won't run over people. If the choices are roughly equal, to the extent of the information available, either choice works.)
Slashdot Mirror
Add to the list of things that distract drivers: hard-to-read electronic signs warning against distracted driving. I found that one ironic.
I don't trust the safety features on my car. I'm fine with adaptive cruise control, because I've always got a couple of seconds warning of impending collision. I keep the vehicle more or less in the lane by myself, and I brake myself rather than letting the car do it. On the other hand, if I screw up, the car may do the right thing anyway, so that's good.
I've become used to my adaptive cruise control. One of the neat things is that, given a reasonable interval, there's time for me to notice any failure and take over myself. My Forester theoretically has some sort of lane-keeping ability, but if that fails I may not have a full second to avoid an accident, so I don't rely on it. (The one time I tried it, fingers a centimeter from the wheel, I didn't like how it did it anyway.)
When put that absolutely, it sounds like a religious belief rather than an empirical one. It would help if we could get a general attitude that we should improve how government works, rather than having a lot of people who'd rather break it so they can argue against government.
Not to mention children. Children are expensive. Unless you want to doom the human race, you have to allow for children.
That's not necessarily any different than the perpetual license model. There aren't plug-in replacements for a lot of things. Even if you can get a replacement that does the same things, you've got to convert your data, retrain everyone, perhaps make collaborating with others harder, and take a productivity hit. If my company had to move our internal software to another OS, it would be a massive project. It would stop forward movement for a long time, and make our users' lives miserable.
One thing that helps maximize profits is producing stuff the customers want. Apple was very good at that for a long time.
There's no reason not to get a smart TV even if you don't want the extra capability. It's likely cheaper to provide you with one choice (smart) than two (smart and not smart).
Things like the headphone jack and user-removable battery are definitely based on what the customers are going to want. If Apple makes iPhones nobody wants, Apple is in trouble. You may want them, but people like you are apparently a small segment of the market. Apple cares what the customers are going to want. Apple doesn't give a crap what you individually want.
As local processing and storage become cheaper, the relative cost of people who know what they're doing goes up. For places that already run sufficiently large server farms to requite decent admins, this is a cost savings. For someone who is getting started in a small way, something like AWS or Azure is likely to work a lot better than the server being run by somebody who's fuzzy on this backup idea.
Spending $600 every 5 years is only a little more expensive than $100/year, although the latter is easier to budget for. The real downside of subscriptions is that, if your payments lapse, you can wind up with a lot of unusable files. The advantage of MS Office here is that you can usually switch to LibreOffice without problems.
You can access YouTube just fine from a browser, no matter what that browser is running on. Some products can access YouTube in other ways, and Google is rather fussy about those.
As an iPhone user, let me point out that Google has few if any contractual obligations to people who upload video. YouTube isn't the content owner unless there's an explicit transfer of copyright, but YouTube can distribute the video as it pleases, not as the content owner pleases.
When Amazon and Hachette Publishing were having their pissing contest, an author I kinda knew told us that there were no good guys in that fight.
I understand what you're saying. You're wrong about a lot of things.
Decimal floating-point isn't really different from binary floating-point. Having control over each digit buys you nothing once you start calculating. Calculations that work out exactly in decimal will be exact, but most won't. If you're working in decimal, try 1.0/3.0 + 1.0/3.0 + 1.0/3.0. If you get 1.0, then the computer is using hidden digits, which by definition you don't have control over, because with fixed numbers of decimal digits you get 0. followed by infinitely many 3s, and adding three 3s together gives you 9.
If you don't understand this, you know very little of floating-point, and you should learn more. I posted a cite of a classic article.
Actually, if it were self-refuting, you could construct an argument based on what it says that would make it wrong. I'm pretty sure you can't do that.
Power is an inherently dangerous thing, and so are citizens who want authoritarian rulers. It doesn't matter what the other politics are, but when people are looking for someone to tell everybody what to do things can get ugly real fast. Right now, we seem to have a fair number of Republican authoritarians, enough to influence Republican internal workings and hence enough to make trouble.
Lots of countries have avoided such violence and avoided Communism.
You are using non-standard definitions of right and left. Could you clarify?
I may have read something that wasn't so, but it was from sources I generally trust. Your cite is from December, and isn't relevant to the present situation.
I am aware of filibusters.
Right, but this isn't the same thing. I was trying to point out that nobody in the US has direct access to an Irish safe deposit box, but that Microsoft apparently has direct access to data in Irish servers. It is possible for people in the US to access data overseas, but not physical objects.
A US court can't order people in Ireland around. It can issue orders to people in the US. It can tell people in the US to say things to people in Ireland, but those people are going to be subject to Irish courts rather than US courts. It can tell people in the US to access servers in Ireland that they have access to, and there's nobody in Ireland who has to do anything, so there's no automatic way to invoke Irish law.
Clearly, a US court can order people in the US to turn over stuff in US servers. Can a US court order people in the US to do the exact same thing on Irish servers?
"I believe we have to start somewhere" is an open-ended statement, suggesting more and more tariffs on imports, and not suggesting an end to it. As a prelude, it's setting up a slippery slope. Classifying solar panels as "essentials" and not defining "essentials" suggests that lots of things would be "essentials", leaving me with no idea what you wouldn't want to slap tariffs on. If you're recommending temporary tariffs for a few things, that's another thing.
Because we like to connect Presidents with their actions and decisions. A little over a year ago, we had the "Obama Administration".
It could include solar from other places on the grid. Whatever it is, it's less likely to be coal all along. Natural gas is cheaper and we've got that in abundance. There's no point in building a new coal plant when gas is less expensive and less likely to be heavily regulated in 2021.
Saying we need to start somewhere sounds like you're advocating shutting down imports so we have to produce everything ourselves, driving prices up. If you can classify solar panels as essentials, you can classify almost anything as an essential. You're setting up a slippery-slope argument by yourself.
Provide incentives to work. I haven't seen any UBI proposal with an income I'm willing to live on, and I have a choice here. I can work at a fairly high-paying job and get more money than I really want to live on.
Just because we need some people working doesn't mean we need some specific people to be working. This isn't slavery.
Why do we need to colonize the oceans? If we have too many people, we might want to put some underwater, but colonist isn't really a job.
We're not going to get deep space hotels any time soon. Getting off this rock into LEO is really, really expensive, and it will stay that way for the foreseeable future. Asteroid mining colonies? Sure, that's fairly plausible, if not in the near future, but since very few people will get off-planet, there won't be many jobs there.
Is this a basic law of nature, or is it a result of economics? It used to be that children were economically useful, and now they're quite expensive. Perhaps we should put some research and resources into solving this.
Hey, fucking for money is a job that's not going to be automated any time soon.
A robot might be better at changing diapers, feeding, and burping. It won't be a good parent for a long, long time.
The baby needs human interaction for speech or emotional development pretty much from the start. If the parents are too impoverished to provide that, that's a problem we need to solve.
You'd be surprised at how many things were in the category of "machines will never be able to do that" and are now performed by machines. (Besides, tough judgment calls are only tough because they're between choices that are roughly equally desirable or equally undesirable. You don't get a trolley problem if you can divert the trolley somewhere it won't run over people. If the choices are roughly equal, to the extent of the information available, either choice works.)