It has to be the timespan of technological civilization. For all we know, there should be no proper civilisation on Earth in few hundred years. Tragedy of the commons will make sure of that. It makes sense for everybody to exploit Earth in short term instead of trying to branch out to space in any real way. And when at some point it will be obvious that it doesn't scale, there will be not enough free/cheap resources available to make that jump. And then big asteriod will appear... That is, if we don't nuke ourselves into oblivion beforehand in name of some ancient deity...
Putting 1000 people on Mars/Asteroid Belt in self-sustaining environment would probably cost same amount (of cash/energy/resources/whatever) as feeding billion of people on earth for their lifetimes. As long as people think that maximizing earth population is overall goal of mankind, there is no chance of any change. And we have it encoded in our genetic and memetic makup. And probably same happens for every civilization out there.
Regarding self-replicating probes... We might have been hit by one 4 billion years ago - DNA+microbes are a lot better nanomachines than clockwork automatons.
In the business area I work, experience trumps education. We are not even looking at education history when browsing CVs. But it is a work requiring a lot of dedication, long hours and a lot of stress and I have serious doubts that anybody over 50 or so is getting hired on 'grunt' level (it will be different in upper management). Obviously, it is not allowed to discriminate based on age - but lack of degree might give a proper _excuse_ to reject a candidate.
So, real problem is probably that "jobs always seem to go to the *younger* guys with impressive degrees".
As other people suggested, start own small business, start selling your skills as a company, not as a worker - at this point age doesn't matter anymore.
Doesn't spy on you and send pics to the NSA of you naked walking from the shower to bathroom...
With XBox One your naked pictures will end up in NSA. With Ouya, the will end up on every hacker harddrive - of course, if Ouya still will have enough processing power to make photos with all the trojans and zombies running in background... sorry, wait... Ouya cannot take pictures... yes, you are right, you are safe on that front.
Is he still saying that? Originally Carmack wanted to take over the Oculus if it proves to be a success and was shown middle finger - relations got a lot colder since then...
It makes sense if language explores new ideas or has groundbreaking implementation. There is no reason to experiment with languages which have both design and implementation sub-par to multiple of existing ones. That said, everybody should try writing their own language at least once in lifetime - it is very good experience and you learn a lot about why other languages have certain quirks. It is just that you should not try to sell your 'baby' on slashdot...
All of us have half-finished, useless projects out there, which have potential to be something nice if we spend another 30 man-years of effort and rewrite them few times. Nothing wrong with that. But posting ninja self-promoting submissions to slashdot about them... thats pathetic.
"stimulating electrodes are placed in the spinal canal via a needle inserted between the appropriate vertebrae in parallel with the spinal cord. The electrodes are connected to a power source"
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Americas are 'foreigners' who have been living in their country for few generations? I suppose that there might be still few bad feelings amongs _native_ population about 'newcomers'. Difference is that in NA it was done properly, by decimating native population and making sure they won't outvote anybody. In Europe, you still have situations from NA from few hundred years ago - 'standard European' being Native American. We just haven't been yet culled by foreigners. They don't have technology differential enjoyed by settlers in NA back then, so they have do it with population pressure rather than brute force.
Maybe I was not clear - obviously, I meant embedding GPL _source_ code. Binaries compiled from GPL are no problem - we are using linux kernels, gcc compilers etc. So yes, if we get a source code to commercial software somehow with license which doesn't allow unburdened redistribution, it is also going to be serious problem as well.
I assure you that not many companies allow you to touch anything GPL even with 10-foot pole. I work for big company (150k+ employees) and there is a blank ban on touching any GPL code ever for internal development. Internal redistribution or not, there is always a chance that you may want to give some variation of the software to client/subsidiary company/whatever - and opening source at this moment (which might be linked to some in-house prioprietary libraries in meantime) is just not worth the effort.
There is small difference. I don't think that futurists of 18th century were writing about passive societies being entrapped by looking at photographs of real world - but SF writers from half century ago were warning about civilizations stagnating because of VR addiction. Not Oculus Rift VR, but 'real' VR - but question is, how far the magic barrier is.
We already have perfect sound simulation. With Rift, we are getting a lot closer to have good enough visual simulation. Taste probably doesn't matter, smell can be solved it if ever becomes a major obstacle. Only things left is full-body tacticle feedback (including temperature), muscle/motor capture in unrestricted environment and gravity/vestibular system interaction. I'm in no way saying these are simple things to do - but I could imagine, in 20 years or so, somebody suspended in some kind of non-viscous liquid, attached to rotating frame, with full-body suit simulating touch feedback, with motion capture being done by monitoring nerves (while being partially paralysed thanks to some chemicals) with vestibular system being stimulated by some kind of ultrasound device (this one was already tried). Expensive like hell, but easier than flying cars probably...
I don't really get it. If it is illegal to raise a cattle in rainforest, put these people in jail or fine heavily. They won't do that, but they expect same people to label the cattle 'It comes from illegal farm in Amazon, don't buy it, because we are breaking the law' ? They are cutting trees and bribing officials, but not putting a label will be beyond their capablities?
Plenty of examples in Science fiction literature. From the top of my head I can remember a short story where mandatory state IQ tests determined class you belonged to. Lowest class was forbidden from working and was provided for, higher classes were forced to work to utilize their mental capacity. Story was about a hacker helping people cheat IQ tests so they could classify as higher class and work. Incidentally that hacker had to pay another hacker to hide his own high IQ so he didnt have to work:). I forgot the name of the story:(
Story also has quite nice projection of effects of multi-purpose smart wallets - something we are going towards with smart phones these days. For example, they had biometric identification to use money, so there was a new type criminals called 'skinners', which were killing the owner, skinning their hand and putting on top of their own as a glove, to fool both fingerprint and warm/blood pulse scanner.
Anyway, Limes Inferior shows different world - world where work was enforced on people. Better example would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_in_Spain, where few capable people were working for all the rest of the world and rest of the world was growing bigger and bigger demands, 'because they are voting majority'. Plus, there it is available in English, as opposed to Limes Inferior:(
Do you really think that republicans will try to attack Obama for putting something they really want in place? In few years, they will be pulling the trigger, so no point in breaking the joystick now, just to spoil other kid's fun.
In any case, it is interesting to see that rather than be concerned about "We can kill random people in the world without the trial" - people are very much concerned about "We can kill Americans, who we strongly suspect of terrorism, without the trial". I can assure you, they won't misuse this capability (because of political backlash) anywhere near the way signature strikes etc are misused now. Before American will die, they will check for 300% if he is terrorist. For foreigners, 80% is ok. Unless these foreigners have beards and are in desert, then even 20% is good enough.
Want to be safe - shave, rather than try to impeach the president.
There was a joke about a physicist preparing an equation for a mobster to predict the horse race results. Unfortunately, he has done some simplifications - basically, assumed spherical horse moving in vacuum.
Fact that complicated model is complicated (or even impossible given current capabilities), doesn't mean that oversimplified model is valuable. They might have been coming with crazy results for few years (10->100 AU; 0.0001->0.0005AU; -PI*AU->PI*AU; 5AU-iAU->5AU+iAU) each time modifying some constants until they finally hit one range which was including 1AU by accident and decided it is good enough to publish...
They are taking greenhouse effect into account? If it goes further this way, by 2050 habitable zone for Earth will be between 1.10 and 2.05 AU, because of amount of CO2 we pump to atmosphere. And this will give us a clear conscience - it is not our fault for making Earth inhabitable, it is just in wrong place in orbit for our pollution needs.
I wonder if our ancestors, barely surviving ice ages, would also agree that 0.99AU is way too close to Sun...
I was not familiar with term 'bucket shop'. After reading wikipedia entry, they look exactly the same as spread betting which is a craze for last few years in UK, as it allows to avoid paying taxes from stock gains by presenting them as 'gambling'. Which in turn is almost the same as futures market (except tax difference) - I don't see any relation to CDSes.
Last market crash was caused by MBS, not CDS. Cause was real estate bubble + careless loans, which in turn is a result of 'living on credit' approach happening for last half century. CDSes were just 'force multipliers'. Car analogy: Somebody shoots all your tires (MBS/loans), you crash into the 4 trees at once (defaults) and some airbags (CDS) fail to deploy (because they were misdesigned to handle hits from only 1 side). Now, it is easy to demonize car manufacturer for putting faulty airbags, especially if you want to move the focus away from the fact that it was a government officer shooting at your tires hoping that it will make you drive faster...
Hmmm. One can argue that no software should be patentable ever. Thats ok. But if you DO allow patenting software, I don't think that 'no allowing emulation of physical concept' is a valid rule. If I create super-smart software emulating protein folding using some new concepts, allowing it to quickly solve all current problems, should it be non-patentable just based on grounds that that concept exists in physical reality for billion+ years?
While we all hope you will live as long as possible and continue your work, do you think that somebody will pick up your legacy and continue to debunk the fraudsters when you are not longer able to? Do you have trusted people to whom you are willing to hand over the responsibility, both financially and skill-wise?
Somehow, period after second WW till 90's was a reasonably stable (market-wise) all over the world. I'm not sure how much it is due to US regulations affecting entire world and how much a cycle happening after big war + military tension due to Cold War.
Are you sure that introduction of CDSes happened because of deregulations and would not be possible before that if somebody had similar idea? They could have been simulated before with different instruments, just in a lot less friendly way.
If Poland breaches 60% debt/GNP ratio, it cannot borrow money any more in any form - which in basic form means budget without deficit. Repaying debts is part of budget, so it is not automatically stopped.
Now, given considerable deficit each year, it would be very hard to manage it. Some immediate things would be reducing government-provided salaries and possibly pensions (which doesn't mean just politicians, it is about teachers/police/minicipal workers/etc), huge increase in taxes (which will damage economy, but in bit longer run - you would get more money for short period of time), reduction/stopping of public-funded investments (even less new roads etc). This would probably be enough for one year - but this 60% is expressed as ratio of GNP. After such action, GNP would drop dramatically, so debt as percentage would start to grow very fast next years without a real way out.
This is obvious political suicide for any party which will allow this to happen. My feeling is that if this happens, constitution would be changed - but only after opposition (which votes would be needed for that) would make sure that leading party would give up completely.
I think that similar thing happened in US - there was also some kind of spending limit and Congress just agreed to extend it multiple times, after some period of political haggling?
Poland had strange way of computing national debt expressed in foreign currencies - it was taking a snapshot of exchange rates from single day during a year. If debt breaches magic threshold, bad things happen (like having to make budget without deficit for next year, which would end up with civil war probably). So what government+central bank did? They have manipulated exchange rate on that particular date to make debt look smaller and avoid the problems. And while you can believe it was for 'people', I'm quite sure that people making the decisions were actually thinking about votes during next election.
So, drawing the parallels Bank Government/CentralBank traders politicians personal monetary gains votes shareholder gains citizens gains manipulating LIBOR secretly manipulating FX secretly trying to artificially reduce exposure trying to artificially reduce debt
Yes, private banks are more evil in most cases, but it is not that far fetched analogy.
Centralized, controlled market (think eastern block before 1989) leads to even worse fraud and monopolies. And somewhere in the middle you have European Union, which tries to do both at same time and has biggest bureaucracy machine ever. And there are as many frauds as in any other system (way the EU funds for development of regions are being manipulated is just mind boggling), maybe just bit less monopolies. And carrots are now fruits, instead of vegetables, due to a lobbing from one carrot-jam producing country.
It is not a fault of free market, communism or bureaucracy that bad things are happening. It is just a nature of people. We like to take advantage of each other. Empathy generally works only on local scale - people who will not cheat a cashier at local shop for 10 cents he has forgotten to take, often won't have issue with screwing half of foreign country by manipulating exchange rates at proper moment.
I don't think there is a solution, unless you want to get back to living in small disconnected communities (300 people) where everybody can be held accountable for his actions by local chieftain with a big club.
This is assuming that you use desert to grow these plants. If you convert forest/meadows/whatever into biofuel fields, then you are losing CO2 trapping done by things which were growing there originally.
Ban uranium/plutonium/certain kind of centrifuges because you can create atomic bomb with them and blow up entire city? Why just not let everybody have their own bombs and ban actual detonation? Ban/regulate certain kinds of biological warfare viruses? We should just ban sneezing while being infected by one. Ban parking 1-mile asteroids in unstable orbits around earth? No, just penalize people who do it slippily enough to drop them to earth and cause mass extinctions.
Slashdot Mirror
It has to be the timespan of technological civilization. For all we know, there should be no proper civilisation on Earth in few hundred years. Tragedy of the commons will make sure of that. It makes sense for everybody to exploit Earth in short term instead of trying to branch out to space in any real way. And when at some point it will be obvious that it doesn't scale, there will be not enough free/cheap resources available to make that jump. And then big asteriod will appear...
That is, if we don't nuke ourselves into oblivion beforehand in name of some ancient deity...
Putting 1000 people on Mars/Asteroid Belt in self-sustaining environment would probably cost same amount (of cash/energy/resources/whatever) as feeding billion of people on earth for their lifetimes. As long as people think that maximizing earth population is overall goal of mankind, there is no chance of any change. And we have it encoded in our genetic and memetic makup. And probably same happens for every civilization out there.
Regarding self-replicating probes... We might have been hit by one 4 billion years ago - DNA+microbes are a lot better nanomachines than clockwork automatons.
In the business area I work, experience trumps education. We are not even looking at education history when browsing CVs. But it is a work requiring a lot of dedication, long hours and a lot of stress and I have serious doubts that anybody over 50 or so is getting hired on 'grunt' level (it will be different in upper management). Obviously, it is not allowed to discriminate based on age - but lack of degree might give a proper _excuse_ to reject a candidate.
So, real problem is probably that "jobs always seem to go to the *younger* guys with impressive degrees".
As other people suggested, start own small business, start selling your skills as a company, not as a worker - at this point age doesn't matter anymore.
Doesn't spy on you and send pics to the NSA of you naked walking from the shower to bathroom...
With XBox One your naked pictures will end up in NSA. With Ouya, the will end up on every hacker harddrive - of course, if Ouya still will have enough processing power to make photos with all the trojans and zombies running in background... sorry, wait... Ouya cannot take pictures... yes, you are right, you are safe on that front.
Is he still saying that? Originally Carmack wanted to take over the Oculus if it proves to be a success and was shown middle finger - relations got a lot colder since then...
It makes sense if language explores new ideas or has groundbreaking implementation. There is no reason to experiment with languages which have both design and implementation sub-par to multiple of existing ones.
That said, everybody should try writing their own language at least once in lifetime - it is very good experience and you learn a lot about why other languages have certain quirks. It is just that you should not try to sell your 'baby' on slashdot...
All of us have half-finished, useless projects out there, which have potential to be something nice if we spend another 30 man-years of effort and rewrite them few times. Nothing wrong with that. But posting ninja self-promoting submissions to slashdot about them... thats pathetic.
"stimulating electrodes are placed in the spinal canal via a needle inserted between the appropriate vertebrae in parallel with the spinal cord. The electrodes are connected to a power source"
I'll wait for strap-on version.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Americas are 'foreigners' who have been living in their country for few generations? I suppose that there might be still few bad feelings amongs _native_ population about 'newcomers'. Difference is that in NA it was done properly, by decimating native population and making sure they won't outvote anybody.
In Europe, you still have situations from NA from few hundred years ago - 'standard European' being Native American. We just haven't been yet culled by foreigners. They don't have technology differential enjoyed by settlers in NA back then, so they have do it with population pressure rather than brute force.
Maybe I was not clear - obviously, I meant embedding GPL _source_ code. Binaries compiled from GPL are no problem - we are using linux kernels, gcc compilers etc.
So yes, if we get a source code to commercial software somehow with license which doesn't allow unburdened redistribution, it is also going to be serious problem as well.
I assure you that not many companies allow you to touch anything GPL even with 10-foot pole. I work for big company (150k+ employees) and there is a blank ban on touching any GPL code ever for internal development.
Internal redistribution or not, there is always a chance that you may want to give some variation of the software to client/subsidiary company/whatever - and opening source at this moment (which might be linked to some in-house prioprietary libraries in meantime) is just not worth the effort.
There is small difference. I don't think that futurists of 18th century were writing about passive societies being entrapped by looking at photographs of real world - but SF writers from half century ago were warning about civilizations stagnating because of VR addiction. Not Oculus Rift VR, but 'real' VR - but question is, how far the magic barrier is.
We already have perfect sound simulation. With Rift, we are getting a lot closer to have good enough visual simulation. Taste probably doesn't matter, smell can be solved it if ever becomes a major obstacle. Only things left is full-body tacticle feedback (including temperature), muscle/motor capture in unrestricted environment and gravity/vestibular system interaction. I'm in no way saying these are simple things to do - but I could imagine, in 20 years or so, somebody suspended in some kind of non-viscous liquid, attached to rotating frame, with full-body suit simulating touch feedback, with motion capture being done by monitoring nerves (while being partially paralysed thanks to some chemicals) with vestibular system being stimulated by some kind of ultrasound device (this one was already tried). Expensive like hell, but easier than flying cars probably...
I don't really get it. If it is illegal to raise a cattle in rainforest, put these people in jail or fine heavily. They won't do that, but they expect same people to label the cattle 'It comes from illegal farm in Amazon, don't buy it, because we are breaking the law' ? They are cutting trees and bribing officials, but not putting a label will be beyond their capablities?
Plenty of examples in Science fiction literature. From the top of my head I can remember a short story where mandatory state IQ tests determined class you belonged to. Lowest class was forbidden from working and was provided for, higher classes were forced to work to utilize their mental capacity. Story was about a hacker helping people cheat IQ tests so they could classify as higher class and work. Incidentally that hacker had to pay another hacker to hide his own high IQ so he didnt have to work :). I forgot the name of the story :(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_inferior
Story also has quite nice projection of effects of multi-purpose smart wallets - something we are going towards with smart phones these days. For example, they had biometric identification to use money, so there was a new type criminals called 'skinners', which were killing the owner, skinning their hand and putting on top of their own as a glove, to fool both fingerprint and warm/blood pulse scanner.
Anyway, Limes Inferior shows different world - world where work was enforced on people. Better example would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_in_Spain, where few capable people were working for all the rest of the world and rest of the world was growing bigger and bigger demands, 'because they are voting majority'. Plus, there it is available in English, as opposed to Limes Inferior :(
Do you really think that republicans will try to attack Obama for putting something they really want in place? In few years, they will be pulling the trigger, so no point in breaking the joystick now, just to spoil other kid's fun.
In any case, it is interesting to see that rather than be concerned about "We can kill random people in the world without the trial" - people are very much concerned about "We can kill Americans, who we strongly suspect of terrorism, without the trial". I can assure you, they won't misuse this capability (because of political backlash) anywhere near the way signature strikes etc are misused now. Before American will die, they will check for 300% if he is terrorist. For foreigners, 80% is ok. Unless these foreigners have beards and are in desert, then even 20% is good enough.
Want to be safe - shave, rather than try to impeach the president.
There was a joke about a physicist preparing an equation for a mobster to predict the horse race results. Unfortunately, he has done some simplifications - basically, assumed spherical horse moving in vacuum.
Fact that complicated model is complicated (or even impossible given current capabilities), doesn't mean that oversimplified model is valuable. They might have been coming with crazy results for few years (10->100 AU; 0.0001->0.0005AU; -PI*AU->PI*AU; 5AU-iAU->5AU+iAU) each time modifying some constants until they finally hit one range which was including 1AU by accident and decided it is good enough to publish...
They are taking greenhouse effect into account? If it goes further this way, by 2050 habitable zone for Earth will be between 1.10 and 2.05 AU, because of amount of CO2 we pump to atmosphere. And this will give us a clear conscience - it is not our fault for making Earth inhabitable, it is just in wrong place in orbit for our pollution needs.
I wonder if our ancestors, barely surviving ice ages, would also agree that 0.99AU is way too close to Sun...
I was not familiar with term 'bucket shop'. After reading wikipedia entry, they look exactly the same as spread betting which is a craze for last few years in UK, as it allows to avoid paying taxes from stock gains by presenting them as 'gambling'. Which in turn is almost the same as futures market (except tax difference) - I don't see any relation to CDSes.
Last market crash was caused by MBS, not CDS. Cause was real estate bubble + careless loans, which in turn is a result of 'living on credit' approach happening for last half century. CDSes were just 'force multipliers'.
Car analogy: Somebody shoots all your tires (MBS/loans), you crash into the 4 trees at once (defaults) and some airbags (CDS) fail to deploy (because they were misdesigned to handle hits from only 1 side). Now, it is easy to demonize car manufacturer for putting faulty airbags, especially if you want to move the focus away from the fact that it was a government officer shooting at your tires hoping that it will make you drive faster...
Hmmm. One can argue that no software should be patentable ever. Thats ok. But if you DO allow patenting software, I don't think that 'no allowing emulation of physical concept' is a valid rule. If I create super-smart software emulating protein folding using some new concepts, allowing it to quickly solve all current problems, should it be non-patentable just based on grounds that that concept exists in physical reality for billion+ years?
While we all hope you will live as long as possible and continue your work, do you think that somebody will pick up your legacy and continue to debunk the fraudsters when you are not longer able to? Do you have trusted people to whom you are willing to hand over the responsibility, both financially and skill-wise?
Somehow, period after second WW till 90's was a reasonably stable (market-wise) all over the world. I'm not sure how much it is due to US regulations affecting entire world and how much a cycle happening after big war + military tension due to Cold War.
Are you sure that introduction of CDSes happened because of deregulations and would not be possible before that if somebody had similar idea? They could have been simulated before with different instruments, just in a lot less friendly way.
If Poland breaches 60% debt/GNP ratio, it cannot borrow money any more in any form - which in basic form means budget without deficit. Repaying debts is part of budget, so it is not automatically stopped.
Now, given considerable deficit each year, it would be very hard to manage it. Some immediate things would be reducing government-provided salaries and possibly pensions (which doesn't mean just politicians, it is about teachers/police/minicipal workers/etc), huge increase in taxes (which will damage economy, but in bit longer run - you would get more money for short period of time), reduction/stopping of public-funded investments (even less new roads etc). This would probably be enough for one year - but this 60% is expressed as ratio of GNP. After such action, GNP would drop dramatically, so debt as percentage would start to grow very fast next years without a real way out.
This is obvious political suicide for any party which will allow this to happen. My feeling is that if this happens, constitution would be changed - but only after opposition (which votes would be needed for that) would make sure that leading party would give up completely.
I think that similar thing happened in US - there was also some kind of spending limit and Congress just agreed to extend it multiple times, after some period of political haggling?
Poland had strange way of computing national debt expressed in foreign currencies - it was taking a snapshot of exchange rates from single day during a year. If debt breaches magic threshold, bad things happen (like having to make budget without deficit for next year, which would end up with civil war probably). So what government+central bank did? They have manipulated exchange rate on that particular date to make debt look smaller and avoid the problems. And while you can believe it was for 'people', I'm quite sure that people making the decisions were actually thinking about votes during next election.
So, drawing the parallels
Bank Government/CentralBank
traders politicians
personal monetary gains votes
shareholder gains citizens gains
manipulating LIBOR secretly manipulating FX secretly
trying to artificially reduce exposure trying to artificially reduce debt
Yes, private banks are more evil in most cases, but it is not that far fetched analogy.
Centralized, controlled market (think eastern block before 1989) leads to even worse fraud and monopolies. And somewhere in the middle you have European Union, which tries to do both at same time and has biggest bureaucracy machine ever. And there are as many frauds as in any other system (way the EU funds for development of regions are being manipulated is just mind boggling), maybe just bit less monopolies. And carrots are now fruits, instead of vegetables, due to a lobbing from one carrot-jam producing country.
It is not a fault of free market, communism or bureaucracy that bad things are happening. It is just a nature of people. We like to take advantage of each other. Empathy generally works only on local scale - people who will not cheat a cashier at local shop for 10 cents he has forgotten to take, often won't have issue with screwing half of foreign country by manipulating exchange rates at proper moment.
I don't think there is a solution, unless you want to get back to living in small disconnected communities (300 people) where everybody can be held accountable for his actions by local chieftain with a big club.
This is assuming that you use desert to grow these plants. If you convert forest/meadows/whatever into biofuel fields, then you are losing CO2 trapping done by things which were growing there originally.
Ban uranium/plutonium/certain kind of centrifuges because you can create atomic bomb with them and blow up entire city? Why just not let everybody have their own bombs and ban actual detonation?
Ban/regulate certain kinds of biological warfare viruses? We should just ban sneezing while being infected by one.
Ban parking 1-mile asteroids in unstable orbits around earth? No, just penalize people who do it slippily enough to drop them to earth and cause mass extinctions.