>It never stops amusing me how arrogant most humans are
Which is funny, given that's exactly what you are. You think you know better than all the experts who have looked at this? Somehow I'm confident you don't have any kind of physics education, nor the ability to follow Miguel's math.
>an Alcubierre drive.. it may be impossible, or it may not, we don't know,
We know, and no, it isn't possible. This isn't like saying the sound barrier can't be broken, this is a fundamental property of our universe that is backed up by piles of experimental confirmation with absolutely nothing indicating the possibility of being wrong about it and everything indicating that if FTL were possible, pretty much everything else in solidly understood physics would have to be wrong.
If you actually knew anything about the Alcubierre drive beyond what you might have read in a pop science article, you'd know everyone who can do the math treats it as a fun math problem and none of them believe it actually shows a way to FTL travel. It's a damn thought experiment and a math exercise, that's it.
Just think about this... Mary would have been about 12 years old when she was married to Joseph, and Joseph would more than likely have been an adult.
According to Christians... while Joseph didn't have sex with Mary right away, a much older guy snuck in there and impregnated her. I hear the guy was, you know, infinitely old, which is a lot.
If God can knock up a 12 year old, I guess Christianity is fundamentally OK with the idea that 12 year old girls are appropriate sex partners despite extreme age differences and immeasurable power imbalances.
So if you're a fundamentalist you probably don't think pedophilia's a big deal so long as it's an older male married to a girl who is old enough to be fertile. Of course, a lot of fundamentalists still hold on to other quaint ideas, like 'women are chattel'.
> I can't imagine what these things do that justify that price tag
Well... I'm just going to throw out the suggestion that Apple has a really, really strong brand loyalty factor going for it, and there's going to be an Apple logo on these things...
Not only am I not Stalin, I'm also not Tojo, Leopold II, or Hitler.
I'm not one of those who puts Trump in the same category as those monsters. I AM one of those who says he shares some disturbing similarities with them, and thinks that you have to be really careful about tolerating that kind of shit.
When someone tries to rally support by choosing minorities to scapegoat indiscriminately, lies without any trace of guilt about it, supresses the free press, believes themselves above the law, pushes for punishing political rivals... I'm thinking there are a lot of problems there, and if you allow the precedent to be set the NEXT person could be the next Stalin, Tojo, Leopold II, or Hitler even if the current one never goes that far.
I agree it's insane for an 8 year old to have a phone, but it's not too many years away from when it is no longer insane.
When I was a kid, you took some coins with you to use a payphone if you got into trouble (and could find a payphone...). That pretty much worked as contrary to pop hysteria there actually ISN'T a sex predator waiting behind every lamp post to abduct your kid. However, if you can give your kid a portable communication device so they can reach you more or less at will... why wouldn't you?
I'm doing so with my kids (though I set the threshold at 'teen', not '8'). And at least initially there will be tracking, including geofencing, and dial restriction installed. That it isn't a secret, they know, and they know if they don't like it they can get a job and pay for their own phones.
Basically, I'm able to have my kids out and about with far less worrying about their well being.
They're ignoring the problems now, what makes you believe they won't ignore the problems to come? I mean, we only have history to look at to show what has actually happened in the recent past.
What magic crystal ball do you have access to that shows that history won't be repeated in spite of every indication it will be?
So yes, I really believe that, and yes, I think you're a fool for not believing it.
And prostitution reduces sexual assaults in general; it's almost as if basic urges drive people to satisfy them. It's uncomfortable for many people to think about, and when they get uncomfortable they turn to 'ban the evil thing'.
I personally am not particularly comfortable with the idea of child porn, but if there is a reputable study out there indicating that simulated child porn reduces the abuse of real children... I'd be evil to oppose it, wouldn't I?
I'd rather have a potential sex predator masturbating than assaulting a kid.
For some reason, if they tell a bald-faced lie it causes less resentment and resistance than simply telling people they're going to be ignored.
In both cases, the same truth is there, and in both cases it's obvious, but when they lie they're more likely to get away with it; a lot of people waste time arguing the lie rather than fighting the truth.
For me, being lied to is insult upon injury and makes me more likely to fight back, but I'm apparently in the minority.
That seems obvious, but unfortunately it's not the best way to go about it.
Users tend to want exactly what they have (no retraining, familiarity = comfort) and will have you customize any replacement solution until it repeats all the flaws of the system it's replacing. You will also find the loudest user gets heard most frequently, but they're probably NOT the most informed or insightful user.
You need multiple groups contributing - you need someone who understands the business process pointing out where improvements are indicated, you need vendors telling you how customizable their solution is, you need a techie telling you what's possible to do within the vendor's limitations, you need management telling you what they want, and THEN you need the users' input - first through expert users advising the business process person, and then finally with their unfiltered suggestions (most of which you will have to dismiss as impractical).
And you may have to go through that cycle a few times before you have a clear path to work with, since each group's input may influence what the other groups have to say.
There will come a day when you can use an AR headset and issue voice commands that will have the porn scenario of your choice overlaid on your environment in fully realistic detail.
I suspect you'll have to use pirate software to use non-porn celebrities in your porn fantasies, though. And there will be the same physical limitations on tactile feedback that we deal with today that will limit the realism and mostly leave you as a voyeur.
It'll still be cheaper than a fully functional sex bot, though.
Correction accepted, and the only reason I do so reluctantly is because I'm annoyed I missed that point on the first go.
I think it's a one-way issue with Trump, though. He doesn't have friends because he doesn't understand that loyalty means something other than, 'serves the current interests of Donald Trump'.
What's shocking is the number of people willing to jump on the Trump train and take a bullet for him in hopes of being rewarded. You'd think the pile of bodies you have to climb over to get into Trump's circle would clue you in to your odds of success being poor.
If BeauHD is being a decent editor, that should be irrelevant.
Of course, this being Slashdot you first have to figure out what's profitable for Slashdot and look at the editorial slant that likely implies.
Also, don't use Slashdot as a trustworthy source of unbiased news, since it doesn't even pretend to be a serious news organization - it's a social networking site based on mod-and-user filtered news feed aggregation.
All they have to do is stop promising to uphold Net Neutrality precepts, and then they're totally in the clear.
The important thing here is that Trump's rich friends will milk some more money from the not-rich in return for degraded services; this is good for the average person somehow.
>. First, it's a very Big Brother sort of solution which would almost certainly draw lawsuits if they tried to implement it.
So will not having the ability to call 911 if someone's hurting kids.
> Third, it is quite an unreasonable administrative burden to try to get everyone who might possibly visit a school to register their phone with a school.
People still have to check in when entering a school (they're generally not free and open to the public). An extra few seconds for tradesmen to put their phone number into the system isn't a huge burden.
>When I coach sports teams I visit other schools during the school day fairly often and it would be EXTREMELY annoying to have to register my phone with every school I visit.
Boo hoo. Live without your electronic leash for a bit. If you're really that important, people will reach you through the school's office.
>No, it is MUCH simple to just forbid the students from taking a phone out of their locker during the school day.
Forbid all you like, kids don't listen. Are you going to search their bags at the start of every class? That sounds like it would cost a lot of instruction time, and probably cause privacy-based lawsuits.
>And children do NOT "need" to receive "emergency calls" during the school day. That is a made up bogus excuse.
SEND, not receive. As should have been obvious when my previous post indicated the cell system would route 911 calls for all phones.
> If there is an emergency the parents can call the administrative offices and they will take care of it.
Funny how that's good enough for the kids, but you want special treatment for your convenience. Try leading by example.
This is something that should be corrected with germ line alterations. Rather than fix the symptom, the gene itself needs to be corrected, and corrected in the reproductive system so the defect isn't passed on to children.
I'm seeing a day when everyone's taking a cocktail of defect-masking pills on a daily basis because we've allowed these genes to spread through the population and everyone has a dozen debilitating / fatal conditions.
Schools should put up their own local cell tower that only routes to 911 or the head office if the call is detected to come from within the borders of the school property, unless it's a registered faculty phone number.
This is something that is possible to do, BTW, not just a pipe dream. It stops kids from wasting time on their phones in class, but still allows for emergency calls.
I agree that the odds look like they favour others living in the neighbourhood. If you select for what we know works - a yellow dwarf star with high metallicity in a relatively low density area that manages to avoid nearby supernovas for a few billion years, and has a wet rock of approximately 1 Earth mass in the stellar Goldilocks zone - well, even with all those qualifiers there are still ~10 billion stars to look at, and we are quickly learning that most stars have planets.
The problem is the size of the neighbourhood. It seems unlikely we'd have neighbours within range that evidence of their activities wouldn't fade into background noise even if we had a telescope pointed right at them.
Even our closest neighbour (which is unlikely to have any little green men) is an 80 year trip away by the best tech we could manage right now... and we lack the ability to keep ourselves alive for that long in interstellar space without resupply (and probably even with, but that's another story). Since I believe in the laws of physics, I don't believe aliens can get here significantly faster or for significantly less expense.
So when people talk about UFOs? I'm totally in agreement that such things exist, I just don't agree that 'unidentified' means 'little green men on a short semi-clandestine visit after spending the equivalent of billions of dollars and a lifetime in transit just to get here'.
>If Bitcoin manages to be successful and achieve widespread adoption, it will necessarily need to increase in value, due to it's scarcity.
But here's the funny thing nobody seems to notice - Bitcoin is just a ledger, nothing about it really cares what 'a bitcoin' is. You divide by ten and move on. There's no real scarcity so long as you can move the decimal place.
In fact, I think that's pretty much the algorithm behind Eliza/DOCTOR, which might be the first therapist chat bot.
Eliza was more of a 'rephrase it in the form of a question that ends in 'how does that make you feel?', so I guess that makes it unnecessarily sophisticated!
In which case I feel for their family, but I have an amazing lack of sympathy for them.
"Ignore the world telling me this is a bad idea, I could get rich quick. If it fails, instead of taking responsibility I just kill myself and leave my dependents to suffer for my stupidity".
I really don't miss people like that when they die.
>Bitcoin, with the limitation is has on the final number which can be issued
Also the incredible resource wastage, no way to adjust it to affect the economy, lack of mechanisms for consumer protection, impossibility to use securely in any practical way, the transaction rate limit, the transaction time problem, the transaction cost issue, the storage needs, and bandwidth requirements.
But if you can get past all that, it's ALMOST as good as a debit card.
It doesn't even need to be argued; if you're not willfully blinded by greed or some bent philosophy, it's obvious.
And I'm kind of happy regulators aren't doing much about it. There are people who know it's gambling and I don't care about them. So long as Bitcoin isn't big enough to harm the economy in general, the bag holders can suffer for their stupidity (it's not like they haven't been repeatedly warned).
On the other hand, I'm not particularly keen on letting the scammers 'get away with it'. The people running crooked exchanges, deliberately misleading fools into buying in so they can sell at a profit... not a fan.
A nice solution where the bad guys lose and the idiots suffer would be great.
Slashdot Mirror
>It never stops amusing me how arrogant most humans are
Which is funny, given that's exactly what you are. You think you know better than all the experts who have looked at this? Somehow I'm confident you don't have any kind of physics education, nor the ability to follow Miguel's math.
>an Alcubierre drive.. it may be impossible, or it may not, we don't know,
We know, and no, it isn't possible. This isn't like saying the sound barrier can't be broken, this is a fundamental property of our universe that is backed up by piles of experimental confirmation with absolutely nothing indicating the possibility of being wrong about it and everything indicating that if FTL were possible, pretty much everything else in solidly understood physics would have to be wrong.
If you actually knew anything about the Alcubierre drive beyond what you might have read in a pop science article, you'd know everyone who can do the math treats it as a fun math problem and none of them believe it actually shows a way to FTL travel. It's a damn thought experiment and a math exercise, that's it.
Just think about this... Mary would have been about 12 years old when she was married to Joseph, and Joseph would more than likely have been an adult.
According to Christians... while Joseph didn't have sex with Mary right away, a much older guy snuck in there and impregnated her. I hear the guy was, you know, infinitely old, which is a lot.
If God can knock up a 12 year old, I guess Christianity is fundamentally OK with the idea that 12 year old girls are appropriate sex partners despite extreme age differences and immeasurable power imbalances.
So if you're a fundamentalist you probably don't think pedophilia's a big deal so long as it's an older male married to a girl who is old enough to be fertile. Of course, a lot of fundamentalists still hold on to other quaint ideas, like 'women are chattel'.
> I can't imagine what these things do that justify that price tag
Well... I'm just going to throw out the suggestion that Apple has a really, really strong brand loyalty factor going for it, and there's going to be an Apple logo on these things...
Not only am I not Stalin, I'm also not Tojo, Leopold II, or Hitler.
I'm not one of those who puts Trump in the same category as those monsters. I AM one of those who says he shares some disturbing similarities with them, and thinks that you have to be really careful about tolerating that kind of shit.
When someone tries to rally support by choosing minorities to scapegoat indiscriminately, lies without any trace of guilt about it, supresses the free press, believes themselves above the law, pushes for punishing political rivals... I'm thinking there are a lot of problems there, and if you allow the precedent to be set the NEXT person could be the next Stalin, Tojo, Leopold II, or Hitler even if the current one never goes that far.
I agree it's insane for an 8 year old to have a phone, but it's not too many years away from when it is no longer insane.
When I was a kid, you took some coins with you to use a payphone if you got into trouble (and could find a payphone...). That pretty much worked as contrary to pop hysteria there actually ISN'T a sex predator waiting behind every lamp post to abduct your kid. However, if you can give your kid a portable communication device so they can reach you more or less at will... why wouldn't you?
I'm doing so with my kids (though I set the threshold at 'teen', not '8'). And at least initially there will be tracking, including geofencing, and dial restriction installed. That it isn't a secret, they know, and they know if they don't like it they can get a job and pay for their own phones.
Basically, I'm able to have my kids out and about with far less worrying about their well being.
They're ignoring the problems now, what makes you believe they won't ignore the problems to come? I mean, we only have history to look at to show what has actually happened in the recent past.
What magic crystal ball do you have access to that shows that history won't be repeated in spite of every indication it will be?
So yes, I really believe that, and yes, I think you're a fool for not believing it.
And prostitution reduces sexual assaults in general; it's almost as if basic urges drive people to satisfy them. It's uncomfortable for many people to think about, and when they get uncomfortable they turn to 'ban the evil thing'.
I personally am not particularly comfortable with the idea of child porn, but if there is a reputable study out there indicating that simulated child porn reduces the abuse of real children... I'd be evil to oppose it, wouldn't I?
I'd rather have a potential sex predator masturbating than assaulting a kid.
>Piss off mate - nobody believes your bullshit.
For some reason, if they tell a bald-faced lie it causes less resentment and resistance than simply telling people they're going to be ignored.
In both cases, the same truth is there, and in both cases it's obvious, but when they lie they're more likely to get away with it; a lot of people waste time arguing the lie rather than fighting the truth.
For me, being lied to is insult upon injury and makes me more likely to fight back, but I'm apparently in the minority.
That seems obvious, but unfortunately it's not the best way to go about it.
Users tend to want exactly what they have (no retraining, familiarity = comfort) and will have you customize any replacement solution until it repeats all the flaws of the system it's replacing. You will also find the loudest user gets heard most frequently, but they're probably NOT the most informed or insightful user.
You need multiple groups contributing - you need someone who understands the business process pointing out where improvements are indicated, you need vendors telling you how customizable their solution is, you need a techie telling you what's possible to do within the vendor's limitations, you need management telling you what they want, and THEN you need the users' input - first through expert users advising the business process person, and then finally with their unfiltered suggestions (most of which you will have to dismiss as impractical).
And you may have to go through that cycle a few times before you have a clear path to work with, since each group's input may influence what the other groups have to say.
> it's not like /.'ers are innumerate...
Well, 40% of 129 is 51.6, so it'd be 101.6 million, not the 100 million you imply in your post. ;p
Still, 'over 100 million' would have been a better headline.
There will come a day when you can use an AR headset and issue voice commands that will have the porn scenario of your choice overlaid on your environment in fully realistic detail.
I suspect you'll have to use pirate software to use non-porn celebrities in your porn fantasies, though. And there will be the same physical limitations on tactile feedback that we deal with today that will limit the realism and mostly leave you as a voyeur.
It'll still be cheaper than a fully functional sex bot, though.
Correction accepted, and the only reason I do so reluctantly is because I'm annoyed I missed that point on the first go.
I think it's a one-way issue with Trump, though. He doesn't have friends because he doesn't understand that loyalty means something other than, 'serves the current interests of Donald Trump'.
What's shocking is the number of people willing to jump on the Trump train and take a bullet for him in hopes of being rewarded. You'd think the pile of bodies you have to climb over to get into Trump's circle would clue you in to your odds of success being poor.
If BeauHD is being a decent editor, that should be irrelevant.
Of course, this being Slashdot you first have to figure out what's profitable for Slashdot and look at the editorial slant that likely implies.
Also, don't use Slashdot as a trustworthy source of unbiased news, since it doesn't even pretend to be a serious news organization - it's a social networking site based on mod-and-user filtered news feed aggregation.
All they have to do is stop promising to uphold Net Neutrality precepts, and then they're totally in the clear.
The important thing here is that Trump's rich friends will milk some more money from the not-rich in return for degraded services; this is good for the average person somehow.
>. First, it's a very Big Brother sort of solution which would almost certainly draw lawsuits if they tried to implement it.
So will not having the ability to call 911 if someone's hurting kids.
> Third, it is quite an unreasonable administrative burden to try to get everyone who might possibly visit a school to register their phone with a school.
People still have to check in when entering a school (they're generally not free and open to the public). An extra few seconds for tradesmen to put their phone number into the system isn't a huge burden.
>When I coach sports teams I visit other schools during the school day fairly often and it would be EXTREMELY annoying to have to register my phone with every school I visit.
Boo hoo. Live without your electronic leash for a bit. If you're really that important, people will reach you through the school's office.
>No, it is MUCH simple to just forbid the students from taking a phone out of their locker during the school day.
Forbid all you like, kids don't listen. Are you going to search their bags at the start of every class? That sounds like it would cost a lot of instruction time, and probably cause privacy-based lawsuits.
>And children do NOT "need" to receive "emergency calls" during the school day. That is a made up bogus excuse.
SEND, not receive. As should have been obvious when my previous post indicated the cell system would route 911 calls for all phones.
> If there is an emergency the parents can call the administrative offices and they will take care of it.
Funny how that's good enough for the kids, but you want special treatment for your convenience. Try leading by example.
This is something that should be corrected with germ line alterations. Rather than fix the symptom, the gene itself needs to be corrected, and corrected in the reproductive system so the defect isn't passed on to children.
I'm seeing a day when everyone's taking a cocktail of defect-masking pills on a daily basis because we've allowed these genes to spread through the population and everyone has a dozen debilitating / fatal conditions.
Schools should put up their own local cell tower that only routes to 911 or the head office if the call is detected to come from within the borders of the school property, unless it's a registered faculty phone number.
This is something that is possible to do, BTW, not just a pipe dream. It stops kids from wasting time on their phones in class, but still allows for emergency calls.
I agree that the odds look like they favour others living in the neighbourhood. If you select for what we know works - a yellow dwarf star with high metallicity in a relatively low density area that manages to avoid nearby supernovas for a few billion years, and has a wet rock of approximately 1 Earth mass in the stellar Goldilocks zone - well, even with all those qualifiers there are still ~10 billion stars to look at, and we are quickly learning that most stars have planets.
The problem is the size of the neighbourhood. It seems unlikely we'd have neighbours within range that evidence of their activities wouldn't fade into background noise even if we had a telescope pointed right at them.
Even our closest neighbour (which is unlikely to have any little green men) is an 80 year trip away by the best tech we could manage right now... and we lack the ability to keep ourselves alive for that long in interstellar space without resupply (and probably even with, but that's another story). Since I believe in the laws of physics, I don't believe aliens can get here significantly faster or for significantly less expense.
So when people talk about UFOs? I'm totally in agreement that such things exist, I just don't agree that 'unidentified' means 'little green men on a short semi-clandestine visit after spending the equivalent of billions of dollars and a lifetime in transit just to get here'.
It doesn't. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something or has Stockholm syndrome.
>If Bitcoin manages to be successful and achieve widespread adoption, it will necessarily need to increase in value, due to it's scarcity.
But here's the funny thing nobody seems to notice - Bitcoin is just a ledger, nothing about it really cares what 'a bitcoin' is. You divide by ten and move on. There's no real scarcity so long as you can move the decimal place.
In fact, I think that's pretty much the algorithm behind Eliza/DOCTOR, which might be the first therapist chat bot.
Eliza was more of a 'rephrase it in the form of a question that ends in 'how does that make you feel?', so I guess that makes it unnecessarily sophisticated!
> they'll probably become suicidal.
In which case I feel for their family, but I have an amazing lack of sympathy for them.
"Ignore the world telling me this is a bad idea, I could get rich quick. If it fails, instead of taking responsibility I just kill myself and leave my dependents to suffer for my stupidity".
I really don't miss people like that when they die.
>Bitcoin, with the limitation is has on the final number which can be issued
Also the incredible resource wastage, no way to adjust it to affect the economy, lack of mechanisms for consumer protection, impossibility to use securely in any practical way, the transaction rate limit, the transaction time problem, the transaction cost issue, the storage needs, and bandwidth requirements.
But if you can get past all that, it's ALMOST as good as a debit card.
It doesn't even need to be argued; if you're not willfully blinded by greed or some bent philosophy, it's obvious.
And I'm kind of happy regulators aren't doing much about it. There are people who know it's gambling and I don't care about them. So long as Bitcoin isn't big enough to harm the economy in general, the bag holders can suffer for their stupidity (it's not like they haven't been repeatedly warned).
On the other hand, I'm not particularly keen on letting the scammers 'get away with it'. The people running crooked exchanges, deliberately misleading fools into buying in so they can sell at a profit... not a fan.
A nice solution where the bad guys lose and the idiots suffer would be great.
>Maybe Putin did send hot woman, but your wife got to her first?
Well then, all Putin has to do is trade me the 'incriminating video' the FSB would undoubtedly have made in return for everything I know.