> If the Howiesons Poort tech was so much better there would have been demand
There are so many possibilities, most of which involve them being killed by more numerous but lower-tech neighbours. After all, we're not talking about the difference between a spear and a rifle, or even between a sword and a longbow. So I think, "We want your tools", "We want your tool makers", "You compete with us for food and land and have to go" are the most likely motivations to wipe them out.
Disease and trade wouldn't even be in my top 10 - but I'm not an anthropologist, never mind an expert on Howiesons Poort societies.
Musk's problem isn't getting people to Mars... it's that he's not sinking any R&D funding into keeping them alive once they get there, while mouthing off about establishing a significant permanent colony.
We still don't know if a mammal can remain healthy in 0.38g, nor where we'd get all the resources required, how to do much with the ones we're pretty sure are there under local conditions, or how to maintain a closed biosphere indefinitely.
I'd love to see a Mars colony, but first I think we need to do something stupidly simple... like send a rover-sized box to Mars with a few lab mice in it to see what happens. And maybe make a few serious major efforts at artificial closed biospheres here on Earth.
Until we know how to live on Mars, Musk's technology is better for sending more rovers than humans.
The way I see it, Musk is a bit of a 'showman' and in that role has a tenuous connection to the truth... but he did deliver a tail-landing rocket and he did deliver electric cars when the naysayers were calling him a liar for even saying it was possible.
So I tend to look at what Musk promises, not when.
I don't know how big an area the Tesla solution can service, but I see no reason why you wouldn't break it into cells with some limited ability for adjacent cells to share power. You'd ultimately end up with a heavily fault-tolerant power grid, mostly enabled by the small cell size due to drastically smaller scale and increased number of power production facilities.
Because you'd still have wires going everywhere, you can also use them for data transmission. Hell, with proper foresight, you could set it up to support future expansion of broadband over power lines.
Finally, while it's likely they're just going to string up more wires on new poles... I'd suggest this is a great opportunity (regardless of what they use for power generation) for the government to build some infrastructure and employ a lot of ditch diggers to bury the new wires.
Because though their grid was in a shambles, it existed and was 'good enough' for the locals.
Now that it's effectively gone and they have to build something to replace it, it's a good time to look at options. There's not much cost savings in reusing the old grid.
I get that you don't understand a lot of computers - including pretty much every laptop - will engage in a lot of power saving that goes out the window with a CPU spike.
I get that you don't understand that a lot of people don't want their OS to become unresponsive just because they're visiting a particular site.
Mostly, though, I get that you have no clue that ad blockers exist.
Script miners are very inefficient to start with, and for all the cryptocurrencies I am aware of, more mining means lower efficiency. There is a very strong motive to max out your CPU because no matter how hard they peg the needle, they're not really getting much from you and the power costs them nothing.
Are you really OK with the same people who are OK with pop-ups, pop-unders, uncloseable window cascades, fake AV warnings and more - are you OK with them deciding how much of your CPU is OK to appropriate?
>Most use-cases for ALPR dont need 'real-time' conversion.
I am actually unfamiliar with those cases - the two I know would be police (who want instant hits to act on), and parking lot access control, which also needs to be real time.
I suppose there's historical analysis of video, but in my parts we have privacy legislation to deal with that prevents you from collecting that stuff long term (if you're a government agency... things get vague and unenforced pretty quickly for private companies, but then they're not usually collecting data across major geographic regions).
Part of your fee should go to general content production. You're not going to willingly fork out for something you aren't going to see for the first time for another year or so, but when that year's up, you're going to expect something novel to watch. And having a diverse selection helps keep the content producer financially healthy so your preferred content remains available.
Another part of your fee should be directed to more specific production - if all you watch is sitcoms, then that's the accounting bucket this should go into. I'm sure there's thousands of ways to slice this particular pie, but it can also be rendered down into a dozen major options.
Finally, the last part of your subscription fee should go to the specific shows you watch. This last part could even be the dreaded 'pay per view', though I'd say it should be more like 'pay to unlock a particular episode for so long as you have a valid general subscription'. But that's a mouthful. Anyway, you'd get up to 'x' new episodes per billing period for your standard subscription, with the ability to buy a higher level package for the right to unlock further episodes.
That way if you want to watch a drama, you're not funding a sport show. One fee for all, spread equally, just irritates people who don't want to be funding other people's expensive niche content.
>I am not a parent yet, but my wife and I are currently trying.
Good luck, and may everything go smoothly. I was really relaxed about it until the first ultrasound was scheduled, at which point it became an exercise in hiding my anxieties from my wife until the kid actually came out. And then, despite having experience, freaking out like almost every new parent does. The second kid is almost always easier because you've chilled out a bit.
>Baby monitors are useful!
Yes, especially video ones. (With suitable encryption so you're not providing a video feed to the entire neighbourhood and thus potentially to thieves as well). Don't bother with the motion detector ones, though... they go off constantly and will stress you right out, and the chances of them helping you save a baby from SIDs are about zero percent.
>I can see being able to power on a night light or mobile without mom or day entering the room might be positive thing too.
I have my doubts, but I'd be happy to see a study done on it.
> The question is where is the line of abdication responsibility to technology and using technology to be a better parent? That might not even be the same place in every family.
Absolutely, especially in the case of a 'special needs' child. In normal cases, there's a line between 'getting some relief / taking a break' and neglect, and I think that's not something that is easily codified in legislation. However, there should already be EXISTING legislation protecting the privacy of minors, and if this device is uploading anything it should be outright banned and the product development team slapped across their individual faces.
>I don't have a policy proposal here, or an opinion about what should or should not be done, but I do understand the concern.
If you're not willing to put in 20 years of effort to properly raise a child, try out 'birth control' or stick to masturbation.
Children are wonderful and all, but they're also a huge responsibility if you're a decent human. Deliberately having a child (or simply not worrying about pregnancy when birth control is more or less ubiquitous) and then abdicating your parenting responsibilities to technology is not the right choice.
And yes, I'm a parent, and yes, I know EXACTLY how difficult a standard that is to meet, and no, I don't actually meet it 100% of the time.
The last I heard that term, it was an onomatopoeia meaning "the act of skullfucking your partner either through the ocular cavity or a hole made via trepanation", based on the sound of brains oozing out around your penis as you did so.
I was quite surprised to see it in the summary, but presumably it has a more mundane meaning.
WTF? It never even occurred to me that a Pi could have enough juice to run ALPR, so of course I never bothered to look for an ALPR app for it... Everything I've seen that runs commercial plate recognition takes a fairly hefty desktop PC.
You missed the part where Kirk is held captive, and where Kirk (or on at least two occasions, Spock) seduces a woman,
Also, they didn't sing Kumbaya, McCoy or Kirk made some vaguely racist comment at Spock's expense, Spock would raise an eyebrow, Kirk and the bridge crew would chuckle, and then the end credits would role.
>In the "ultimatum" model, the rewards are shared and no one is personally motivated to do anything.
I don't think you read the description correctly. It appears to be a scale of "All for me" to "Equally shared among the group", which to me seems like it's a bit like the Prisoner's Dilemma. Share and you get the least if everyone else is selfish, so you might as well be selfish in the expectation that some if not all of the other participants will come to the same conclusion.
>I guess I don't think we're living in a time when Star Trek could be successful
I think perhaps you have that backwards. Sure, we're still producing 'gritty/dark', but I think we're on the tail end of that as audiences often want to escape reality and get a taste of something different - which can simply entertain or be inspirational - and the world's been a bit too gritty and dark recently.
I'd say now is actually a great time to start popping out the idealistic stuff, but maybe not quite as simplistic as it used to be. Not every idealist has to be deeply and secretly flawed... but they do have to deal with a realistic world where not everything goes their way just because they're 'fighting the good fight'. (And I'd throw the current MCU Captain America and DC Wonder Woman up as decent examples of this)
A lot of entertainment presents an idealized individual who encounters no serious barriers because everyone more or less falls under the spell of their righteousness in 60 minutes less commercial breaks, and that's just stupid on too many levels to take.
> the main character that bugs me which is that she's got a way too broad range of skills
That is standard for Trek. They give lip service to specialization, but when you get down to it the lead character always knows what the technical people are doing and can micromanage them if they're not actually just doing it themselves.
> in the 2 first episodes she twice beat a Klingon warrior in single combat while having no previous experience of fighting them, and being smaller.
Modern television. Nobody wants to point out that a petite female has to have far, far superior training plus some luck to take out a large male... physics itself can take a flying leap because nobody's even paying attention to mass, inertia, or leverage in these matchups never mind muscle. Also, since TNG it has been traditional in Trek to beat up a Klingon to show how badass you are.
Trek science is usually only marginally better than what you'd find in a Michael Bay movie.
>Star Trek usually considers the moral and philosophical implications of choices, but so far there has been very little of that in Discover
That would be science fiction. CBS isn't in the sci-fi business. Hell, they're not even in the 'sci-fi veneer on something else' business. They're mainly in the 'procedurals with some action for the over 40 crowd' business.
They really ought to have sold off the Star Trek TV rights, it's not in their wheelhouse.
Slashdot Mirror
I was trying to have an intelligent conversation, but apparently you're either not interested or not capable of that.
Have you tried Reddit?
It absolutely is - a cultural extinction.
> If the Howiesons Poort tech was so much better there would have been demand
There are so many possibilities, most of which involve them being killed by more numerous but lower-tech neighbours. After all, we're not talking about the difference between a spear and a rifle, or even between a sword and a longbow. So I think, "We want your tools", "We want your tool makers", "You compete with us for food and land and have to go" are the most likely motivations to wipe them out.
Disease and trade wouldn't even be in my top 10 - but I'm not an anthropologist, never mind an expert on Howiesons Poort societies.
Musk's problem isn't getting people to Mars... it's that he's not sinking any R&D funding into keeping them alive once they get there, while mouthing off about establishing a significant permanent colony.
We still don't know if a mammal can remain healthy in 0.38g, nor where we'd get all the resources required, how to do much with the ones we're pretty sure are there under local conditions, or how to maintain a closed biosphere indefinitely.
I'd love to see a Mars colony, but first I think we need to do something stupidly simple... like send a rover-sized box to Mars with a few lab mice in it to see what happens. And maybe make a few serious major efforts at artificial closed biospheres here on Earth.
Until we know how to live on Mars, Musk's technology is better for sending more rovers than humans.
Musk cheerleaders, Musk naysayers, and the truth.
The way I see it, Musk is a bit of a 'showman' and in that role has a tenuous connection to the truth... but he did deliver a tail-landing rocket and he did deliver electric cars when the naysayers were calling him a liar for even saying it was possible.
So I tend to look at what Musk promises, not when.
I don't know how big an area the Tesla solution can service, but I see no reason why you wouldn't break it into cells with some limited ability for adjacent cells to share power. You'd ultimately end up with a heavily fault-tolerant power grid, mostly enabled by the small cell size due to drastically smaller scale and increased number of power production facilities.
Because you'd still have wires going everywhere, you can also use them for data transmission. Hell, with proper foresight, you could set it up to support future expansion of broadband over power lines.
Finally, while it's likely they're just going to string up more wires on new poles... I'd suggest this is a great opportunity (regardless of what they use for power generation) for the government to build some infrastructure and employ a lot of ditch diggers to bury the new wires.
Because though their grid was in a shambles, it existed and was 'good enough' for the locals.
Now that it's effectively gone and they have to build something to replace it, it's a good time to look at options. There's not much cost savings in reusing the old grid.
I get that you don't understand a lot of computers - including pretty much every laptop - will engage in a lot of power saving that goes out the window with a CPU spike.
I get that you don't understand that a lot of people don't want their OS to become unresponsive just because they're visiting a particular site.
Mostly, though, I get that you have no clue that ad blockers exist.
> Who cares about a few CPU cycles
Script miners are very inefficient to start with, and for all the cryptocurrencies I am aware of, more mining means lower efficiency. There is a very strong motive to max out your CPU because no matter how hard they peg the needle, they're not really getting much from you and the power costs them nothing.
Are you really OK with the same people who are OK with pop-ups, pop-unders, uncloseable window cascades, fake AV warnings and more - are you OK with them deciding how much of your CPU is OK to appropriate?
>Most use-cases for ALPR dont need 'real-time' conversion.
I am actually unfamiliar with those cases - the two I know would be police (who want instant hits to act on), and parking lot access control, which also needs to be real time.
I suppose there's historical analysis of video, but in my parts we have privacy legislation to deal with that prevents you from collecting that stuff long term (if you're a government agency... things get vague and unenforced pretty quickly for private companies, but then they're not usually collecting data across major geographic regions).
I think there needs to a split formula.
Part of your fee should go to general content production. You're not going to willingly fork out for something you aren't going to see for the first time for another year or so, but when that year's up, you're going to expect something novel to watch. And having a diverse selection helps keep the content producer financially healthy so your preferred content remains available.
Another part of your fee should be directed to more specific production - if all you watch is sitcoms, then that's the accounting bucket this should go into. I'm sure there's thousands of ways to slice this particular pie, but it can also be rendered down into a dozen major options.
Finally, the last part of your subscription fee should go to the specific shows you watch. This last part could even be the dreaded 'pay per view', though I'd say it should be more like 'pay to unlock a particular episode for so long as you have a valid general subscription'. But that's a mouthful. Anyway, you'd get up to 'x' new episodes per billing period for your standard subscription, with the ability to buy a higher level package for the right to unlock further episodes.
That way if you want to watch a drama, you're not funding a sport show. One fee for all, spread equally, just irritates people who don't want to be funding other people's expensive niche content.
>I am not a parent yet, but my wife and I are currently trying.
Good luck, and may everything go smoothly. I was really relaxed about it until the first ultrasound was scheduled, at which point it became an exercise in hiding my anxieties from my wife until the kid actually came out. And then, despite having experience, freaking out like almost every new parent does. The second kid is almost always easier because you've chilled out a bit.
>Baby monitors are useful!
Yes, especially video ones. (With suitable encryption so you're not providing a video feed to the entire neighbourhood and thus potentially to thieves as well). Don't bother with the motion detector ones, though... they go off constantly and will stress you right out, and the chances of them helping you save a baby from SIDs are about zero percent.
>I can see being able to power on a night light or mobile without mom or day entering the room might be positive thing too.
I have my doubts, but I'd be happy to see a study done on it.
> The question is where is the line of abdication responsibility to technology and using technology to be a better parent? That might not even be the same place in every family.
Absolutely, especially in the case of a 'special needs' child. In normal cases, there's a line between 'getting some relief / taking a break' and neglect, and I think that's not something that is easily codified in legislation. However, there should already be EXISTING legislation protecting the privacy of minors, and if this device is uploading anything it should be outright banned and the product development team slapped across their individual faces.
>I don't have a policy proposal here, or an opinion about what should or should not be done, but I do understand the concern.
If you're not willing to put in 20 years of effort to properly raise a child, try out 'birth control' or stick to masturbation.
Children are wonderful and all, but they're also a huge responsibility if you're a decent human. Deliberately having a child (or simply not worrying about pregnancy when birth control is more or less ubiquitous) and then abdicating your parenting responsibilities to technology is not the right choice.
And yes, I'm a parent, and yes, I know EXACTLY how difficult a standard that is to meet, and no, I don't actually meet it 100% of the time.
The last I heard that term, it was an onomatopoeia meaning "the act of skullfucking your partner either through the ocular cavity or a hole made via trepanation", based on the sound of brains oozing out around your penis as you did so.
I was quite surprised to see it in the summary, but presumably it has a more mundane meaning.
> I do it with my pi and openalpr.
WTF? It never even occurred to me that a Pi could have enough juice to run ALPR, so of course I never bothered to look for an ALPR app for it... Everything I've seen that runs commercial plate recognition takes a fairly hefty desktop PC.
How effective is it on a Pi?
ROLE? ROLE? Damn it.
I think you've almost struck on something there - imagine paying quality posters with credits for porn services!
You missed the part where Kirk is held captive, and where Kirk (or on at least two occasions, Spock) seduces a woman,
Also, they didn't sing Kumbaya, McCoy or Kirk made some vaguely racist comment at Spock's expense, Spock would raise an eyebrow, Kirk and the bridge crew would chuckle, and then the end credits would role.
Simpler times, man, simpler times.
>In the "ultimatum" model, the rewards are shared and no one is personally motivated to do anything.
I don't think you read the description correctly. It appears to be a scale of "All for me" to "Equally shared among the group", which to me seems like it's a bit like the Prisoner's Dilemma. Share and you get the least if everyone else is selfish, so you might as well be selfish in the expectation that some if not all of the other participants will come to the same conclusion.
I'd say to modernize you could award the Nobel to the paper, and let the researchers figure out who their figurehead should be.
Why do you need to choose 1-3 humans when it's the discovery you're celebrating?
Precision and accuracy are different things; precision just means you used very small units.
That being said, you can still estimate accurately, too. It means your error margin is very small.
>As much as I would like to see "some little children helping their mommies" on TV
This fall on NBC - 'Equalizer, Jr."
>I guess I don't think we're living in a time when Star Trek could be successful
I think perhaps you have that backwards. Sure, we're still producing 'gritty/dark', but I think we're on the tail end of that as audiences often want to escape reality and get a taste of something different - which can simply entertain or be inspirational - and the world's been a bit too gritty and dark recently.
I'd say now is actually a great time to start popping out the idealistic stuff, but maybe not quite as simplistic as it used to be. Not every idealist has to be deeply and secretly flawed... but they do have to deal with a realistic world where not everything goes their way just because they're 'fighting the good fight'. (And I'd throw the current MCU Captain America and DC Wonder Woman up as decent examples of this)
A lot of entertainment presents an idealized individual who encounters no serious barriers because everyone more or less falls under the spell of their righteousness in 60 minutes less commercial breaks, and that's just stupid on too many levels to take.
> the main character that bugs me which is that she's got a way too broad range of skills
That is standard for Trek. They give lip service to specialization, but when you get down to it the lead character always knows what the technical people are doing and can micromanage them if they're not actually just doing it themselves.
> in the 2 first episodes she twice beat a Klingon warrior in single combat while having no previous experience of fighting them, and being smaller.
Modern television. Nobody wants to point out that a petite female has to have far, far superior training plus some luck to take out a large male... physics itself can take a flying leap because nobody's even paying attention to mass, inertia, or leverage in these matchups never mind muscle. Also, since TNG it has been traditional in Trek to beat up a Klingon to show how badass you are.
Trek science is usually only marginally better than what you'd find in a Michael Bay movie.
>Star Trek usually considers the moral and philosophical implications of choices, but so far there has been very little of that in Discover
That would be science fiction. CBS isn't in the sci-fi business. Hell, they're not even in the 'sci-fi veneer on something else' business. They're mainly in the 'procedurals with some action for the over 40 crowd' business.
They really ought to have sold off the Star Trek TV rights, it's not in their wheelhouse.