The government is - in theory - a monopoly beholden to the population. A regional private monopoly is responsible only to their shareholders.
As the government maintains most roads, it can build, maintain, and operate most data infrastructure... either directly or by contracting the work out as required.
And as with roads, it can levy taxes to support the work. The entire economy depends on it these days (and more than that, it's critical for culture and knowledge flow as well), it's not like you're enriching a few by taxing the many.
I can't believe either side let things get this far, because it just makes the truth more obvious and the more obvious it is, the faster the revolution goes.
Neither studio nor writer had any leverage here. Both sides had everything to lose and nothing to win.
One day we'll admit broadcast is a dead medium and concentrate on delivery of on-demand streams over the Internet, perhaps leaving a few FTA PBS stations in a much reduced spectrum so the poorest and most rural folk still have something.
Of course, as the airwaves are national property, so the copper, fiber optic, and microwaves of the Internet should also be. Information infrastructure is too critical in the Information Age to let regional monopolies hold it hostage.
Think about what you just posted and why it might be incredibly stupid, because you have overlooked something incredibly obvious while trying to be clever.
>Innocent children are taught that they should be unquestioningly accepting of wacky ideas just because their elders seem to believe them. Their natural scepticism is denounced as heresy.
It's not just religion - that's how you raise your kids, mostly. Because there's way too much stuff to let them question you about every little thing if you want to finish raising them before you die of old age.
And you may not have noticed this, but if you let a kid question you once... it rapidly escalates until they question EVERYTHING. Which sounds nice until you're trying to get them to brush their teeth before school.
I mean, you have to try to raise your children to be rational thinkers (if you're a good parent), but it is a trial of Herculean proportions.
We can do 5% if we are willing to go big and use nukes. 10% is in the realm of a fusion drive that is theoretically possible but hasn't been designed, built, or tested yet.
Regardless, it's 'only' a 150 day trip to Mars (and could be less given more fuel... I believe Musk is planning on 80 days without a revolutionary new rocket engine being necessary). As long as they spin the cabin on a tether to provide artificial gravity, that's not an impossibly long trip for people.
0.1c isn't really required to get the job done, though it'd be nice.
Solved. Put the water and waste tanks around the emergency shelter area, watch the Sun and send warnings ahead to the astronauts when there's a risk of high radiation. On Mars, pile Martian regolith over your habitat module, or move in to a lava tube. Accept a slight increase in your risk of cancer.
Even without the shielding, this is literally not a problem for the people who would go. With current technology, you'd come back from a two year trip with a lifetime risk of death by cancer increasing from a base of 21% to 24%. And you got to visit Mars.
>solve the problem of... lack of gravity
Once you're done accelerating, you split the ship in two on a (long) tether and spin it. A 400m tether and a rate of 2RPM would get you pretty much normal Earth gravity, if I recall the math correctly.
>figure out how to land
Musk has this one. He can do it on Earth, now he has to get it working with less air but also less gravity. The basic technology is already there and only requires refinement.
>how to survive on the planet until it's time to go.
Right now... you throw lots of supplies at the planet two years before you send people. We're throwing money at the problem, this is the easiest solution... though NASA has had some limited success with extending supplies with recycling, and you'd utilize that technology too, of course.
> But all of these things take time no matter how much money you throw at them.
Yes, but we've already done the stuff that takes up time. We know how to get a rocket to Mars. We have industries that can build rockets (and we're not worried about reusability except for the humans who need a ride back). It's just about money if we're willing to brute force the trip and risk a percentage of loss (equipment AND astronauts). More accurately, it's about redirecting economic activity to space exploration at the expense of multiple other sectors.
A trip that's more about finesse requires better technology - better recycling, better rocket engines, more knowledge of how to deal with the Martian surface (cycling airlocks, keeping out the Martian dust, in situ resource utilization).
I absolutely believe it could be done within a two-term presidency, and *possibly*, if everything went perfectly, even within one. Nobody's going to throw that kind of money at it, though. They'd get lynched. And even though I'm very much a proponent of human space exploration, I certainly wouldn't support any politician who thought it was a good idea.
>If MENSA had required an IQ of 180, it could be called a proper genius club.
If I recall correctly, there are more exclusive clubs for the 1%, 0.1% and 0.01%.
Mensa is something you join if you're a smart but socially inept kid who wants to brag. If you're still in Mensa as an adult you're probably not as smart as you think you are. The other groups seem more likely to be for actual smart people who simply want to have a better chance of being understood when discussing things... and I base that on the fact that you never hear people bragging about being in them.
>There's absolutely no guarantee that money will actually make it to people capable and willing to accomplish this.
We can get rockets to Mars now, and have done so several times. We've seen Musk's tail landing tech coming along nicely, and the math works out so we know it's possible to get it right for Mars.
>Not to mention it takes forever for a rocket to make it to Mars
Most estimates are in the 150-300 day range. It depends on how much fuel you want to burn. Mars and Earth align every 25 months or so, but you don't worry about that unless you're sending humans. Longer trips are OK for 'stuff'.
>Even communications with Earth will be subject to several minutes of delay due to speed of light being finite.
4-24 minutes speed-of-light delay, assuming a direct line of sight. If you're bouncing a signal off a Sun-orbiting satellite to get around our star, then it'll be a bit longer. That's not really a problem for sending 'stuff', and the reason to send humans is they don't need live remote control.
The problem would be manufacturing and testing. Which is where the money comes in. The next decent Mars launch window is in April of 2018, then there's another in July of 2020. So you make a metric fuckton of rockets for 2018 and mount your payloads and shoot 'em off, then you follow up with humans a couple of years later.
Money. LOTS of money. Ludicrous amounts of money. But it would make a difference, and it could be done.
And the point would be to figure out how to live there, and to more efficiently do scientific research. If you could keep a geologist alive on Mars, they could do more in a week than the rovers have done since the first one landed. Humans are very flexible tools.
And ultimately, we'd want to see if we could live there. Because why not? The same reason we migrated out of the trees and then eventually out of Africa. Because it's a new place to go and make more humans.
Mars is one of the few problems that 'throwing money at it' would actually solve.
It would just take a LOT of it. Ridiculous amounts.
But, in principle, we could launch fleets of rockets at Mars with life support and other modules until we have enough to keep a crew alive for a while. And while we're doing that, we could be paying Musk to develop his tail-landing tech on a faster timeline, even throwing test rockets at Mars.
And then, in a few years, we could throw a bunch of astronaut-carrying rockets at the red planet and hope to have a high percentage of successful landings.
You have to ask yourself if accelerating the timeline is worth the cost, and if in doing so you'd actually achieve anything useful that couldn't be done better and for less money with a bit more patience - and I think the answer is 'no'.
>But in the meantime, new kinds of work were created
Yep. We're all going to sell each other the latest crap for a 'home-based business' to peddle. You'll spend your days smelling candles or admiring custom wristbands or something as you and your neighbours try to make money selling each other overpriced crap.
Because we're not going to need warehouse workers, we're not going to need drivers, we're going to need vastly fewer cooks, malls will die as they fail to compete with automation-backed online retailers... daycare workers, cops, EMS, and politicians will be about it with pretty much every industry decimated *at least*.
Seriously, what do you think is going to replace what we currently do for work when almost everything gets dumped within a generation?
> 1.) Artificial intelligence is already getting smarter than us, at an exponential rate
Nobody who knows anything says that. We don't have real AI at all yet, just expert systems and a few interesting decision algorithms.
> 2.) We'll make AIs into a general purpose intelligence, like our own.
Of course we will. (Why would anyone make a phone that is also a web browser, a camera, an appointment tracker, a video game machine, a music player, a movie player, a flashlight, a compass, a map, a light level sensor, and a motion sensor?)
If you've figured out AI, you go general as soon as you can, because you get everything in one box.
>3.) We can make human intelligence in silicon
Meat is not special. In fact, we have a lot more reason to believe we'll be able to build an intelligence in silicon that is more efficient than evolution built with meat that to believe it's impossible because [insert magical thinking].
> 4.) Intelligence can be expanded without limit.
Lots of singularity nuts may think this, but again, anyone who knows anything about the universe will understand there must be a finite limit. We don't have any reason to believe humans are anywhere near it - and we could at least expect to make an AI as smart as the smartest human ever, and then take out the unnecessary bits that slowed that person down. Then up the clock rate.
> 5.) Once we have exploding superintelligence it can solve most of our problems
Most of the problems that can be solved with thought and not action and where cooperation with implementing the solution can be reasonably expected.
In short, Wired's founding executive editor Kevin Kelly is (at least in this instance) a buffoon speaking of things he does not understand sufficiently well to be speaking of them from a public platform.
>Just because my opinion that the jury is still out re bitcoin doesn't match your opinion that bitcoin is a complete failure DOESN'T mean you are more technologically savvy on the matter. I make my living consulting in ERP/Financial Reporting Systems and have several large banking clients. I have undergraduate degrees in Economics and Accounting, and a graduate degree in Business - so I'm not exactly naive when it comes to the matter at hand.
Good for you. You don't know shit about Bitcoin, and insisting you do based on irrelevant credentials is just making you look a bit dim witted as well as ignorant.
>So...the time I've spent acquiring knowledge of bitcoin has been wasted, huh?
Yes.
> If I decide to change my opinions on bitcoin to more closely align with yours will my time magically become "well spent"?
Nope. You'd just be aware it was wasted time.
>Tell you what, why don't you take the time to draft a post demonstrating your extensive knowledge on the technology and economics of bitcoin and lay out some well-reasoned arguments supporting your position that "Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed, technologically and philosophically"?
Why don't you try... oh, I don't know, pulling your head out of your ass and reading the millions of critiques out there that very, very effectively tear Bitcoin down on pretty much every single point its proponents have ever put forward as a reason it should be worth something?
> Kinda makes you look a little foolish, don't you think?
Your faith in Bitcoin (and yes, it's faith, because it is totally unsupported facts) is making you look more than just a little foolish. As are your irrelevant claims to be an authority of any kind on the subject, and your apparent compulsion to carry on defending it with follow-up posts days after everyone else has passed this topic by.
Bitcoin is now at the stage where all but the cultists have realised it's a failure. It's not 'first they laugh, then they fight, then you win"... it's 'first they laugh, then they try to jump on the bandwagon, then they realize they've been had'. The net result of Bitcoin was idiots having their money (sometimes in the form of electricity) moved into the hands of scammers, con-men, and a few individuals who got lucky... and also 'blockchain' becoming a buzzword in the financial sector. That's it.
It's time to pack your robe away, put down the manifesto, and move on to your next foolish obsession. Or grow up. Either or.
>of course if the cars were self driving then you could have your "rail provided power" on the freeway be good to go. If we got to the point where freeway access required a self driving car then we could probably increase the speed of those freeways safely.
The nice thing about rails is they're a lot better than asphalt if you want to deliver power with them, and they're also a lot better at steering. Inducted power and reliable self-driving tech just isn't there yet.
>This seems like it is avoiding those requirements by putting the self driving ability on these little carts,
Actually, mostly on the rail. Because we don't have trustworthy self-driving yet.
> but it is bad in that it requires an amazing amount of infrastructure to be built to make this work (tunnels everywhere).
Musk wants tunnels. I'm just talking about leveraging exiting rail, probably just during rush hour and leaving the rail for freight the rest of the time.
I mean, my plan is still impractical because it would require a major rail electrification project, building entrance and egress capability at each train station, and getting everyone to buy a commuter car to get to work. Still, we're a lot closer to that than to having everyone in a self-driving electric car running on induction-based grid power.
Trains are efficient on a cost-per-pound depot-to-depot basis... but the moment you want your trip to start or end somewhere other than a train station, or start or end at something other than the scheduled time, they suck.
Now, if we all drove little electric cars and - when it made sense - drove them onto a train designed to carry them - that'd be efficient. And once you're doing that, you can eliminate the train and just have the little electric car run off rail-provided power during its trip.
If the cars are small enough - can you say 'tandem two-seater'? - you could use existing railway track as dual monorails to instantly support travel in both directions simultaneously without laying new track. (There's still the electrification issue, of course...)
For most suburb-to-city commuting, such a system would be incredibly efficient; you'd get range and speed out of electric cars that couldn't be matched with current battery tech., and you'd get 'self-driving' that's essentially foolproof while following the rails without any advances in self-driving technology.
The rail system would even be more efficient, since it could be filled with almost bumper-to-bumper cars, optimally spaced based on time of day and anticipated traffic levels at each station.
More likely you'll get old rich people with suddenly youthful skin as they get theirs replaced when it starts wrinkling, sagging, and getting thin with age. And of course it'll be a massive (heh) boost for the breast augmentation industry.
But first you'll see replacement livers, kidneys, pancreases, lungs, etc. New bones for serious trauma victims, maybe to replaced deformed bones, too.
The real jump (not that these new technologies aren't already wonderful) will be when they can regrow and connect nerves reliably. When they can replace a damaged spine, or build a new arm... that will be awesome.
It's exciting to think that it's possible that within my lifetime the only thing that will be irreplaceable might be the frontal lobe of the brain... and maybe we could extend life quite a bit until that part starts to fail.
You joke, but blackmailing the Chinese to verify a transaction moving some long-untouched Bitcoin that's probably long-forgotten wouldn't be the worst scheme in the world.
Honestly, I'm surprised the Chinese miners haven't done it for themselves. As long as they don't touch the stuff supposedly mined by Satoshi, and randomly distribute their fraudulent transactions across the ledger and over time, it's unlikely they'd get caught.
>Whether or not bitcoin can ever become competitive with the established electronic currency systems remains to be seen
This is what makes it obvious you are NOT as savvy as I, at least in this area; it HAS been seen.
Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed, technologically and philosophically. It is self-defeating and incapable of being of any practical use on any decent scale. The only practical way to use Bitcoin is by utilizing other technologies that defeat any rational reasons for using Bitcoin in the first place.
If you haven't figured that out, you haven't learned enough about it. Or rather, you've wasted just enough time to be interested in it, but not enough to realize that time was wasted.
Stupid as it may be, as long as enough other fools believe in it, you can exchange your imaginary money for actual government-backed, widely accepted money or even goods.
And there are still enough Bitcoin idiots out there that we keep getting these posts on Slashdot - a forum where everyone should ideally be technically savvy enough to recognize Bitcoin as technological bullshit.
>The two shows that are currently well known from here are Orphan Black and Murdoch Mysteries.
I didn't know Orphan Black was Canadian. Murdoch was awesome for 9 seasons, but now I'm looking forward to the 'spinoff' set a couple of decades later.
I was thinking more along the lines of Schitt's Creek or maybe Letterkenny (but I don't know how well that's done internationally if at all). Or in the past, Due South and on the lower end of the scale Forever Knight and Night Heat.
> All of the work that we do for the American studios is creating the expertise to improve our shows.
I don't think we were ever that far behind except for the top talent going south and the lower budgets. With the costs going down as electronics and software improve, budgets have to be mattering less on those fronts... hell, amateurs can put out something decent if they have talent.
>Actually it's probably around the same percentage of good stuff that gets created.
I would doubt that on an apples-to-apples comparison. Their entertainment industry is disproportionately larger and drawing on a much larger talent pool. Bell curves being bell curves, I'd expect their top end - however you define the cut-off - would have to be better than ours.
Well, the Moon gives you gravity. Not a lot, but it's still far better than free fall. You drop something, you pick it up off the floor instead of worrying about another piece of space junk in proximity to your craft. It also gives you a support structure on which to build stuff (though that's really only important because of the gravity, I suppose). And it could be a supply of materials so you don't have to haul everything from Earth. And if you build your base in a polar crater, you can get more or less eternal shade and sunshine as you like it.
Back to the gravity, though... I'd love to see a long-duration mission to the Moon even if we just park an astronaut in a tin can on the surface. We have NO data on the long term effects of low-g on the human body, and our relatively nearby neighbour could give us valuable information that tells us something about how viable Mars is for human occupation.
First, a lot of our premium talent moves to California where the money is. The USA is, after all, right there, speaks the same language, has a compatible culture, and is 10x our size.
But we still manage to keep a lot of talent here - where the budgets are a bit smaller. And despite THAT, we still are known for our kids' programming and occasionally a comedy or drama that rises to the top and goes international.
And you have to remember we are a BIT different, and cultural differences will affect how you interpret what you're watching. There's stuff Canadians can't wait to have return between new episodes that most Americans would probably turn off at any time.
And finally, you have American shows produced in Canada for the financial advantage. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're crap... but they're not OURS regardless.
So... maybe the best answer to your question is, 'Mostly but not necessarily'.
Slashdot Mirror
The government is - in theory - a monopoly beholden to the population. A regional private monopoly is responsible only to their shareholders.
As the government maintains most roads, it can build, maintain, and operate most data infrastructure... either directly or by contracting the work out as required.
And as with roads, it can levy taxes to support the work. The entire economy depends on it these days (and more than that, it's critical for culture and knowledge flow as well), it's not like you're enriching a few by taxing the many.
I can't believe either side let things get this far, because it just makes the truth more obvious and the more obvious it is, the faster the revolution goes.
Neither studio nor writer had any leverage here. Both sides had everything to lose and nothing to win.
One day we'll admit broadcast is a dead medium and concentrate on delivery of on-demand streams over the Internet, perhaps leaving a few FTA PBS stations in a much reduced spectrum so the poorest and most rural folk still have something.
Of course, as the airwaves are national property, so the copper, fiber optic, and microwaves of the Internet should also be. Information infrastructure is too critical in the Information Age to let regional monopolies hold it hostage.
Think about what you just posted and why it might be incredibly stupid, because you have overlooked something incredibly obvious while trying to be clever.
I covered that with the last sentence of my previous post.
>Innocent children are taught that they should be unquestioningly accepting of wacky ideas just because their elders seem to believe them. Their natural scepticism is denounced as heresy.
It's not just religion - that's how you raise your kids, mostly. Because there's way too much stuff to let them question you about every little thing if you want to finish raising them before you die of old age.
And you may not have noticed this, but if you let a kid question you once... it rapidly escalates until they question EVERYTHING. Which sounds nice until you're trying to get them to brush their teeth before school.
I mean, you have to try to raise your children to be rational thinkers (if you're a good parent), but it is a trial of Herculean proportions.
We can do 5% if we are willing to go big and use nukes. 10% is in the realm of a fusion drive that is theoretically possible but hasn't been designed, built, or tested yet.
Regardless, it's 'only' a 150 day trip to Mars (and could be less given more fuel... I believe Musk is planning on 80 days without a revolutionary new rocket engine being necessary). As long as they spin the cabin on a tether to provide artificial gravity, that's not an impossibly long trip for people.
0.1c isn't really required to get the job done, though it'd be nice.
>solve the problem of radiation
Solved. Put the water and waste tanks around the emergency shelter area, watch the Sun and send warnings ahead to the astronauts when there's a risk of high radiation. On Mars, pile Martian regolith over your habitat module, or move in to a lava tube. Accept a slight increase in your risk of cancer.
Even without the shielding, this is literally not a problem for the people who would go. With current technology, you'd come back from a two year trip with a lifetime risk of death by cancer increasing from a base of 21% to 24%. And you got to visit Mars.
>solve the problem of ... lack of gravity
Once you're done accelerating, you split the ship in two on a (long) tether and spin it. A 400m tether and a rate of 2RPM would get you pretty much normal Earth gravity, if I recall the math correctly.
>figure out how to land
Musk has this one. He can do it on Earth, now he has to get it working with less air but also less gravity. The basic technology is already there and only requires refinement.
>how to survive on the planet until it's time to go.
Right now... you throw lots of supplies at the planet two years before you send people. We're throwing money at the problem, this is the easiest solution... though NASA has had some limited success with extending supplies with recycling, and you'd utilize that technology too, of course.
> But all of these things take time no matter how much money you throw at them.
Yes, but we've already done the stuff that takes up time. We know how to get a rocket to Mars. We have industries that can build rockets (and we're not worried about reusability except for the humans who need a ride back). It's just about money if we're willing to brute force the trip and risk a percentage of loss (equipment AND astronauts). More accurately, it's about redirecting economic activity to space exploration at the expense of multiple other sectors.
A trip that's more about finesse requires better technology - better recycling, better rocket engines, more knowledge of how to deal with the Martian surface (cycling airlocks, keeping out the Martian dust, in situ resource utilization).
I absolutely believe it could be done within a two-term presidency, and *possibly*, if everything went perfectly, even within one. Nobody's going to throw that kind of money at it, though. They'd get lynched. And even though I'm very much a proponent of human space exploration, I certainly wouldn't support any politician who thought it was a good idea.
>If MENSA had required an IQ of 180, it could be called a proper genius club.
If I recall correctly, there are more exclusive clubs for the 1%, 0.1% and 0.01%.
Mensa is something you join if you're a smart but socially inept kid who wants to brag. If you're still in Mensa as an adult you're probably not as smart as you think you are. The other groups seem more likely to be for actual smart people who simply want to have a better chance of being understood when discussing things... and I base that on the fact that you never hear people bragging about being in them.
>There's absolutely no guarantee that money will actually make it to people capable and willing to accomplish this.
We can get rockets to Mars now, and have done so several times. We've seen Musk's tail landing tech coming along nicely, and the math works out so we know it's possible to get it right for Mars.
>Not to mention it takes forever for a rocket to make it to Mars
Most estimates are in the 150-300 day range. It depends on how much fuel you want to burn. Mars and Earth align every 25 months or so, but you don't worry about that unless you're sending humans. Longer trips are OK for 'stuff'.
>Even communications with Earth will be subject to several minutes of delay due to speed of light being finite.
4-24 minutes speed-of-light delay, assuming a direct line of sight. If you're bouncing a signal off a Sun-orbiting satellite to get around our star, then it'll be a bit longer. That's not really a problem for sending 'stuff', and the reason to send humans is they don't need live remote control.
The problem would be manufacturing and testing. Which is where the money comes in. The next decent Mars launch window is in April of 2018, then there's another in July of 2020. So you make a metric fuckton of rockets for 2018 and mount your payloads and shoot 'em off, then you follow up with humans a couple of years later.
Money. LOTS of money. Ludicrous amounts of money. But it would make a difference, and it could be done.
And the point would be to figure out how to live there, and to more efficiently do scientific research. If you could keep a geologist alive on Mars, they could do more in a week than the rovers have done since the first one landed. Humans are very flexible tools.
And ultimately, we'd want to see if we could live there. Because why not? The same reason we migrated out of the trees and then eventually out of Africa. Because it's a new place to go and make more humans.
Mars is one of the few problems that 'throwing money at it' would actually solve.
It would just take a LOT of it. Ridiculous amounts.
But, in principle, we could launch fleets of rockets at Mars with life support and other modules until we have enough to keep a crew alive for a while. And while we're doing that, we could be paying Musk to develop his tail-landing tech on a faster timeline, even throwing test rockets at Mars.
And then, in a few years, we could throw a bunch of astronaut-carrying rockets at the red planet and hope to have a high percentage of successful landings.
You have to ask yourself if accelerating the timeline is worth the cost, and if in doing so you'd actually achieve anything useful that couldn't be done better and for less money with a bit more patience - and I think the answer is 'no'.
>But in the meantime, new kinds of work were created
Yep. We're all going to sell each other the latest crap for a 'home-based business' to peddle. You'll spend your days smelling candles or admiring custom wristbands or something as you and your neighbours try to make money selling each other overpriced crap.
Because we're not going to need warehouse workers, we're not going to need drivers, we're going to need vastly fewer cooks, malls will die as they fail to compete with automation-backed online retailers... daycare workers, cops, EMS, and politicians will be about it with pretty much every industry decimated *at least*.
Seriously, what do you think is going to replace what we currently do for work when almost everything gets dumped within a generation?
... I'm glad I did not RTFA.
> 1.) Artificial intelligence is already getting smarter than us, at an exponential rate
Nobody who knows anything says that. We don't have real AI at all yet, just expert systems and a few interesting decision algorithms.
> 2.) We'll make AIs into a general purpose intelligence, like our own.
Of course we will. (Why would anyone make a phone that is also a web browser, a camera, an appointment tracker, a video game machine, a music player, a movie player, a flashlight, a compass, a map, a light level sensor, and a motion sensor?)
If you've figured out AI, you go general as soon as you can, because you get everything in one box.
>3.) We can make human intelligence in silicon
Meat is not special. In fact, we have a lot more reason to believe we'll be able to build an intelligence in silicon that is more efficient than evolution built with meat that to believe it's impossible because [insert magical thinking].
> 4.) Intelligence can be expanded without limit.
Lots of singularity nuts may think this, but again, anyone who knows anything about the universe will understand there must be a finite limit. We don't have any reason to believe humans are anywhere near it - and we could at least expect to make an AI as smart as the smartest human ever, and then take out the unnecessary bits that slowed that person down. Then up the clock rate.
> 5.) Once we have exploding superintelligence it can solve most of our problems
Most of the problems that can be solved with thought and not action and where cooperation with implementing the solution can be reasonably expected.
In short, Wired's founding executive editor Kevin Kelly is (at least in this instance) a buffoon speaking of things he does not understand sufficiently well to be speaking of them from a public platform.
>Just because my opinion that the jury is still out re bitcoin doesn't match your opinion that bitcoin is a complete failure DOESN'T mean you are more technologically savvy on the matter. I make my living consulting in ERP/Financial Reporting Systems and have several large banking clients. I have undergraduate degrees in Economics and Accounting, and a graduate degree in Business - so I'm not exactly naive when it comes to the matter at hand.
Good for you. You don't know shit about Bitcoin, and insisting you do based on irrelevant credentials is just making you look a bit dim witted as well as ignorant.
>So...the time I've spent acquiring knowledge of bitcoin has been wasted, huh?
Yes.
> If I decide to change my opinions on bitcoin to more closely align with yours will my time magically become "well spent"?
Nope. You'd just be aware it was wasted time.
>Tell you what, why don't you take the time to draft a post demonstrating your extensive knowledge on the technology and economics of bitcoin and lay out some well-reasoned arguments supporting your position that "Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed, technologically and philosophically"?
Why don't you try... oh, I don't know, pulling your head out of your ass and reading the millions of critiques out there that very, very effectively tear Bitcoin down on pretty much every single point its proponents have ever put forward as a reason it should be worth something?
> Kinda makes you look a little foolish, don't you think?
Your faith in Bitcoin (and yes, it's faith, because it is totally unsupported facts) is making you look more than just a little foolish. As are your irrelevant claims to be an authority of any kind on the subject, and your apparent compulsion to carry on defending it with follow-up posts days after everyone else has passed this topic by.
Bitcoin is now at the stage where all but the cultists have realised it's a failure. It's not 'first they laugh, then they fight, then you win"... it's 'first they laugh, then they try to jump on the bandwagon, then they realize they've been had'. The net result of Bitcoin was idiots having their money (sometimes in the form of electricity) moved into the hands of scammers, con-men, and a few individuals who got lucky... and also 'blockchain' becoming a buzzword in the financial sector. That's it.
It's time to pack your robe away, put down the manifesto, and move on to your next foolish obsession. Or grow up. Either or.
And you wonder why nobody ever visits. It's people like you.
Holy Zarquon's singing fish, mankind.
>of course if the cars were self driving then you could have your "rail provided power" on the freeway be good to go. If we got to the point where freeway access required a self driving car then we could probably increase the speed of those freeways safely.
The nice thing about rails is they're a lot better than asphalt if you want to deliver power with them, and they're also a lot better at steering. Inducted power and reliable self-driving tech just isn't there yet.
>This seems like it is avoiding those requirements by putting the self driving ability on these little carts,
Actually, mostly on the rail. Because we don't have trustworthy self-driving yet.
> but it is bad in that it requires an amazing amount of infrastructure to be built to make this work (tunnels everywhere).
Musk wants tunnels. I'm just talking about leveraging exiting rail, probably just during rush hour and leaving the rail for freight the rest of the time.
I mean, my plan is still impractical because it would require a major rail electrification project, building entrance and egress capability at each train station, and getting everyone to buy a commuter car to get to work. Still, we're a lot closer to that than to having everyone in a self-driving electric car running on induction-based grid power.
Trains are efficient on a cost-per-pound depot-to-depot basis... but the moment you want your trip to start or end somewhere other than a train station, or start or end at something other than the scheduled time, they suck.
Now, if we all drove little electric cars and - when it made sense - drove them onto a train designed to carry them - that'd be efficient. And once you're doing that, you can eliminate the train and just have the little electric car run off rail-provided power during its trip.
If the cars are small enough - can you say 'tandem two-seater'? - you could use existing railway track as dual monorails to instantly support travel in both directions simultaneously without laying new track. (There's still the electrification issue, of course...)
For most suburb-to-city commuting, such a system would be incredibly efficient; you'd get range and speed out of electric cars that couldn't be matched with current battery tech., and you'd get 'self-driving' that's essentially foolproof while following the rails without any advances in self-driving technology.
The rail system would even be more efficient, since it could be filled with almost bumper-to-bumper cars, optimally spaced based on time of day and anticipated traffic levels at each station.
Only if my wife gets a deeper vagina.
More likely you'll get old rich people with suddenly youthful skin as they get theirs replaced when it starts wrinkling, sagging, and getting thin with age. And of course it'll be a massive (heh) boost for the breast augmentation industry.
But first you'll see replacement livers, kidneys, pancreases, lungs, etc. New bones for serious trauma victims, maybe to replaced deformed bones, too.
The real jump (not that these new technologies aren't already wonderful) will be when they can regrow and connect nerves reliably. When they can replace a damaged spine, or build a new arm... that will be awesome.
It's exciting to think that it's possible that within my lifetime the only thing that will be irreplaceable might be the frontal lobe of the brain... and maybe we could extend life quite a bit until that part starts to fail.
You joke, but blackmailing the Chinese to verify a transaction moving some long-untouched Bitcoin that's probably long-forgotten wouldn't be the worst scheme in the world.
Honestly, I'm surprised the Chinese miners haven't done it for themselves. As long as they don't touch the stuff supposedly mined by Satoshi, and randomly distribute their fraudulent transactions across the ledger and over time, it's unlikely they'd get caught.
>Whether or not bitcoin can ever become competitive with the established electronic currency systems remains to be seen
This is what makes it obvious you are NOT as savvy as I, at least in this area; it HAS been seen.
Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed, technologically and philosophically. It is self-defeating and incapable of being of any practical use on any decent scale. The only practical way to use Bitcoin is by utilizing other technologies that defeat any rational reasons for using Bitcoin in the first place.
If you haven't figured that out, you haven't learned enough about it. Or rather, you've wasted just enough time to be interested in it, but not enough to realize that time was wasted.
Stupid as it may be, as long as enough other fools believe in it, you can exchange your imaginary money for actual government-backed, widely accepted money or even goods.
And there are still enough Bitcoin idiots out there that we keep getting these posts on Slashdot - a forum where everyone should ideally be technically savvy enough to recognize Bitcoin as technological bullshit.
A company based on Bitcoin isn't operating according to the highest standards?
Wow. I'm definitely making a note in my diary about this unique and surprising turn of events.
>The two shows that are currently well known from here are Orphan Black and Murdoch Mysteries.
I didn't know Orphan Black was Canadian. Murdoch was awesome for 9 seasons, but now I'm looking forward to the 'spinoff' set a couple of decades later.
I was thinking more along the lines of Schitt's Creek or maybe Letterkenny (but I don't know how well that's done internationally if at all). Or in the past, Due South and on the lower end of the scale Forever Knight and Night Heat.
> All of the work that we do for the American studios is creating the expertise to improve our shows.
I don't think we were ever that far behind except for the top talent going south and the lower budgets. With the costs going down as electronics and software improve, budgets have to be mattering less on those fronts... hell, amateurs can put out something decent if they have talent.
>Actually it's probably around the same percentage of good stuff that gets created.
I would doubt that on an apples-to-apples comparison. Their entertainment industry is disproportionately larger and drawing on a much larger talent pool. Bell curves being bell curves, I'd expect their top end - however you define the cut-off - would have to be better than ours.
If you really want to sell it, I think you'd have to suggest we could gild the Moon.
Well, the Moon gives you gravity. Not a lot, but it's still far better than free fall. You drop something, you pick it up off the floor instead of worrying about another piece of space junk in proximity to your craft. It also gives you a support structure on which to build stuff (though that's really only important because of the gravity, I suppose). And it could be a supply of materials so you don't have to haul everything from Earth. And if you build your base in a polar crater, you can get more or less eternal shade and sunshine as you like it.
Back to the gravity, though... I'd love to see a long-duration mission to the Moon even if we just park an astronaut in a tin can on the surface. We have NO data on the long term effects of low-g on the human body, and our relatively nearby neighbour could give us valuable information that tells us something about how viable Mars is for human occupation.
>Is it just me, or does Canadian TV suck?
Yes and no. It actually gets a bit complicated.
First, a lot of our premium talent moves to California where the money is. The USA is, after all, right there, speaks the same language, has a compatible culture, and is 10x our size.
But we still manage to keep a lot of talent here - where the budgets are a bit smaller. And despite THAT, we still are known for our kids' programming and occasionally a comedy or drama that rises to the top and goes international.
And you have to remember we are a BIT different, and cultural differences will affect how you interpret what you're watching. There's stuff Canadians can't wait to have return between new episodes that most Americans would probably turn off at any time.
And finally, you have American shows produced in Canada for the financial advantage. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're crap... but they're not OURS regardless.
So... maybe the best answer to your question is, 'Mostly but not necessarily'.