I predict a decline in American television will result in an uptick in streaming and piracy of foreign content... and there are a few Canadian shows that do well in the American market that might get a boost in the traditional distribution arena.
There are plenty of English-language productions out there. The UK, Canada, and Australia could take the opportunity to grab a bigger piece of the market from the USA.
I think Heroes was doomed from the start... and if not the start, by the conclusion of the season one finale. It was all tease, and when they finally blew their wad at the end, it was a half load.
Yes. But I think this one is more of a 'espouse opinion whenever the opportunity comes up, encourage people to write their rep (or even better, their preferred candidate in the next election cycle) and then vote' type situation than a 'grab the pitchforks and torches' one.
> I suppose I should just leave my family behind, go buy a Hummer, and spend the rest of my days eating double-cheeseburgers and partying with hookers and blow.
If I can occasionally visit my family, go buy an airplane, and spend the rest of my days eating filet mignon and partying with hookers and alcohol... I could be convinced!
If the problem is well-defined and the developers have worked on similar projects before, they can probably give fairly accurate estimates on how long it will take. Mostly with mid-sized projects, I've found, because any delay is disproportionately large in a tiny project, and large projects are more likely to have significant managerial interference after the project goals were supposed to be set in stone.
If you're looking as something novel, then estimating the required time becomes more of a dark art. You simply don't know what issues will come up that you've never encountered before (and therefore you also don't know how difficult they will be to code around) when you're in unknown territory. Sure, if the problem is well-defined and the project manager successfully resists scope creep, this can be limited, but it can never be eliminated. Eventually, the UAT group is going to identify a problem that wasn't on the coder's radar, and then delays begin.
I usually double my gut feeling then inevitably have a few instances where I'm under stress trying to keep to that when something's gone wrong. Dark art.
>Distractionball is only there to keep your mind off of what the elites are really doing, anyway
Lemmie tell you something - LIFE is a distraction. One after another until you're dead. You just hope you get enough interesting distractions along the way that you mostly enjoy your time among the living.
If being a sports fan works for someone to the point they surrender their wallet to the media companies and their privacy to the government (and media companies...), well, OK. I'd like everyone to have the same priorities I do, but as long as they're not putting a gun to my head I'm pretty much OK with them doing whatever the hell they want.
In 100 years we're all going to be dead anyway; let the rabble have their circuses. They're probably having more fun than we are and good for them. The elites, for all the power they wield and riches they have, will ALSO be dead. And believe it or not, they don't enjoy life significantly more than anyone who has their basic needs met. Humans are discontented by nature.
Now, you find one of the elite doing something that messes with your personal path to happiness, yeah, you rally the troops and storm the castle. Other than that, you're just wasting your valuable time on Earth worrying about them when you should be worrying about yourself.
They have their own worldview that doesn't have you at the center. They have their own competing needs and desires.
Give me a sufficiently complex AI that can be set to be as subservient as I like and I'd absolutely choose a factory build over Nature's own. And I can guarantee you I'm not alone in that.
AI (if we ever figure it out) is a serious danger to the continuation of our species, and not because it'll result in robots rising up against us. It will simply take our jobs and be our friend while we lay about not breeding new generations of ourselves.
The American definition of 'Person of Interest' is someone who has not been formally accused or charged with a crime, which means they don't have enough evidence yet. If you don't have enough to charge a person, you shouldn't have enough to run public facial recognition scans for them.
If you're ready to arrest them on sight, that's enough for me. That's a good standard.
But what about everyone else? Do you really think the cops won't keep every face they capture, for comparison against future images from security cameras? Do you think they won't start analyzing who shows up where and the correlation with criminal activity to create lists of suspects?
They cast this net as far and wide as the technology permits unless and until they're reined in by law. Given enough cameras and enough processing power, they'd gladly follow every citizen all day long, because it'd make their job much easier.
The public needs to decide just how much privacy they're willing to sacrifice in the name of security, and get their legislative representatives to give that decision the force of law... or the cops will take all their privacy without even blinking. Not because they're evil, but because their job is to catch bad guys, not consider the moral and philosophical issues of the tools and methods they use to catch them.
I'm in my 40s, so I've started thinking about it. You know what? I can't see myself retiring, and it's not about money.
I just wouldn't know what to do with myself other than become a couch potato. I've already travelled the world as much as I care to (and have a bit more travelling to do to keep the spouse happy).
I'm not rich enough to just do 'whatever', but have more than I need to get by. Unless I win the lottery so I can fiddle around on a large scale, I'll keep working just for something useful to do.
What retirement looks like for me is slowing down, not stopping.
I agree that limited your personal environmental impact - and making compromises to limit the environmental impact of your society in general - is just common sense in terms of long term safety.
That's not the same thing, though. When you talk about safety standards, you're talking about things that are dangerous on scales of less than a human lifetime, and also that have a nice, local cause-and-effect relationship.
Climate change is too slow, too abstract, and the costs too dispersed to qualify. That's why sane nations have environmental standards along side their more traditional safety standards.
The higher the organizational level at which a standard is set, the fewer groups have to come up with standards, and the easier compliance becomes. Done at least somewhat close to well, it is more efficient for the standard setters, the companies who follow the standard, and the consumers who judge by it.
Now, Energy Star isn't a safety standard, so it's not exactly critical, but it's still a great thing to have a common measuring stick for all to use.
> A lot of people assume that welfare systems will be abused.
Oh, that's not an assumption, it's damn near a law of Nature.
> They'd rather pay more knowing the money is going to working people, than people that hypothetically are abusing the welfare system.
Which is a foolish attitude. You know abuse will happen, you put in some checks and balances and aim for a low enough rate of abuse to be tolerable. Just like we manage to have a society without every other person being a police officer, and a few criminals having fairly long careers and an even smaller number essentially 'getting away with it' for their entire lifetimes.
I'm all for restricting the use of credentials - like 'Doctor', for instance - to people certified by the state to use them. However, that restriction should only come into play when they're using those credentials professionally or to lend authority to a fraudulent claim, which this man was not.
He was speaking the truth, arguably for the public good, and he IS an engineer, just not one registered to work professionally in the state. His background does make his study and its findings somewhat more credible to those incapable of understanding it themselves... but he's RIGHT, so he's not trying to use that title to defraud anyone.
If I'm going to spend extra just to keep money in the country, I'd rather it be taxed from me and redistributed as welfare rather than charged as a premium on products handled by a make-work project.
With welfare you're not enriching the already-rich at the top of the corporate structure, so you're giving much more efficiently to the people who need it.
We're already having the opening skirmishes - you can see it in Hollywood where they're tailoring productions to be Chinese-friendly. Rewrite anything the Communist Party of China might find offensive before the script is considered complete, make sure the dialogue translates well.
But imagine a future in which all media is fully available (after the government censors apply their filters). Imagine you have a choice of seeing a Chinese movie (made in English for foreign consumption) over an American or British one, and the viewing fee is 90% lower. You go for it, the movie's fine... but without you even realizing it, you're absorbing Chinese culture. Their values, their imagery, fawning over their stars. Maybe even displacing your own.
Sounds like a silly thing to be concerned about, but on long enough time scales (like generations) that kind of propaganda works wonders, especially when it subtly presents their way as better. Sure, we're doing the same to them, but who has the bigger population, who can crank out new product for less money, more frequently?
I'm all for cultures mixing - picking up the best each has to offer and excising their own worst in the process - but if the flow is too one-sided that's not what happens. You get their best and worst replacing yours.
They are the very definition of 'middle-men'. They are the gatekeepers because they're the gatekeepers, not because they're adding value.
Because if they really were adding value, they'd simply enrich themselves with their knowledge instead of hedging their bets by taking a commission off of others.
They're glorified shamans and bookies, offering betting advice based on sheep entrails. But they get lots of coke and hookers, so they have that going for them.
You're going to want a LONG fuse on that deadman switch, or any number of accidents or incidents of forgetfulness could cause you some serious annoyance.
I have a friend who would wipe or destroy my digital media for me if I died, after migrating any family photos or videos my wife wanted to keep. My stuff is locked down for the sake of it, and not locked down well enough to keep law enforcement or a decent hacker out anyway.
Security vs. convenience. By the time you've gone to deadman switches you're so far beyond 'inconvenient' you need a new word for it.
I have to admit, the first time I ordered something direct from China I was a bit worried I'd never see a product and the bank would call me about fraudulent activity on my card.
No such worries now. When I'm getting the same product (literally) direct from the factory in China instead of having it go through a local retailer, I pay less than 1/3 the price. Not even Wal-Mart seems able to compete, given the last price comparison I did had them demanding 5x what an AliExpress vendor was selling a comparable product for.
Canada lost some wealth and China gained some, and in the meantime I get to live as if I were a bit wealthier than I am.
Lowering trade barriers globally allows the common consumer some of the same freedom the 1% have had to themselves until now - purchasing what they want from where they want and screw national borders.
In the long run, this will result in equalization of standard of living around the globe - so long as we have the same social support systems and the same expectations of our local governments. But with wealth will come education and power, at least to some degree, and we'll see social standards equalize as well. Since we're all human, I don't really have a problem with leveling the playing field, so long as it happens slowly enough it doesn't disrupt my life on noticeable timescales.
This kind of thing was predicted long ago, though it was supposed to be a warning:
"We'll know you're dead when you don't answer your phone".
Well, we showed those prognosticators, and we ignored their warnings and went leagues beyond what they foresaw. We voluntarily wear electronics that spy on us regardless of whether we activate them or not.
It's too easy to circumvent - use private email, pass notes, take a break and talk outside, etc.
It seems more likely that they're using this project as an opportunity for tuning Watson so it can be developed as a replacement for your average stock analyst.
Wow. I thought Toronto was small, but Dallas-Fort Worth has a tiny downtown core and a LOT of sprawl. I don't think you'd bother with rooftop landing there, for downtown you'd just land on the outskirts and walk the rest of the way, and everywhere else you'd just use the parking lot for your destination building.
Of course, that's probably why they're talking about doing this there rather than a more dense urban area.
You can't safely operate flying vehicles in close proximity to tall buildings... so we're going to need a lot more rooftop landing pads and better roof access to them.
The reason you can't fly deep within a heavily urban landscape is that buildings make very strong vortices as wind is forced around corners. Yeah, it looks cool in movies when a helicopter comes down Main, but it's not something you want to do if there's anything more than a light breeze. And then there's all the extra obstacles as you get closer to the ground - wires, lamp posts, signs, etc.
>Sure, you can force a certain note, but it sounds artificial.
But it doesn't need to. They don't have to do auto-tune in discrete steps following a set scale, it could be (as far as the human ear is concerned) done in an analog fashion.
The technology will improve until you don't even notice it. It may already have done so, with the only auto-tune you notice today being deliberately worse than necessary for effect or simply the result of cut-rate sound engineering.
Which makes me wonder... can you get a mic with built-in auto-tune for home karaoke yet? I sing like a cat being strangled, I could use one.
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I predict a decline in American television will result in an uptick in streaming and piracy of foreign content... and there are a few Canadian shows that do well in the American market that might get a boost in the traditional distribution arena.
There are plenty of English-language productions out there. The UK, Canada, and Australia could take the opportunity to grab a bigger piece of the market from the USA.
I think Heroes was doomed from the start... and if not the start, by the conclusion of the season one finale. It was all tease, and when they finally blew their wad at the end, it was a half load.
>But shouldn't there be a line in the sand?
Yes. But I think this one is more of a 'espouse opinion whenever the opportunity comes up, encourage people to write their rep (or even better, their preferred candidate in the next election cycle) and then vote' type situation than a 'grab the pitchforks and torches' one.
> I suppose I should just leave my family behind, go buy a Hummer, and spend the rest of my days eating double-cheeseburgers and partying with hookers and blow.
If I can occasionally visit my family, go buy an airplane, and spend the rest of my days eating filet mignon and partying with hookers and alcohol... I could be convinced!
If the problem is well-defined and the developers have worked on similar projects before, they can probably give fairly accurate estimates on how long it will take. Mostly with mid-sized projects, I've found, because any delay is disproportionately large in a tiny project, and large projects are more likely to have significant managerial interference after the project goals were supposed to be set in stone.
If you're looking as something novel, then estimating the required time becomes more of a dark art. You simply don't know what issues will come up that you've never encountered before (and therefore you also don't know how difficult they will be to code around) when you're in unknown territory. Sure, if the problem is well-defined and the project manager successfully resists scope creep, this can be limited, but it can never be eliminated. Eventually, the UAT group is going to identify a problem that wasn't on the coder's radar, and then delays begin.
I usually double my gut feeling then inevitably have a few instances where I'm under stress trying to keep to that when something's gone wrong. Dark art.
>Distractionball is only there to keep your mind off of what the elites are really doing, anyway
Lemmie tell you something - LIFE is a distraction. One after another until you're dead. You just hope you get enough interesting distractions along the way that you mostly enjoy your time among the living.
If being a sports fan works for someone to the point they surrender their wallet to the media companies and their privacy to the government (and media companies...), well, OK. I'd like everyone to have the same priorities I do, but as long as they're not putting a gun to my head I'm pretty much OK with them doing whatever the hell they want.
In 100 years we're all going to be dead anyway; let the rabble have their circuses. They're probably having more fun than we are and good for them. The elites, for all the power they wield and riches they have, will ALSO be dead. And believe it or not, they don't enjoy life significantly more than anyone who has their basic needs met. Humans are discontented by nature.
Now, you find one of the elite doing something that messes with your personal path to happiness, yeah, you rally the troops and storm the castle. Other than that, you're just wasting your valuable time on Earth worrying about them when you should be worrying about yourself.
They have their own worldview that doesn't have you at the center. They have their own competing needs and desires.
Give me a sufficiently complex AI that can be set to be as subservient as I like and I'd absolutely choose a factory build over Nature's own. And I can guarantee you I'm not alone in that.
AI (if we ever figure it out) is a serious danger to the continuation of our species, and not because it'll result in robots rising up against us. It will simply take our jobs and be our friend while we lay about not breeding new generations of ourselves.
The American definition of 'Person of Interest' is someone who has not been formally accused or charged with a crime, which means they don't have enough evidence yet. If you don't have enough to charge a person, you shouldn't have enough to run public facial recognition scans for them.
If you're ready to arrest them on sight, that's enough for me. That's a good standard.
But what about everyone else? Do you really think the cops won't keep every face they capture, for comparison against future images from security cameras? Do you think they won't start analyzing who shows up where and the correlation with criminal activity to create lists of suspects?
They cast this net as far and wide as the technology permits unless and until they're reined in by law. Given enough cameras and enough processing power, they'd gladly follow every citizen all day long, because it'd make their job much easier.
The public needs to decide just how much privacy they're willing to sacrifice in the name of security, and get their legislative representatives to give that decision the force of law... or the cops will take all their privacy without even blinking. Not because they're evil, but because their job is to catch bad guys, not consider the moral and philosophical issues of the tools and methods they use to catch them.
I'm in my 40s, so I've started thinking about it. You know what? I can't see myself retiring, and it's not about money.
I just wouldn't know what to do with myself other than become a couch potato. I've already travelled the world as much as I care to (and have a bit more travelling to do to keep the spouse happy).
I'm not rich enough to just do 'whatever', but have more than I need to get by. Unless I win the lottery so I can fiddle around on a large scale, I'll keep working just for something useful to do.
What retirement looks like for me is slowing down, not stopping.
I agree that limited your personal environmental impact - and making compromises to limit the environmental impact of your society in general - is just common sense in terms of long term safety.
That's not the same thing, though. When you talk about safety standards, you're talking about things that are dangerous on scales of less than a human lifetime, and also that have a nice, local cause-and-effect relationship.
Climate change is too slow, too abstract, and the costs too dispersed to qualify. That's why sane nations have environmental standards along side their more traditional safety standards.
The higher the organizational level at which a standard is set, the fewer groups have to come up with standards, and the easier compliance becomes. Done at least somewhat close to well, it is more efficient for the standard setters, the companies who follow the standard, and the consumers who judge by it.
Now, Energy Star isn't a safety standard, so it's not exactly critical, but it's still a great thing to have a common measuring stick for all to use.
>The problem is, this goes against the capitalist nature of the country.
Yours, probably. Mine, mostly. We're already moderately socialist.
> A lot of people assume that welfare systems will be abused.
Oh, that's not an assumption, it's damn near a law of Nature.
> They'd rather pay more knowing the money is going to working people, than people that hypothetically are abusing the welfare system.
Which is a foolish attitude. You know abuse will happen, you put in some checks and balances and aim for a low enough rate of abuse to be tolerable. Just like we manage to have a society without every other person being a police officer, and a few criminals having fairly long careers and an even smaller number essentially 'getting away with it' for their entire lifetimes.
>Either you didn't think it through, or you're a libertarian.
First, learn to read. Second, learn to comprehend. Third, re-read my first post and realize why I wrote this one.
I'm all for restricting the use of credentials - like 'Doctor', for instance - to people certified by the state to use them. However, that restriction should only come into play when they're using those credentials professionally or to lend authority to a fraudulent claim, which this man was not.
He was speaking the truth, arguably for the public good, and he IS an engineer, just not one registered to work professionally in the state. His background does make his study and its findings somewhat more credible to those incapable of understanding it themselves... but he's RIGHT, so he's not trying to use that title to defraud anyone.
I hope he wins his lawsuit.
>And the world outside USA says "Go on, tell us more". Hollywood has been giving us overt US propaganda since the second world war...
As a Canadian, I'm somewhat aware of that, and in fact that's what led to my post in the first place.
If I'm going to spend extra just to keep money in the country, I'd rather it be taxed from me and redistributed as welfare rather than charged as a premium on products handled by a make-work project.
With welfare you're not enriching the already-rich at the top of the corporate structure, so you're giving much more efficiently to the people who need it.
We're already having the opening skirmishes - you can see it in Hollywood where they're tailoring productions to be Chinese-friendly. Rewrite anything the Communist Party of China might find offensive before the script is considered complete, make sure the dialogue translates well.
But imagine a future in which all media is fully available (after the government censors apply their filters). Imagine you have a choice of seeing a Chinese movie (made in English for foreign consumption) over an American or British one, and the viewing fee is 90% lower. You go for it, the movie's fine... but without you even realizing it, you're absorbing Chinese culture. Their values, their imagery, fawning over their stars. Maybe even displacing your own.
Sounds like a silly thing to be concerned about, but on long enough time scales (like generations) that kind of propaganda works wonders, especially when it subtly presents their way as better. Sure, we're doing the same to them, but who has the bigger population, who can crank out new product for less money, more frequently?
I'm all for cultures mixing - picking up the best each has to offer and excising their own worst in the process - but if the flow is too one-sided that's not what happens. You get their best and worst replacing yours.
Something to think about, anyway.
They are the very definition of 'middle-men'. They are the gatekeepers because they're the gatekeepers, not because they're adding value.
Because if they really were adding value, they'd simply enrich themselves with their knowledge instead of hedging their bets by taking a commission off of others.
They're glorified shamans and bookies, offering betting advice based on sheep entrails. But they get lots of coke and hookers, so they have that going for them.
You're going to want a LONG fuse on that deadman switch, or any number of accidents or incidents of forgetfulness could cause you some serious annoyance.
I have a friend who would wipe or destroy my digital media for me if I died, after migrating any family photos or videos my wife wanted to keep. My stuff is locked down for the sake of it, and not locked down well enough to keep law enforcement or a decent hacker out anyway.
Security vs. convenience. By the time you've gone to deadman switches you're so far beyond 'inconvenient' you need a new word for it.
I have to admit, the first time I ordered something direct from China I was a bit worried I'd never see a product and the bank would call me about fraudulent activity on my card.
No such worries now. When I'm getting the same product (literally) direct from the factory in China instead of having it go through a local retailer, I pay less than 1/3 the price. Not even Wal-Mart seems able to compete, given the last price comparison I did had them demanding 5x what an AliExpress vendor was selling a comparable product for.
Canada lost some wealth and China gained some, and in the meantime I get to live as if I were a bit wealthier than I am.
Lowering trade barriers globally allows the common consumer some of the same freedom the 1% have had to themselves until now - purchasing what they want from where they want and screw national borders.
In the long run, this will result in equalization of standard of living around the globe - so long as we have the same social support systems and the same expectations of our local governments. But with wealth will come education and power, at least to some degree, and we'll see social standards equalize as well. Since we're all human, I don't really have a problem with leveling the playing field, so long as it happens slowly enough it doesn't disrupt my life on noticeable timescales.
This kind of thing was predicted long ago, though it was supposed to be a warning:
"We'll know you're dead when you don't answer your phone".
Well, we showed those prognosticators, and we ignored their warnings and went leagues beyond what they foresaw. We voluntarily wear electronics that spy on us regardless of whether we activate them or not.
>What is the compelling business case that BTC, ETH, LTC, NMC or PPC cannot address
Err... you need to ask, "What is the compelling business case that BTC, ETH, LTC, NMC or PPC can address.
Unless you count, 'gambling, fraud, and purchases on black markets the cops aren't watching yet' as valid.
It's too easy to circumvent - use private email, pass notes, take a break and talk outside, etc.
It seems more likely that they're using this project as an opportunity for tuning Watson so it can be developed as a replacement for your average stock analyst.
Wow. I thought Toronto was small, but Dallas-Fort Worth has a tiny downtown core and a LOT of sprawl. I don't think you'd bother with rooftop landing there, for downtown you'd just land on the outskirts and walk the rest of the way, and everywhere else you'd just use the parking lot for your destination building.
Of course, that's probably why they're talking about doing this there rather than a more dense urban area.
You can't safely operate flying vehicles in close proximity to tall buildings... so we're going to need a lot more rooftop landing pads and better roof access to them.
The reason you can't fly deep within a heavily urban landscape is that buildings make very strong vortices as wind is forced around corners. Yeah, it looks cool in movies when a helicopter comes down Main, but it's not something you want to do if there's anything more than a light breeze. And then there's all the extra obstacles as you get closer to the ground - wires, lamp posts, signs, etc.
>Sure, you can force a certain note, but it sounds artificial.
But it doesn't need to. They don't have to do auto-tune in discrete steps following a set scale, it could be (as far as the human ear is concerned) done in an analog fashion.
The technology will improve until you don't even notice it. It may already have done so, with the only auto-tune you notice today being deliberately worse than necessary for effect or simply the result of cut-rate sound engineering.
Which makes me wonder... can you get a mic with built-in auto-tune for home karaoke yet? I sing like a cat being strangled, I could use one.