>Most of the time, when the "display" is bad, it's actually the driving electronics that are bad.
With CRTs use for steady or repetitive images, burn in is a serious issue. And if the phosphor coating can be degraded in specific places (I'm not up on the physics/chemistry, but presumably the electron gun isn't running out of electrons...), it's going to be degrading to a lesser extent in general.
If you ever used a classic arcade system back in the day, you'd know even when they were relatively new the screens showed ghosts of the demo screen, or any common game elements (as in Donkey Kong or Pac-Man). You wouldn't want to use an old screen from one game for another one.
I'm not terribly troubled by it. My MAME cabinet has an LED screen in it, which means lower power requirements, a sharper image, and no real worry that the main screen will burn in.
If the retro community is big enough, somebody will produce a 4:3 aspect ratio, slightly convex LED with a thick glass cover - and perhaps even an onboard function that can simulate burn in.
It still won't be the same, of course, but neither are the guts of most arcade systems anyway.
And when the patient loses their key? Or when a medical records clerk makes an error? You're introducing more problems than you're solving.
You don't want an unalterable, ever-growing database. You want standards to allow easy exchange of information, a system to which access is limited to authorized users, and privacy legislation to ensure anyone misusing the data can be severely punished.
>but it's easy to build up a never-exhausted queue of good stuff to watch when you're in the mood.
I don't know about that - I've built what I consider to be a fairly large collection of basically every movie or television show I've enjoyed in the last 30 years or so (since I started caring at all about what I watched).
You know what? I find I'm almost always more willing to spend a lot of time hunting for something new than to spend a little time to select something I already have.
Most of the stuff I have falls into two categories - good enough I remember it and bad enough I don't. Either way, it's unusual that I want to watch it again. I still enjoy the option, though.
It'll see cars coming and assess the demographics of then next batch of cars, then deploy an ad that will earn the most revenue for the billboard owner for that batch.
The ad will be on display as your batch comes into optimal viewing distance and cycled to the next ad for the next batch when your group passes out of optimal distance.
And that's just the easiest bit of processing to do. You could get fancier and allow for cutting the cycle short if a particularly profitable cluster of cars is detected that is outside your regular cycle.
My GP is responsible for my medical records (all medical results get copied to him regardless of where I go), though exactly how and where they're stored I've no idea. I do know the bastards charge ridiculous amounts of money in some instances to transfer or release records.
I suspect it's 3rd party vendors contracted by the province and restricted by the provincial Personal Health Information Privacy Act (https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/04p03).
The system seems to be working, more or less. I can't recall the last time there was a news item about someone violating the privacy protections.
Patients should have access to their records, but giving them control is a mistake from a societal perspective. You're just asking for an 'arms race' of lawsuits and insurance premiums.
Yeah, IT meetings are about sharing information, maybe receiving direction from higher up the chain.
It's kind of a shame they're treated like any other meeting, because if you could appear when the agenda has an item that might involve you and then step out afterwards (assuming those items cluster well...), a lot fewer people would be sitting there bored out of their minds instead of possibly being productive back at their desks.
The manager is the only one who needs to be there end-to-end, because they're the ones who need to know where everyone is and roughly what they're doing. I only need to know or share when my actions and a colleague's are likely to overlap.
>AI isn't going to want to destroy humanity unless we program it to
And if we're not careful, we could inadvertently program them that way. We're talking about creating a highly flexible system we'd consider intelligent, and its programming would amount to instincts.
With regular old 'dumb' programs we make mistakes that have unintended consequences all the time. That could be much worse with AI.
Do you really want to be standing on piles of human skulls, waiting your turn to die and thinking, "Well, that was a really interesting emergent behaviour we didn't anticipate"?
>The "we can't innovate because the rich get first dibs" argument is not sailing with the public.
This is because everyone dreams of joining the ranks of the rich, despite the odds against it.
>Wealth inequality gets worse the more you start monkeying around with the market.
That is incorrect; an unregulated market results in robber barons. See history.
>I'd RATHER have wealth inequality because then the people who aren't contributing anything or doing menial work of limited value (pealing potatoes) get LESS than what people are finding new ways to provide for things people are actually willing to pay for.
Wealth inequality will never go away, but it isn't inappropriate for a society to attempt to limit the degree of inequality.
And it's not the innovators who tend to be the richest, but those with the wealth to already dominate the market. They're not necessarily earning their position on the wealth scale doing that, and in fact are likely retarding progress as it is something that could harm their position. Established players like the established market.
In the short term, people in the US can choose to work at what amounts to starvation wages compared to local cost of living. Or move on to those new jobs everyone's always claiming will magically appear.
In the long term (after the American economy is destroyed but the richest have milked it for all they can and moved to whatever nation can still support their standard of living), foreign workers will have cause their local economies to grow and their wage expectations will grow simultaneously. Ultimately, they'll be the same as domestic labour only with the hassle of dealing with people in a different time zone and possibly with cultural and language issues. But hey, equalization will happen faster if America's crashing as quickly as they're growing.
It would seem one solution is to levy a 'standard of living' tariff on offshored jobs that covers the difference in expense, and here's the difficult part - remit the collected tariffs to the foreign workers instead of trying to hold onto it domestically.
That will not only make the domestic labor force more competitive in the short term, it will insure a rapid rise of the foreign economy so they are less competitive in the long run.
Or you can put up various walls, isolate your nation from the global economy, and find yourself falling further and further behind the rest of the planet over time.
>they should have enough memory to be switched on when their shift starts and switched off when it ends.
The technology isn't there yet. Cops often work shifts that exceed 12h. Storage? Sure. Transferring it to central storage, cataloguing it all? Exists but is relatively expensive to do right. Lightweight battery to keep a decent camera recording for more than half a day? Not yet.
And they have the right to go to the bathroom or just take a lunch break without being on camera.
With a large enough sample size, it is expected to average out.
75L of urine is a single instance of voiding a full bladder for each of 215 people... people 'randomly selected' from the population by their willingness to urinate in a public pool.
Sure, you have no idea what the diet of each of those people is, but you can make a pretty good estimate of the average diet.
Having said that, I'd want to do a quick count of who uses the pool on a weekly basis. If you have a large senior fitness class or get hit by the new-moms-and-babies set, that could explain all the urine... and you could tighten your estimates a bit since you could make better guesses about the average diet.
Just imagine you roll up on a scene where there is an armed and dangerous person. How likely are you to be thinking about turning on your camera and ensuring it's working before you're dealing with the problem?
Or, from another perspective... someone's pointing a gun at you, and you see a cop arrive but he spends 30 seconds or more in his cruiser pushing buttons before he comes to help you.
Something like a 'GoPro for guns' is probably the best possible solution. A little bullet cam mounted like a scope, that activates when pulled from the holster. There'd still be the issue of keeping it charged and checking that it works, but that could be a start-of-shift check (and there'd be a convenient record of that check, too).
Broadcast television is that thing where you get an extremely limited selection, you don't choose when things start, and only have an option to pause or rewind if you insert a DVR into the loop.
Oh, and generally it's around 33% unskippable advertisements.
If you're not offering a massive library of on-demand material (including a lot of new material), there wouldn't seem to be much point for a 'broadcast television' streaming service outside of sports... which this service doesn't include.
Actually, the story was the rail gun's standard payloads were altered from wheat to rock. I can't recall if that was a standard shipping 'container' packed with gravel or a metal band and some rockets strapped to one big rock... either way the payload size would have been limited by the diameter of the driver's magnetic rings and the limit of its ability to provide vertical lift.
Since that system was designed to drop payloads non-destructively into a body of water, there's a certain amount of suspension of disbelief required to see that same system launching much more massive objects at much higher velocities.
Their secondary launcher was built in preparation for war, so that would have had the mass and acceleration requirements accounted for, but I'm pretty sure that in the book the second launcher was just a backup.
So yes, once you're on the Moon, and once you have an appropriate mass driver that can levitate enough mass and accelerate it to a useful velocity, you can take solar-powered shots at Earth until the Earthlings manage to build and launch a rocket to destroy your launcher. (Min several days even if it's sitting on a launch pad waiting to go).
I'm certainly not concerned about a dangerous weapon being built on the Moon in the near term... there's no benefit to balance the cost of doing so. It's a lot more cost effective just to put something (nuclear) in orbit and leave it on standby.
I'd actually be OK with that - so long as customers don't have to pay.
You could still filter at the customer end (you'd be foolish to trust your ISP anyway), and you'd legislate it so the ISP can't count identifiable spam traffic as part of the customer's network utilization. They'd have to provide extra bandwidth to handle it, and couldn't charge for bit transfer.
I doubt any spammers would pay for that service, because they thrive on parasitic abuse of the network to avoid the already minimal costs for sending digital messages.
The problem is the minor stuff gets ignored (and honestly, a good deal of it is just innocent human being human stuff which is WHY it gets ignored), and a lot of the genuine complaints are so beyond our experience that when they're brought up they sound just as outrageous as the false ones.
I'm kind of on board with "Don't make a big deal of it in the press until it's gone through the courts". There's no reasonable way to judge what happened based on whether the claims seem credible or not, when reality is so variable in this regard.
I disagree with point 3. There are filtering measures required to combat spam, botnets, DDOS attacks, etc.
You want to move those costs as close to the source as possible to put pressure on them to eliminate the problem. A totally unfiltered Internet just means the consumer pays for a choked pipe they can't actually use.
> It's a solid phone that was hampered by rough software at launch which has been fixed.
I have a Classic. Buggy browser, OS patching seems to have stopped, nobody's developing apps anymore (but at least it's Android-based now so you can side load many apps if you want to).
They hamstrung the Blackberry Bridge and then dropped the Playbook platform altogether after swearing up and down they wouldn't.
I like the sandboxed work and personal modes. I like the secure link to a private server (though poorly implemented so features fail if Blackberry has an outage).
I don't want an 'access standby' button, I want an OFF button, damnit.
It is ridiculous that if I want an actual off button I have to either unplug the device (or pull the battery), or have it powered through a power bar that (thankfully) still has a power switch on it that does something.
Make the tickets transferrable and include the right to refuse anyone who can't meet the fitness requirements (requirements which a clearly published so people can decide ahead of time)
Have another clause allowing for a pair of alternates to be selected in case of a last-minute issue with insufficient time to vet/train anyone you might sell your tickets to.
Have secondary prizes of sending a quarter kilo of inert material for the trip, or a place at the launch pad.
A lottery system might actually work really well. Mainly the 'transferrable' part, because that means if you can't go or chicken out, you can make metric buttloads of cash selling your winning ticket.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a profitable model.
When I stream, I'm downloading. The data goes from their servers to my device.
You may play some tricks to minimize caching and delete the data as quickly as its done with, but it's still downloading.
So how is copyright enforcement supposed to know if I'm capturing that data for later additional use?
>Most of the time, when the "display" is bad, it's actually the driving electronics that are bad.
With CRTs use for steady or repetitive images, burn in is a serious issue. And if the phosphor coating can be degraded in specific places (I'm not up on the physics/chemistry, but presumably the electron gun isn't running out of electrons...), it's going to be degrading to a lesser extent in general.
If you ever used a classic arcade system back in the day, you'd know even when they were relatively new the screens showed ghosts of the demo screen, or any common game elements (as in Donkey Kong or Pac-Man). You wouldn't want to use an old screen from one game for another one.
>completely impractical.
This is the protection against this going anywhere of course. Any practical trial would show it to be a clusterfuck of epic proportions.
I'm not terribly troubled by it. My MAME cabinet has an LED screen in it, which means lower power requirements, a sharper image, and no real worry that the main screen will burn in.
If the retro community is big enough, somebody will produce a 4:3 aspect ratio, slightly convex LED with a thick glass cover - and perhaps even an onboard function that can simulate burn in.
It still won't be the same, of course, but neither are the guts of most arcade systems anyway.
And when the patient loses their key? Or when a medical records clerk makes an error? You're introducing more problems than you're solving.
You don't want an unalterable, ever-growing database. You want standards to allow easy exchange of information, a system to which access is limited to authorized users, and privacy legislation to ensure anyone misusing the data can be severely punished.
>but it's easy to build up a never-exhausted queue of good stuff to watch when you're in the mood.
I don't know about that - I've built what I consider to be a fairly large collection of basically every movie or television show I've enjoyed in the last 30 years or so (since I started caring at all about what I watched).
You know what? I find I'm almost always more willing to spend a lot of time hunting for something new than to spend a little time to select something I already have.
Most of the stuff I have falls into two categories - good enough I remember it and bad enough I don't. Either way, it's unusual that I want to watch it again. I still enjoy the option, though.
Who says it has to look at the nearest car?
It'll see cars coming and assess the demographics of then next batch of cars, then deploy an ad that will earn the most revenue for the billboard owner for that batch.
The ad will be on display as your batch comes into optimal viewing distance and cycled to the next ad for the next batch when your group passes out of optimal distance.
And that's just the easiest bit of processing to do. You could get fancier and allow for cutting the cycle short if a particularly profitable cluster of cars is detected that is outside your regular cycle.
My GP is responsible for my medical records (all medical results get copied to him regardless of where I go), though exactly how and where they're stored I've no idea. I do know the bastards charge ridiculous amounts of money in some instances to transfer or release records.
I suspect it's 3rd party vendors contracted by the province and restricted by the provincial Personal Health Information Privacy Act (https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/04p03).
The system seems to be working, more or less. I can't recall the last time there was a news item about someone violating the privacy protections.
Patients should have access to their records, but giving them control is a mistake from a societal perspective. You're just asking for an 'arms race' of lawsuits and insurance premiums.
Yeah, IT meetings are about sharing information, maybe receiving direction from higher up the chain.
It's kind of a shame they're treated like any other meeting, because if you could appear when the agenda has an item that might involve you and then step out afterwards (assuming those items cluster well...), a lot fewer people would be sitting there bored out of their minds instead of possibly being productive back at their desks.
The manager is the only one who needs to be there end-to-end, because they're the ones who need to know where everyone is and roughly what they're doing. I only need to know or share when my actions and a colleague's are likely to overlap.
>AI isn't going to want to destroy humanity unless we program it to
And if we're not careful, we could inadvertently program them that way. We're talking about creating a highly flexible system we'd consider intelligent, and its programming would amount to instincts.
With regular old 'dumb' programs we make mistakes that have unintended consequences all the time. That could be much worse with AI.
Do you really want to be standing on piles of human skulls, waiting your turn to die and thinking, "Well, that was a really interesting emergent behaviour we didn't anticipate"?
>The "we can't innovate because the rich get first dibs" argument is not sailing with the public.
This is because everyone dreams of joining the ranks of the rich, despite the odds against it.
>Wealth inequality gets worse the more you start monkeying around with the market.
That is incorrect; an unregulated market results in robber barons. See history.
>I'd RATHER have wealth inequality because then the people who aren't contributing anything or doing menial work of limited value (pealing potatoes) get LESS than what people are finding new ways to provide for things people are actually willing to pay for.
Wealth inequality will never go away, but it isn't inappropriate for a society to attempt to limit the degree of inequality.
And it's not the innovators who tend to be the richest, but those with the wealth to already dominate the market. They're not necessarily earning their position on the wealth scale doing that, and in fact are likely retarding progress as it is something that could harm their position. Established players like the established market.
In the short term, people in the US can choose to work at what amounts to starvation wages compared to local cost of living. Or move on to those new jobs everyone's always claiming will magically appear.
In the long term (after the American economy is destroyed but the richest have milked it for all they can and moved to whatever nation can still support their standard of living), foreign workers will have cause their local economies to grow and their wage expectations will grow simultaneously. Ultimately, they'll be the same as domestic labour only with the hassle of dealing with people in a different time zone and possibly with cultural and language issues. But hey, equalization will happen faster if America's crashing as quickly as they're growing.
It would seem one solution is to levy a 'standard of living' tariff on offshored jobs that covers the difference in expense, and here's the difficult part - remit the collected tariffs to the foreign workers instead of trying to hold onto it domestically.
That will not only make the domestic labor force more competitive in the short term, it will insure a rapid rise of the foreign economy so they are less competitive in the long run.
Or you can put up various walls, isolate your nation from the global economy, and find yourself falling further and further behind the rest of the planet over time.
>they should have enough memory to be switched on when their shift starts and switched off when it ends.
The technology isn't there yet. Cops often work shifts that exceed 12h. Storage? Sure. Transferring it to central storage, cataloguing it all? Exists but is relatively expensive to do right. Lightweight battery to keep a decent camera recording for more than half a day? Not yet.
And they have the right to go to the bathroom or just take a lunch break without being on camera.
With a large enough sample size, it is expected to average out.
75L of urine is a single instance of voiding a full bladder for each of 215 people... people 'randomly selected' from the population by their willingness to urinate in a public pool.
Sure, you have no idea what the diet of each of those people is, but you can make a pretty good estimate of the average diet.
Having said that, I'd want to do a quick count of who uses the pool on a weekly basis. If you have a large senior fitness class or get hit by the new-moms-and-babies set, that could explain all the urine... and you could tighten your estimates a bit since you could make better guesses about the average diet.
Don't be foolishly reactionary.
Just imagine you roll up on a scene where there is an armed and dangerous person. How likely are you to be thinking about turning on your camera and ensuring it's working before you're dealing with the problem?
Or, from another perspective... someone's pointing a gun at you, and you see a cop arrive but he spends 30 seconds or more in his cruiser pushing buttons before he comes to help you.
Something like a 'GoPro for guns' is probably the best possible solution. A little bullet cam mounted like a scope, that activates when pulled from the holster. There'd still be the issue of keeping it charged and checking that it works, but that could be a start-of-shift check (and there'd be a convenient record of that check, too).
I wish I hadn't posted prior to this, because I'd love to have used my mod points to boost your post.
I love it when someone does the math.
Broadcast television is that thing where you get an extremely limited selection, you don't choose when things start, and only have an option to pause or rewind if you insert a DVR into the loop.
Oh, and generally it's around 33% unskippable advertisements.
If you're not offering a massive library of on-demand material (including a lot of new material), there wouldn't seem to be much point for a 'broadcast television' streaming service outside of sports... which this service doesn't include.
Actually, the story was the rail gun's standard payloads were altered from wheat to rock. I can't recall if that was a standard shipping 'container' packed with gravel or a metal band and some rockets strapped to one big rock... either way the payload size would have been limited by the diameter of the driver's magnetic rings and the limit of its ability to provide vertical lift.
Since that system was designed to drop payloads non-destructively into a body of water, there's a certain amount of suspension of disbelief required to see that same system launching much more massive objects at much higher velocities.
Their secondary launcher was built in preparation for war, so that would have had the mass and acceleration requirements accounted for, but I'm pretty sure that in the book the second launcher was just a backup.
So yes, once you're on the Moon, and once you have an appropriate mass driver that can levitate enough mass and accelerate it to a useful velocity, you can take solar-powered shots at Earth until the Earthlings manage to build and launch a rocket to destroy your launcher. (Min several days even if it's sitting on a launch pad waiting to go).
I'm certainly not concerned about a dangerous weapon being built on the Moon in the near term... there's no benefit to balance the cost of doing so. It's a lot more cost effective just to put something (nuclear) in orbit and leave it on standby.
I'd actually be OK with that - so long as customers don't have to pay.
You could still filter at the customer end (you'd be foolish to trust your ISP anyway), and you'd legislate it so the ISP can't count identifiable spam traffic as part of the customer's network utilization. They'd have to provide extra bandwidth to handle it, and couldn't charge for bit transfer.
I doubt any spammers would pay for that service, because they thrive on parasitic abuse of the network to avoid the already minimal costs for sending digital messages.
The problem is the minor stuff gets ignored (and honestly, a good deal of it is just innocent human being human stuff which is WHY it gets ignored), and a lot of the genuine complaints are so beyond our experience that when they're brought up they sound just as outrageous as the false ones.
I'm kind of on board with "Don't make a big deal of it in the press until it's gone through the courts". There's no reasonable way to judge what happened based on whether the claims seem credible or not, when reality is so variable in this regard.
I disagree with point 3. There are filtering measures required to combat spam, botnets, DDOS attacks, etc.
You want to move those costs as close to the source as possible to put pressure on them to eliminate the problem. A totally unfiltered Internet just means the consumer pays for a choked pipe they can't actually use.
> It's a solid phone that was hampered by rough software at launch which has been fixed.
I have a Classic. Buggy browser, OS patching seems to have stopped, nobody's developing apps anymore (but at least it's Android-based now so you can side load many apps if you want to).
They hamstrung the Blackberry Bridge and then dropped the Playbook platform altogether after swearing up and down they wouldn't.
I like the sandboxed work and personal modes. I like the secure link to a private server (though poorly implemented so features fail if Blackberry has an outage).
I'm going to show my age here... but I haven't been happy since mechanical on/off switches became passé.
I don't want an 'access standby' button, I want an OFF button, damnit.
It is ridiculous that if I want an actual off button I have to either unplug the device (or pull the battery), or have it powered through a power bar that (thankfully) still has a power switch on it that does something.
Make the tickets transferrable and include the right to refuse anyone who can't meet the fitness requirements (requirements which a clearly published so people can decide ahead of time)
Have another clause allowing for a pair of alternates to be selected in case of a last-minute issue with insufficient time to vet/train anyone you might sell your tickets to.
Have secondary prizes of sending a quarter kilo of inert material for the trip, or a place at the launch pad.
A lottery system might actually work really well. Mainly the 'transferrable' part, because that means if you can't go or chicken out, you can make metric buttloads of cash selling your winning ticket.