Assuming we as a society believe that widely adopted health insurance is good, then is it better to have it supplied directly by the government or better to allow wider choice provided by a more free but still highly regulated open market?
It makes sense to let the government compete with commercial insurance via Medicare/Medicaid (in the U.S.). I've heard claims that the overhead of administering those programs is lower than for commercial insurance, but I don't know if it's cheaper than employer self-insurance, and Medicare reimbursement is currently heavily discounted when it pays providers, with Medicaid reimbursement varying by state as far as I know. The ability to opt into Medicare/Medicaid for an additional fee might work. Something else that might make more sense would be to enforce up-front pricing for medical services since at this point it's very difficult to get accurate estimates and of course that also breaks the free market. Health care is generally an infrequent expense without much choice in where it's delivered, however, so it does make some sense for market forces to come from insurance providers who have better pricing information instead of healthcare consumers. Making that kind of meta-pricing available to consumers when they purchase insurance would probably help, a sort of TCO for the insurance.
The idea that employers have a right to impose their religious beliefs on their employees should make anyone who actually believes in freedom of religion puke.
It's slightly more nuanced than that. If you run an insurance company you have to be responsible for the pharmacy formulary (deciding which drugs will be covered under the insurance plan) and the list of covered medical services and procedures (ER visits, well-checks, mammograms, abortions, caesarian sections, chiropracty, heart surgery, plastic surgery, gender re-assignment, etc.) that will be covered. Suppose you have a moral or financial objection to plastic surgery, which isn't too uncommon for insurance companies. Most insurance companies will not cover elective cosmetic procedures unless it's to treat an injury. This is an ethical/moral decision on the part of the insurance company; they believe that enhanced physical appearance is not important enough to the insured to cover fully. It's a very similar argument that a few insurance providers use to not cover contraceptives and abortion, and in general they should be free to cover whatever they feel is appropriate and the market should decide which insurance companies prosper.
The first problem occurs when restrictive insurance providers also force their employees to use the insurance they sell, which effectively happens any time an organization opts for medical self-insurance. The second problem is when the government requires all insurance providers to provide a basic level of service and forces entities to cover medical procedures or drugs that they don't think are morally acceptable. Both problems are infringements on free choice and the free market, but the latter is definitely closer to what the civil rights act prohibited, e.g. a correction of attitudes and beliefs that are just wrong and harmful.
I think pretty much every employer would prefer not to be involved in health care. It is a stupid system. But the reason that it was necessary is that insurance does not work when the insurer knows the individual risks. The individual insurance market began to collapse in the 1980s.
It's actually surprising that employers don't do the same screening that individual insurance carriers do and refuse to hire high-risk employees, since that would greatly lower the cost of self-insurance. Maybe the ADA prevents it? The closest example I can think of are campus smoking bans which effectively fire or cure employee smokers. Maybe campus fatty bans are next.
I agree with you that some sort of mandate is necessary so that everyone can be insured, but I am not enough of an expert to know what makes sense to mandate. Mandating that every medical procedure and drug including cosmetic surgery and off-label experimental use must be covered would be going too far, and mandating only that insurance had to pay for one clinic visit a year and up to $10,000 per ICU stay would be too limited. Driving some insurance companies out of business because they can't comply with the mandate is probably the lesser harm, but it is definitely a harm if employers/employees have to pay more for equivalent insurance elsewhere. For one thing, there are presumably people who want to buy insurance that matches their ethical standards and if the buyer and seller of the insurance aren't harming anyone else I don't think it's right to interfere. Clearly, only if an employee can freely choose the insurance they want is a requirement for the preceding to be true. It would be too easy for employers to make employees a deal they couldn't refuse otherwise.
The only way to get the ACA passed though was if people who already had insurance were assured that they wouldn't lose it. Many people have subsidized insurance built into their employment package and would lose substantially if that happened. Which is why the ACA has big tax penalties for employers who drop coverage and requires the coverage to meet certain minimum standa
Sorry, but you missed the point. Religion A says that pill X is against their religion. Insurance company is a Religion A organization, but government says that Insurance company cannot refuse to give pill X regardless of what they believe. In short, the government has decided that you must provide a service you believe is immoral.
The immorality was in coercing employers to provide insurance in the first place. In a sane world employers would pay their employees a larger salary and employees would purchase insurance, or the government would provide medical coverage directly. The ridiculous tax loopholes that give employers an incentive to provide insurance as a "benefit" led directly to the crazy individual mandate we have now, where no one is in a good position.
Yes, but earlier systems, which the OP was suggesting could be used for this purpose, lacks that functionality. Also, please reset your sarcasm detector, it appears to be out of alignment -- a functional detector would have pinged on "Raid 9 Million(tm)".
Apparently ReFS will have data and metadata checksums which combined with storage spaces could detect and correct bit rot if implemented properly. While I have no idea if the OP researched the actual capabilities of ReFS, with checksums it is possible to detect bit rot without parity, and correct it with an extra (good) copy. Sarcasm is fun, but only if it's accurate. You might argue that checksums are just a form of parity and maybe I'd agree with you since apparently the error-correction codes for RAID-6 are generally referred to as parity despite actually being linear error-correction codes. But the sense I got from your comment was that you didn't believe it was possible to prevent bit rot with just two copies of checksummed data, or by storing a single copy with an error-correcting code.
Correct, and those that are aren't immune to human stupidity. No filesystem can save you from a guy who decides to pour beer into the storage array, or who goes to move a directory and misclicks sending it to the trash. Disaster recovery is not a simple matter of choosing the right filesystem and then patting yourself on the back. It requires careful planning and consideration... None of which the majority of the people on this thread seem to be capable of. At least you seem to have some grasp of the underlying technology.
Most of your other points were spot-on. Relying on single storage systems that aren't geographically distributed is just asking for trouble. Not keeping administratively separate backups or immutable version history (read-only snapshots, revision control, etc.) is also a quick way to lose your data. I don't think there are any foolproof solutions you can get at the moment. Replicated git repos are close, but there was that KDE fiasco with git not explicitly checking the cryptographic hashes during all of its operations and allowing bitrot to be replicated to other repositories. Dumb. I have never been a fan of the Linus/Linux philosophy of trusting the hardware to provide 0 bit errors per yottabyte. It's just not realistic. Of course that means that the next step will be implementing lock-step (or at least consistency-point comparison) processing in software to work around CPU/RAM errors...
Without parity checking, you simply aren't addressing bit rot. Period. It could be Raid 9 Million(tm) and if all it's doing is copying the data, and not comparing it, bit rot will still proceed apace, silently eating your data. But let's say you're a good administrator that has enabled parity. Great! But there's still a problem: parity cannot restore data that has become corrupted due to bit rot -- it is a detection-only mechanism.
This is incorrect for Reed-Solomon based RAID (levels 6 and higher such as RAID Z3). RAID6 can correct bit rot on a single disk and in general for t parity disks, floor(t/2) random errors per RS code can be corrected. All the RS-based RAID systems I've seen essentially store the RS code across devices using a GF(2^8) code, meaning that up to an entire byte could be corrupted by bit rot at a given logical address across all the stripes and still be corrected. All the details are on Wikipedia. Not all RAID-6+ implementations actually check the parity when reading, and I have no idea how many can solve the error locator polynomial for each RS code to actually identify and correct bit rot in multiple locations in different codes versus just dealing with known bulk errors (e.g. failed disks).
Now that I've explained all the ways that you're wrong, let me say that bit rot is probably not the cause of the OPs problems. Infact, USB devices are well-known for corrupting filesystems because of spontanious disconnects, power loss events, etc., and this is simply what can be expected in a typical residential environment. Even a RAID configuration in a residential environment isn't invulnerable to the "write hole" problem -- where data is partially committed to disk, but then the array suffers a power loss event.
Any proper file system will have a large enough transaction/intent log that can be replayed to correct partial data/metadata writes due to power failure and the RAID write hole, etc.. Most file systems in use are not proper, of course, but at least a few are available.
The problem is double-spending. You have to check the whole blockchain to make sure an address hasn't already spent the coins it's trying to give you. I had thought of adding explicit back-references to the last block/transaction that an address is referenced in so that you only have to backtrack to specific blocks to find a trustworthy balance for an address, but it would be a major protocol change and old addresses from before the change would still need the full ~13GB of blockchain. You'd also have to trust the metadata a bit more; it's easy to check all transactions, but trusting that clients and miners have properly verified the back-references without being lazy is more dangerous.
The seller has a choice; post a stable price in bitcoins or post a (constantly adjusted) realistic price in bitcoins.
And it's basically a no-brainer; set the prices in dollars or other local currency and do real-time conversion to bitcoin prices using the recent exchange history. It's almost certainly going to be converted to another currency at that exchange fairly quickly anyway. Bitcoin will be a payment method and not a stable currency for, in my guess, quite a long time to come. If not because of the speculation but because of its tiny market cap compared to global markets. As such, bitcoin will never become useless until its market cap is smaller than the smallest purchase one might want to make, or if all the exchanges die. In fact, the lack of exchanges would tend to stabilize the currency value so it could still be used to send a few dollars worth of value across the Internet.
Re:Um, this isn't as amazing as some might think..
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195K Bitcoin Transaction
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Financial markets like MtGox could easily maintain fractional reserves because many account-holders don't withdraw their entire balance of bitcoins every night. There is plenty of opportunity for the exchange to do whatever they want with a portion of the deposits. In essence "mtgox bitcoins" are already a fiat currency that are payable in real bitcoins upon request. They just haven't started paying out at less than 1 bitcoin per mtgox bitcoin yet, like half of the other bitcoin exchanges/banks/whatever have when they got hacked.
Why would the Rods from God [popsci.com] project require a manned platform? Especially an international crew that would be likely to discover the device and report it back to their own respective countries?
To give the rods a heave out of the tube perhaps? I'm not sure how many of you have personally de-orbited anything from LEO, but you can't just "drop" things on the Earth from up there.
The ONE THING? So nobody is free unless they have the right to a gun? So nobody in any other country, who doesn't have a gun-carrying laws possiby be free?
That's obvious. If you are restricted from possessing a small, machined piece of steel then you are not very free. Guns are inert without ammunition and yet it is the rare government that actually makes this critical distinction. Possessing harmful or dangerous chemicals is the real problem; more specifically possessing dangerous potential energy is what society unfortunately has need to regulate because of people's harmful intentions and simple incompetence. Unfortunately for gun-control advocates, addressing the real danger would logically require giving up gasoline, natural gas, and other volatile fuels, or implementing heavy-handed restrictions such as only allowing trained, licensed professionals to dispense gasoline into vehicles with fines or jail time for the irresponsible nuts who dared to open the gas cap or do mechanic work on the fuel system without authorization.
And, of course, the typical response is "Oh, but gasoline is NECESSARY! It's USEFUL!" but it ultimately kills far, far more people when it's mixed with self-driven vehicles than ammunition fired from a gun. So which is it; do you advocate the freedom to drive yourself around instead of being forced to walk or use mass transit or do you advocate serfdom so that you can feel safe from guns that have less of a chance of killing you than your car does? For that matter, statistically twinkies and big macs will kill you with a much higher success rate than guns. Banning personal vehicles or unhealthy food or dangerous sports or mountain climbing (have you seen the death rate for climbing Mt. Everest?) would only require people to give up portions of their lifestyle which is no more than gun-control advocates ask of gun/ammunition owners. Wouldn't it be better to give up just some of your personal freedom for just a little more safety and security?
Points taken; I spend a lot of time in the man pages and other references. I think the part I misinterpreted was the "I couldn't write a quicksort to save my life", which if taken literally means an inability to write simple programs. What I think you meant was "I couldn't write a quicksort in a few minutes without spending some time looking up reference material." I think anyone who has studied computer science should be able to come up with quicksort given enough time and motivation (and pencil and paper, at least). The concepts of divide and conquer and in-place array operations are just too basic to programming for something like quicksort to not eventually be developed by a competent programmer.
I'm sad to learn that, by your standards, I'm not currently a programmer, but merely a hack just out of high school, as I couldn't write a quicksort to save my life. Ironically, though, 20 years ago, when I WAS just out of high school (and WAY less experienced/skilled), I apparently was a programmer back then because I could and did write a quicksort at that time.
That is kind of sad. Could you describe how quicksort works, at least? Does divide and conquer ring a bell? How about a pivot element? I'm not going to require you to do it in-place or anything. If you've forgotten how to program I'm not sure what to say, except that you have my condolences.
Comparative (not competitive) advantages are disappearing. When walmart (or, more likely, amazon/google/some-other-tech-company) can plop a robotic liquor store in your neighborhood the microbreweries and corner stores are (nearly) history. They become a luxury item instead of a commodity, and while luxury beer will always have a market it's a much smaller market than the general liquor market. Eventually, robotically microbrewed local beer will have the comparative advantage if it's marketed as Luxury Robot Beer (Hand-Programmed Limited Edition).
TFA is about the shrinking number of comparative advantages that human labor has. You're not competing against Walmart, you're competing against automation that won't leave you with any comparative advantages in the end. Become a pure capitalist because labor won't pay. Buy/build robots.
Employees are free to sell their labor elsewhere. They have the right to order their affairs and sell their time as they see fit, finding the most advantageous deal they can. The employer can decide if the labor provided is worth it. The employee can decide if the pay is worth it.
Not only that, but consumers are free to not buy products at prices that ultimately lead to their own lowered wages.
Corporations are more efficient processes for accumulating wealth. The problem is that corporations have no intrinsic terminal value for individuals, and so a society of individuals must constantly enforce its own terminal values at the expense of corporate values.
And there's a new article for preventing that attack. In short: compile your candidate compiler with two other compilers (call them A and B), and then compile the candidate compiler with C and D, producing E and F. Compare E and F; if they're identical it's highly unlikely you suffer from a compromised compiler; if you did then either A or B would generate a compromised compiler (C or D), but it's highly unlikely that A and B would be compromised in exactly the same way, leading to identical binaries for E and F. There's some practical work in making A and B and C and D produce deterministic output, but the author of the paper that I am too lazy to look up did it.
Those same corrupt assholes who I have on video towing my car while not improperly parked, fucking up, dropping it on its side, totaling it then lying in court saying it was side swiped when they got there, and the judge disallowing the surveillance video?
Pics or it didn't happen.
Seriously, stick that video on youtube and get yourself a nice civil lawsuit going when it goes viral.
It sounds like reality. Do you really think that every month or two when Adobe or Oracle patches a remote exploit that's in 90% of computers it's a bug introduced within the last patch cycle? Of course not. Software is riddled with bugs and they're found incrementally. If you can find bugs faster than the public researchers you will have a database of zero-days, end of story.
The final damage toll of Snowden's actions will not be known for some time as he continues to leak information and terrorists groups are altering their communication methods [latimes.com] in light of Snowden's leaks.
As if any organization needs secret information to improve their communications. They already have a stellar example with Bin Laden's network that persisted for 9 years. Trusted human couriers with no network access. Any organization too stupid to use the same methods wouldn't be smart enough to alter their methods just because of Snowden.
What is probably more likely than NSA-inserted backdoors is the normal unintentional vulnerabilities in all software that the NSA knows about because it spends a lot of time searching for them. Roughly the same effect, but without the fearmongering of an evil NSA out to ruin open source. It's also probably in the best interest of the NSA to not have traceable commits when the hypothesized backdoors are eventually found. How long would they have to develop an agent/asset so that they had commit privileges to major open source software, and is it worth the risk of being burned once the backdoor was found? Version control makes it trivial to identify who was responsible and git in particular makes clandestine changes virtually impossible.
Or more realistically in our capitalist economy the rich guy and the homeless guy swap heads and bodies and the homeless guy gets paid the riches. Business as usual and the formerly rich guy can go make another fortune. There are plenty of people who would rather die old and rich than work hard in their youth. I think that makes a market.
I've long felt that schools have been doing a disservice to pupils since the 70's; preparing grade school kids for life should include basic money management, awareness of the state and federal tax code, family law, and the penal code. It takes an education to understand the responsibilities society places on you and the consequences of ignoring them, yet we toss our kids to the wolves as soon as they complete primary without any of that. Its really rather silly.
If you got rid of Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, History, Science, P.E., and Recess we might be able to cover the U.S. tax code in K-12, although it would be woefully outdated knowledge by the time they got to college. If we started sending every kid to summer school it would make a dent in the rest of the Federal statutes. States would have to do their own statutes as extra homework and weekend sessions. I have no idea when country/city ordinances would be covered. Good idea, though.
Nice, that you mentioned Gödel. His greatest achievement was a contribution to formal systems, where, in short, a language/system cannot be consistent and complete at the same time. This applies to Watson, but that limitation does not apply to humans or animals. Furthermore, machines are always bound by their programming, as you state yourself
Try saying "prefec2 can not consistently assert this sentence" to see if humans are not subject to the Incompleteness Theorem.
While I concur to the last part, I do not think that it is a deterministic thinking apparatus. First, to be self-aware, the brain and the body of a person interact. It is this connection which allows to build self-awareness. However, it is not the only ingredient. Second, while a single nerve cell can be modeled with mathematics, it is a large simplification. Even though each cell-model is a non-deterministic system. In combination with others it is able to solve problems, sometimes without prior knowledge, which are not computable and heuristics won't apply.
Quantum mechanics has a deterministic, timeless representation of the wavefunction of the Universe. Determinism does not preclude self-awareness or self-determination. I think it's more accurate to say that neurons have non-linear behavior and are therefore difficult to predict with accuracy. There is a threshold, however, at which computing power is sufficient to simulate a neural network of some size such that it is indistinguishable from the original. If there were not such a threshold then all the environmental noise like thermal noise, electromagnetic radiation, and stray cosmic rays would strongly interfere with our brains.
For intelligent machines to become our overlords, we would have to program them to be that, which is very unlikely. And they need to be greedy and power hungry. We have a pretty good model, why some of us are greedy and power hungry, and how this trait evolved.
Bacteria are not greedy or power hungry. Neither are viruses. They will eat you all the same. A train is not greedy or power hungry, but it will flatten you if you are in the way. What happens if you get in the way of a self-improving machine that wasn't explicitly programmed to avoid squashing humans? The risk is not that we will be slaves to a machine but that the machine will ignore us as it converts available matter and energy (including us) into whatever its goals and programming tell it to do. It requires very complex goals and behavior to enslave humans. Simple goals will simply destroy us.
However, lets assume that we program a system to become our overlord, like in iRobot, where we formulate rules, which in the end conflict with our own ability to be nice to each other, which results in drastic measures applied by the machine. If it would come to that we would be doomed. However, the machine would soon recognize that the humans would die off and that its own measures are the cause. That is, of course, only true if we do not program it to be a total asshole.
You are much closer to the heart of the problem here. How do you program a machine to not be an asshole? That is the very core of the problem. Any self-improving machine with the ability to change the world will eventually act dangerously toward humans out of no desire of its own but due to a lack of programming to protect humans. The machine must understand humans at least as well as we understand ourselves and additionally have the goal of preserving and improving our moral judgements.
Look up Friendly AI for a fairly thorough discussion of the risks involved
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Assuming we as a society believe that widely adopted health insurance is good, then is it better to have it supplied directly by the government or better to allow wider choice provided by a more free but still highly regulated open market?
It makes sense to let the government compete with commercial insurance via Medicare/Medicaid (in the U.S.). I've heard claims that the overhead of administering those programs is lower than for commercial insurance, but I don't know if it's cheaper than employer self-insurance, and Medicare reimbursement is currently heavily discounted when it pays providers, with Medicaid reimbursement varying by state as far as I know. The ability to opt into Medicare/Medicaid for an additional fee might work. Something else that might make more sense would be to enforce up-front pricing for medical services since at this point it's very difficult to get accurate estimates and of course that also breaks the free market. Health care is generally an infrequent expense without much choice in where it's delivered, however, so it does make some sense for market forces to come from insurance providers who have better pricing information instead of healthcare consumers. Making that kind of meta-pricing available to consumers when they purchase insurance would probably help, a sort of TCO for the insurance.
The idea that employers have a right to impose their religious beliefs on their employees should make anyone who actually believes in freedom of religion puke.
It's slightly more nuanced than that. If you run an insurance company you have to be responsible for the pharmacy formulary (deciding which drugs will be covered under the insurance plan) and the list of covered medical services and procedures (ER visits, well-checks, mammograms, abortions, caesarian sections, chiropracty, heart surgery, plastic surgery, gender re-assignment, etc.) that will be covered. Suppose you have a moral or financial objection to plastic surgery, which isn't too uncommon for insurance companies. Most insurance companies will not cover elective cosmetic procedures unless it's to treat an injury. This is an ethical/moral decision on the part of the insurance company; they believe that enhanced physical appearance is not important enough to the insured to cover fully. It's a very similar argument that a few insurance providers use to not cover contraceptives and abortion, and in general they should be free to cover whatever they feel is appropriate and the market should decide which insurance companies prosper.
The first problem occurs when restrictive insurance providers also force their employees to use the insurance they sell, which effectively happens any time an organization opts for medical self-insurance. The second problem is when the government requires all insurance providers to provide a basic level of service and forces entities to cover medical procedures or drugs that they don't think are morally acceptable. Both problems are infringements on free choice and the free market, but the latter is definitely closer to what the civil rights act prohibited, e.g. a correction of attitudes and beliefs that are just wrong and harmful.
I think pretty much every employer would prefer not to be involved in health care. It is a stupid system. But the reason that it was necessary is that insurance does not work when the insurer knows the individual risks. The individual insurance market began to collapse in the 1980s.
It's actually surprising that employers don't do the same screening that individual insurance carriers do and refuse to hire high-risk employees, since that would greatly lower the cost of self-insurance. Maybe the ADA prevents it? The closest example I can think of are campus smoking bans which effectively fire or cure employee smokers. Maybe campus fatty bans are next.
I agree with you that some sort of mandate is necessary so that everyone can be insured, but I am not enough of an expert to know what makes sense to mandate. Mandating that every medical procedure and drug including cosmetic surgery and off-label experimental use must be covered would be going too far, and mandating only that insurance had to pay for one clinic visit a year and up to $10,000 per ICU stay would be too limited. Driving some insurance companies out of business because they can't comply with the mandate is probably the lesser harm, but it is definitely a harm if employers/employees have to pay more for equivalent insurance elsewhere. For one thing, there are presumably people who want to buy insurance that matches their ethical standards and if the buyer and seller of the insurance aren't harming anyone else I don't think it's right to interfere. Clearly, only if an employee can freely choose the insurance they want is a requirement for the preceding to be true. It would be too easy for employers to make employees a deal they couldn't refuse otherwise.
The only way to get the ACA passed though was if people who already had insurance were assured that they wouldn't lose it. Many people have subsidized insurance built into their employment package and would lose substantially if that happened. Which is why the ACA has big tax penalties for employers who drop coverage and requires the coverage to meet certain minimum standa
Sorry, but you missed the point. Religion A says that pill X is against their religion. Insurance company is a Religion A organization, but government says that Insurance company cannot refuse to give pill X regardless of what they believe. In short, the government has decided that you must provide a service you believe is immoral.
The immorality was in coercing employers to provide insurance in the first place. In a sane world employers would pay their employees a larger salary and employees would purchase insurance, or the government would provide medical coverage directly. The ridiculous tax loopholes that give employers an incentive to provide insurance as a "benefit" led directly to the crazy individual mandate we have now, where no one is in a good position.
We know it wasn't an arc, AFCI (required in garages) would have tripped.
I don't think large appliances and car chargers are required to be on AFCI. The regs appear to be aimed at 120V outlets.
Yes, but earlier systems, which the OP was suggesting could be used for this purpose, lacks that functionality. Also, please reset your sarcasm detector, it appears to be out of alignment -- a functional detector would have pinged on "Raid 9 Million(tm)".
Apparently ReFS will have data and metadata checksums which combined with storage spaces could detect and correct bit rot if implemented properly. While I have no idea if the OP researched the actual capabilities of ReFS, with checksums it is possible to detect bit rot without parity, and correct it with an extra (good) copy. Sarcasm is fun, but only if it's accurate. You might argue that checksums are just a form of parity and maybe I'd agree with you since apparently the error-correction codes for RAID-6 are generally referred to as parity despite actually being linear error-correction codes. But the sense I got from your comment was that you didn't believe it was possible to prevent bit rot with just two copies of checksummed data, or by storing a single copy with an error-correcting code.
Correct, and those that are aren't immune to human stupidity. No filesystem can save you from a guy who decides to pour beer into the storage array, or who goes to move a directory and misclicks sending it to the trash. Disaster recovery is not a simple matter of choosing the right filesystem and then patting yourself on the back. It requires careful planning and consideration... None of which the majority of the people on this thread seem to be capable of. At least you seem to have some grasp of the underlying technology.
Most of your other points were spot-on. Relying on single storage systems that aren't geographically distributed is just asking for trouble. Not keeping administratively separate backups or immutable version history (read-only snapshots, revision control, etc.) is also a quick way to lose your data. I don't think there are any foolproof solutions you can get at the moment. Replicated git repos are close, but there was that KDE fiasco with git not explicitly checking the cryptographic hashes during all of its operations and allowing bitrot to be replicated to other repositories. Dumb. I have never been a fan of the Linus/Linux philosophy of trusting the hardware to provide 0 bit errors per yottabyte. It's just not realistic. Of course that means that the next step will be implementing lock-step (or at least consistency-point comparison) processing in software to work around CPU/RAM errors...
Without parity checking, you simply aren't addressing bit rot. Period. It could be Raid 9 Million(tm) and if all it's doing is copying the data, and not comparing it, bit rot will still proceed apace, silently eating your data. But let's say you're a good administrator that has enabled parity. Great! But there's still a problem: parity cannot restore data that has become corrupted due to bit rot -- it is a detection-only mechanism.
This is incorrect for Reed-Solomon based RAID (levels 6 and higher such as RAID Z3). RAID6 can correct bit rot on a single disk and in general for t parity disks, floor(t/2) random errors per RS code can be corrected. All the RS-based RAID systems I've seen essentially store the RS code across devices using a GF(2^8) code, meaning that up to an entire byte could be corrupted by bit rot at a given logical address across all the stripes and still be corrected. All the details are on Wikipedia. Not all RAID-6+ implementations actually check the parity when reading, and I have no idea how many can solve the error locator polynomial for each RS code to actually identify and correct bit rot in multiple locations in different codes versus just dealing with known bulk errors (e.g. failed disks).
Now that I've explained all the ways that you're wrong, let me say that bit rot is probably not the cause of the OPs problems. Infact, USB devices are well-known for corrupting filesystems because of spontanious disconnects, power loss events, etc., and this is simply what can be expected in a typical residential environment. Even a RAID configuration in a residential environment isn't invulnerable to the "write hole" problem -- where data is partially committed to disk, but then the array suffers a power loss event.
Any proper file system will have a large enough transaction/intent log that can be replayed to correct partial data/metadata writes due to power failure and the RAID write hole, etc.. Most file systems in use are not proper, of course, but at least a few are available.
The problem is double-spending. You have to check the whole blockchain to make sure an address hasn't already spent the coins it's trying to give you. I had thought of adding explicit back-references to the last block/transaction that an address is referenced in so that you only have to backtrack to specific blocks to find a trustworthy balance for an address, but it would be a major protocol change and old addresses from before the change would still need the full ~13GB of blockchain. You'd also have to trust the metadata a bit more; it's easy to check all transactions, but trusting that clients and miners have properly verified the back-references without being lazy is more dangerous.
The seller has a choice; post a stable price in bitcoins or post a (constantly adjusted) realistic price in bitcoins.
And it's basically a no-brainer; set the prices in dollars or other local currency and do real-time conversion to bitcoin prices using the recent exchange history. It's almost certainly going to be converted to another currency at that exchange fairly quickly anyway. Bitcoin will be a payment method and not a stable currency for, in my guess, quite a long time to come. If not because of the speculation but because of its tiny market cap compared to global markets. As such, bitcoin will never become useless until its market cap is smaller than the smallest purchase one might want to make, or if all the exchanges die. In fact, the lack of exchanges would tend to stabilize the currency value so it could still be used to send a few dollars worth of value across the Internet.
Financial markets like MtGox could easily maintain fractional reserves because many account-holders don't withdraw their entire balance of bitcoins every night. There is plenty of opportunity for the exchange to do whatever they want with a portion of the deposits. In essence "mtgox bitcoins" are already a fiat currency that are payable in real bitcoins upon request. They just haven't started paying out at less than 1 bitcoin per mtgox bitcoin yet, like half of the other bitcoin exchanges/banks/whatever have when they got hacked.
Why would the Rods from God [popsci.com] project require a manned platform? Especially an international crew that would be likely to discover the device and report it back to their own respective countries?
To give the rods a heave out of the tube perhaps? I'm not sure how many of you have personally de-orbited anything from LEO, but you can't just "drop" things on the Earth from up there.
The ONE THING? So nobody is free unless they have the right to a gun? So nobody in any other country, who doesn't have a gun-carrying laws possiby be free?
That's obvious. If you are restricted from possessing a small, machined piece of steel then you are not very free. Guns are inert without ammunition and yet it is the rare government that actually makes this critical distinction. Possessing harmful or dangerous chemicals is the real problem; more specifically possessing dangerous potential energy is what society unfortunately has need to regulate because of people's harmful intentions and simple incompetence. Unfortunately for gun-control advocates, addressing the real danger would logically require giving up gasoline, natural gas, and other volatile fuels, or implementing heavy-handed restrictions such as only allowing trained, licensed professionals to dispense gasoline into vehicles with fines or jail time for the irresponsible nuts who dared to open the gas cap or do mechanic work on the fuel system without authorization.
And, of course, the typical response is "Oh, but gasoline is NECESSARY! It's USEFUL!" but it ultimately kills far, far more people when it's mixed with self-driven vehicles than ammunition fired from a gun. So which is it; do you advocate the freedom to drive yourself around instead of being forced to walk or use mass transit or do you advocate serfdom so that you can feel safe from guns that have less of a chance of killing you than your car does? For that matter, statistically twinkies and big macs will kill you with a much higher success rate than guns. Banning personal vehicles or unhealthy food or dangerous sports or mountain climbing (have you seen the death rate for climbing Mt. Everest?) would only require people to give up portions of their lifestyle which is no more than gun-control advocates ask of gun/ammunition owners. Wouldn't it be better to give up just some of your personal freedom for just a little more safety and security?
Points taken; I spend a lot of time in the man pages and other references. I think the part I misinterpreted was the "I couldn't write a quicksort to save my life", which if taken literally means an inability to write simple programs. What I think you meant was "I couldn't write a quicksort in a few minutes without spending some time looking up reference material." I think anyone who has studied computer science should be able to come up with quicksort given enough time and motivation (and pencil and paper, at least). The concepts of divide and conquer and in-place array operations are just too basic to programming for something like quicksort to not eventually be developed by a competent programmer.
I'm sad to learn that, by your standards, I'm not currently a programmer, but merely a hack just out of high school, as I couldn't write a quicksort to save my life. Ironically, though, 20 years ago, when I WAS just out of high school (and WAY less experienced/skilled), I apparently was a programmer back then because I could and did write a quicksort at that time.
That is kind of sad. Could you describe how quicksort works, at least? Does divide and conquer ring a bell? How about a pivot element? I'm not going to require you to do it in-place or anything. If you've forgotten how to program I'm not sure what to say, except that you have my condolences.
Not to mention the tolerances! Most people have no idea just how precise they have to be in order to hold together yet easily pull apart like that.
The first time they pick up some megablocks or other imitations, they get a pretty good idea.
Comparative (not competitive) advantages are disappearing. When walmart (or, more likely, amazon/google/some-other-tech-company) can plop a robotic liquor store in your neighborhood the microbreweries and corner stores are (nearly) history. They become a luxury item instead of a commodity, and while luxury beer will always have a market it's a much smaller market than the general liquor market. Eventually, robotically microbrewed local beer will have the comparative advantage if it's marketed as Luxury Robot Beer (Hand-Programmed Limited Edition).
TFA is about the shrinking number of comparative advantages that human labor has. You're not competing against Walmart, you're competing against automation that won't leave you with any comparative advantages in the end. Become a pure capitalist because labor won't pay. Buy/build robots.
Employees are free to sell their labor elsewhere. They have the right to order their affairs and sell their time as they see fit, finding the most advantageous deal they can. The employer can decide if the labor provided is worth it. The employee can decide if the pay is worth it.
Not only that, but consumers are free to not buy products at prices that ultimately lead to their own lowered wages.
Uh oh, I see the problem. There is no perfect economic information and so large hierarchical entities can collude to manipulate market prices and wages because of their ability to solve the coordination problem for the actions of their independent agents more efficiently than free individuals who have trouble just avoiding the tragedy of the commons, not to mention the problems of self-governance.
Corporations are more efficient processes for accumulating wealth. The problem is that corporations have no intrinsic terminal value for individuals, and so a society of individuals must constantly enforce its own terminal values at the expense of corporate values.
And there's a new article for preventing that attack. In short: compile your candidate compiler with two other compilers (call them A and B), and then compile the candidate compiler with C and D, producing E and F. Compare E and F; if they're identical it's highly unlikely you suffer from a compromised compiler; if you did then either A or B would generate a compromised compiler (C or D), but it's highly unlikely that A and B would be compromised in exactly the same way, leading to identical binaries for E and F. There's some practical work in making A and B and C and D produce deterministic output, but the author of the paper that I am too lazy to look up did it.
Those same corrupt assholes who I have on video towing my car while not improperly parked, fucking up, dropping it on its side, totaling it then lying in court saying it was side swiped when they got there, and the judge disallowing the surveillance video?
Pics or it didn't happen.
Seriously, stick that video on youtube and get yourself a nice civil lawsuit going when it goes viral.
It sounds like reality. Do you really think that every month or two when Adobe or Oracle patches a remote exploit that's in 90% of computers it's a bug introduced within the last patch cycle? Of course not. Software is riddled with bugs and they're found incrementally. If you can find bugs faster than the public researchers you will have a database of zero-days, end of story.
The final damage toll of Snowden's actions will not be known for some time as he continues to leak information and terrorists groups are altering their communication methods [latimes.com] in light of Snowden's leaks.
As if any organization needs secret information to improve their communications. They already have a stellar example with Bin Laden's network that persisted for 9 years. Trusted human couriers with no network access. Any organization too stupid to use the same methods wouldn't be smart enough to alter their methods just because of Snowden.
What is probably more likely than NSA-inserted backdoors is the normal unintentional vulnerabilities in all software that the NSA knows about because it spends a lot of time searching for them. Roughly the same effect, but without the fearmongering of an evil NSA out to ruin open source. It's also probably in the best interest of the NSA to not have traceable commits when the hypothesized backdoors are eventually found. How long would they have to develop an agent/asset so that they had commit privileges to major open source software, and is it worth the risk of being burned once the backdoor was found? Version control makes it trivial to identify who was responsible and git in particular makes clandestine changes virtually impossible.
Or more realistically in our capitalist economy the rich guy and the homeless guy swap heads and bodies and the homeless guy gets paid the riches. Business as usual and the formerly rich guy can go make another fortune. There are plenty of people who would rather die old and rich than work hard in their youth. I think that makes a market.
There are plenty of suicidal people with perfectly healthy bodies. You may have to deal with being a hormonal teenager again, though.
I've long felt that schools have been doing a disservice to pupils since the 70's; preparing grade school kids for life should include basic money management, awareness of the state and federal tax code, family law, and the penal code. It takes an education to understand the responsibilities society places on you and the consequences of ignoring them, yet we toss our kids to the wolves as soon as they complete primary without any of that. Its really rather silly.
If you got rid of Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, History, Science, P.E., and Recess we might be able to cover the U.S. tax code in K-12, although it would be woefully outdated knowledge by the time they got to college. If we started sending every kid to summer school it would make a dent in the rest of the Federal statutes. States would have to do their own statutes as extra homework and weekend sessions. I have no idea when country/city ordinances would be covered. Good idea, though.
Nice, that you mentioned Gödel. His greatest achievement was a contribution to formal systems, where, in short, a language/system cannot be consistent and complete at the same time. This applies to Watson, but that limitation does not apply to humans or animals. Furthermore, machines are always bound by their programming, as you state yourself
Try saying "prefec2 can not consistently assert this sentence" to see if humans are not subject to the Incompleteness Theorem.
While I concur to the last part, I do not think that it is a deterministic thinking apparatus. First, to be self-aware, the brain and the body of a person interact. It is this connection which allows to build self-awareness. However, it is not the only ingredient. Second, while a single nerve cell can be modeled with mathematics, it is a large simplification. Even though each cell-model is a non-deterministic system. In combination with others it is able to solve problems, sometimes without prior knowledge, which are not computable and heuristics won't apply.
Quantum mechanics has a deterministic, timeless representation of the wavefunction of the Universe. Determinism does not preclude self-awareness or self-determination. I think it's more accurate to say that neurons have non-linear behavior and are therefore difficult to predict with accuracy. There is a threshold, however, at which computing power is sufficient to simulate a neural network of some size such that it is indistinguishable from the original. If there were not such a threshold then all the environmental noise like thermal noise, electromagnetic radiation, and stray cosmic rays would strongly interfere with our brains.
For intelligent machines to become our overlords, we would have to program them to be that, which is very unlikely. And they need to be greedy and power hungry. We have a pretty good model, why some of us are greedy and power hungry, and how this trait evolved.
Bacteria are not greedy or power hungry. Neither are viruses. They will eat you all the same. A train is not greedy or power hungry, but it will flatten you if you are in the way. What happens if you get in the way of a self-improving machine that wasn't explicitly programmed to avoid squashing humans? The risk is not that we will be slaves to a machine but that the machine will ignore us as it converts available matter and energy (including us) into whatever its goals and programming tell it to do. It requires very complex goals and behavior to enslave humans. Simple goals will simply destroy us.
However, lets assume that we program a system to become our overlord, like in iRobot, where we formulate rules, which in the end conflict with our own ability to be nice to each other, which results in drastic measures applied by the machine. If it would come to that we would be doomed. However, the machine would soon recognize that the humans would die off and that its own measures are the cause. That is, of course, only true if we do not program it to be a total asshole.
You are much closer to the heart of the problem here. How do you program a machine to not be an asshole? That is the very core of the problem. Any self-improving machine with the ability to change the world will eventually act dangerously toward humans out of no desire of its own but due to a lack of programming to protect humans. The machine must understand humans at least as well as we understand ourselves and additionally have the goal of preserving and improving our moral judgements.
Look up Friendly AI for a fairly thorough discussion of the risks involved