Whether Musk is right or not probably mostly depends on whether worry about global warming increases over that time period, and chances are darn good that that will happen, as the effects of the already-wired-in warming start to become more and more obvious, even to the studiously blind.
So his bet probably depends a lot on whether the US government grows a pair and institutes a rapidly escalating carbon tax, as almost everyone who actually knows anything about the GHGs and global warming problem believes is the most effective approach to getting the energy and transportation economy to turn the corner rapidly.
It's probably because IOS and Android+Linux were complete, general OS stacks designed for, you know, computers, whereas RIM s/w was designed to run on low-end electronics like pagers and early cellphones, so is much more limited and specialized, then added to in an adhoc fashion as the hardware got faster and more memory.
What really happened here is that the cellphone got replaced by a portable computer that happens to be able to phone people. RIM and to be fair many others got caught napping when that happened.
unless the levels of taxation are assymetrical; i.e. unless there are more categories of deductions and greater levels of deductions for one industrial sector compared to other sectors of the economy. Then it would be a subsidy. I think if you study the details there is a a subsidy by this definition for the fossil fuel industry.
You are right. Cap and trade is easy to render impotent by changing definitions of things to the point of meaninglessness. It's full of potential accounting tricks that would ensure that no real progress was made on the only number that matters in this topic: the rate of change of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
A hefty carbon tax is much simpler, stands a chance if implemented at being effective in reducing fossil-fuel use, and thus is predictably politically impossible.
What the hell is it about us that makes the intelligent and effective choice politically impossible. "Then we're stupid and we'll die !"
Is there an inherent limit to the amount of (low-entropy) energy (disequilibria) that should be directed by humans to human ends.
You would seem to have history on your side if you were to say that we have used the plentiful fossil-fuel energy of the last century or so very unwisely, but does that inherently mean that we can not ever be responsible "fire users"?
The problem comes with the definition of over-consumption. What is that definition? True, it is easy to show that we are being terribly wasteful and inefficient with our current cheap (borrow from the future generations) fossil fuel energy. But what if we were not wasteful and inefficient with energy? What if we did develop technologies to harness vast amounts of the plentiful energy hitting and contained in the Earth which had no serious direct negative side-effects like GHGs and air pollution?
Is your contention that we would just use the energy to more rapidly deplete the rest of the natural eco-systems of the planet? History again would be on your side of that argument. But couldn't we, in principle, learn how to shape our law and bend our will to responsible use of a vast energy throughput? Is that thought well beyond the social ingenuity and short-term hoarding predilections of human beings as we are?
You forgot the lack of a carbon tax or cap and trade system for co2 emissions. That's a massive subsidy of today's oil companies by future generations who will be paying to re-do the economy as a whole in a world of greatly warmed climate, shifted arable zones, an acidified ocean, and enviro-wars.
I'm pretty sure that, in common law jurisdictions, it would be found that there is a common law right (established by tradition) to make payments using anonymous currency.
Whether the anonymous currency is metal or bits is immaterial !:-) (to the legality of using anonymous currency)
Technically, the cash register person who refuses the $50 bill must, in legal terms, be refusing to make the sale to you, rather than refusing to accept the legal tender after the sale is made. Perhaps though you could legally argue that it was discriminatory in some way for them to refuse to enter into the selling transaction with you.
These interactive glasses would be way more attention distracting than a cell phone call or texting. The fact that you are still looking in the direction of straight ahead doesn't matter at all. Your brain can only pay attention to one thing at a time.
There are many experiments demonstrating people looking straight at things and not noticing them because they are attending mentally elsewhere. Faceplants into poles while walking would be the least of your worries.
However, remember that just because a "FAKE AI" chatbot can now fool a bunch of not very astute humans does not imply that real deep AI is impossible.
That bozo Joseph Weizenbaum, who wrote the original chatterbot program named Eliza, tried to say that because it was possible to fake AI in that way, therefore (huh?), all AI must be fake.
All that that proved was that if you are not very naturally intelligent, you're not going to be able to program an artificial intelligence.
Strangely, I find myself able to form my own political viewpoints and impression of what's going on.
Netflix and iTunes for movies and commercial-free old tv series. News sites for news.
Go to the pub to watch big sports events like Stanley cup and World Cup soccer (the vibe is better than the living room anyway).
Olympics etc come online now too. Not a fan of (the mostly non-foot variety of) football, so no problem at all there with weekly sports viewing.
Only thing is, Canadian Netflix and iTunes movie and tv show selection sucks sucks sucks due to separate licensing agreements for the content compared to in US. It's like spending an hour in a video rental store trying to find a movie that you haven't seen that actually wasn't straight to DVD. Most of their selection is "wasn't good enough for the big screen" crap or something from pre-1965. Almost bad enough to make you want to get a TV or a US proxy net connection and fake US zip code and US bank VISA card, but not quite.
The Fisker Karma (series hybrid) has a solar PV roof used to offset the additional power consumed by the air conditioner.
Adds a tiny bit of range too but negligible.
Gotta know your orders of magnitude with systems. If you don't know anything else, know your orders of magnitude.
This will prevent you making mistakes like kicking a government out because they wasted a million dollars on an advertising contract, when for example they were managing a 150 billion dollar budget.
Or it will prevent you complaining that city counsellors should take a 10% pay cut to lower your property taxes.
Or it will help you know why a 5 cents a gallon carbon tax would be completely useless but a $2 a gallon tax might start to have an effect on the environment, after 50 years or so of CO2 emissions-levels inertia.
The fact that USA is producing much of its electricity from coal is an essentially separate problem from whether EVs are a step in the right direction or not.
With the electricity thing, I would just say: "Stop doing that, morons. It's really bad for the climate and there are practical alternatives, and/or alternatives that you could make practical with 10 years of focused, adequately funded R&D to optimize them."
The thing with an electricity grid and batteries is you can supply them with energy made in many different ways, many of which are not fossil fuel based. The fact that you aren't doing that yet is just an almost criminal level of complacency and laziness.
As soon as you get your electricity generation (and smartgrid and electrical energy conservation) act together, the EVs will be much less environmentally damaging than the ICE vehicles. So they are a step in the right direction.
Firstly, oil is almost entirely old plants and plankton etc, not dinosaurs, but I'm sure you knew that. Secondly, the problem was we needed to be producing 400 to 500 times of the stuff per year than we were, to keep up with current demand.
Umm. High density urban living has a much lower ecological footprint than low-density sprawled living.
With high-density urban living with good rapid transit, most people could get by without a car and rent one for the occasional weekend holiday or renovation project.
Once programs reach a certain complexity, the programmers can't know what the program is going to do exactly.
For one thing there's this little theoretical computer science result called the halting problem where it's provable that you can't tell in advance when or if a program is going to halt, given an arbitrary input. If you can't tell when or if the program is going to halt (i.e. stop looping), then you can't say what result the program is going to return.
There is no programmer in the universe (even working at Google) who knows what the next google search result from a new query is going to be. It's too complex, and the input (the total set of web pages in the index) is changing all the time, as are the user statistics that help prioritize personalized searches. Also, some of the result differences might depend on essentially random communication times between different servers, which result in a choice of which server(s) are used to answer the query. There could be a slightly different version of the search index on different servers at any given moment.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There will be many programs of an AI nature that are completely unpredictable by their programmers.
One thing though. A "decision" by a computer is a decision. It is not in and of itself speech. Currently, speech is defined in law as something that a person utters.
Effectively, with unpredictable computer programs unleashed, there is no human person uttering the speech.
Yes. There are two reasons that religions exist and persist in human society:
1. They produce social cohesion and the resulting increased opportunity for trustworthy trade and co-operation. 2. They make societies easier to govern, through behavioral constraint and institutionalized punishment mechanisms.
Note that neither of these reasons has anything to do with the actual existence of a god.
One can frame an argument, at least in biological/sociological/meme terms, that religion is good for societies (and the average fate of an individual within one) even though its core stories are completely full of shit.
In other words that the harm prevention (through enforced prevention of social discord, inside each adherent population), is of more practical consequence than the fact that the populace believes a bunch of falsehoods.
Those who claim that religions cause more strife than they prevent simply don't know what they're talking about. Religions enforce a common ethos, and peace, within the adherent group, and restrict conflicts to at the borders of the religious group, where it bumps into another one. Purely mathematically, this is less conflict per individual per lifetime than if one lived in a non-aligned society of many many free agents and fewer agreed social norms.
I'm not sure where I come down on this argument. The trade-off, however, is clear.
The challenge for atheists (like myself) is to come up with a means of aligning human societies (and their norms of behaviour) without resorting to the bullshit-laden moral fairytales of religions. And this has to work with human people as they are (of a vast range of education and intellectual capacity, with the average not that impressive), not just for a crust of scientific or rational-superman types.
In other words, there is truth, and there is pragmatics. Do we have to choose one?
Slashdot Mirror
Whether Musk is right or not probably mostly depends on whether worry about global warming increases over that time period, and chances are darn good that that will happen, as the effects of the already-wired-in warming start to become more and more obvious, even to the studiously blind.
So his bet probably depends a lot on whether the US government grows a pair and institutes a rapidly escalating carbon tax, as almost everyone who actually knows anything about the GHGs and global warming problem believes is the most effective approach to getting the energy and transportation economy to turn the corner rapidly.
It's probably because IOS and Android+Linux were complete, general OS stacks designed for, you know, computers, whereas RIM s/w was designed to run on low-end electronics like pagers and early cellphones, so is much more limited and specialized, then added to in an adhoc fashion as the hardware got faster and more memory.
What really happened here is that the cellphone got replaced by a portable computer that happens to be able to phone people. RIM and to be fair many others got caught napping when that happened.
Remember those 1 in 200 year storms/floods/heat waves they designed for.
They are going to be more frequent going forward, so your design is only good up to, say, a 1 in 20 year event.
unless the levels of taxation are assymetrical; i.e. unless there are more categories of deductions and greater levels of deductions for one industrial sector compared to other sectors of the economy. Then it would be a subsidy. I think if you study the details there is a a subsidy by this definition for the fossil fuel industry.
You are right. Cap and trade is easy to render impotent by changing definitions of things to the point of meaninglessness. It's full of potential accounting tricks that would ensure that no real progress was made on the only number that matters in this topic: the rate of change of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
A hefty carbon tax is much simpler, stands a chance if implemented at being effective in reducing fossil-fuel use, and thus is predictably politically impossible.
What the hell is it about us that makes the intelligent and effective choice politically impossible. "Then we're stupid and we'll die !"
Well you raise a good question.
Is there an inherent limit to the amount of (low-entropy) energy (disequilibria) that should be directed by humans to human ends.
You would seem to have history on your side if you were to say that we have used the plentiful fossil-fuel energy of the last century or so very unwisely, but does that inherently mean that we can not ever be responsible "fire users"?
The problem comes with the definition of over-consumption. What is that definition? True, it is easy to show that we are being terribly wasteful and inefficient with our current cheap (borrow from the future generations) fossil fuel energy. But what if we were not wasteful and inefficient with energy? What if we did develop technologies to harness vast amounts of the plentiful energy hitting and contained in the Earth which had no serious direct negative side-effects like GHGs and air pollution?
Is your contention that we would just use the energy to more rapidly deplete the rest of the natural eco-systems of the planet? History again would be on your side of that argument. But couldn't we, in principle, learn how to shape our law and bend our will to responsible use of a vast energy throughput? Is that thought well beyond the social ingenuity and short-term hoarding predilections of human beings as we are?
http://blog.google.org/2011/10/new-geothermal-map-of-united-states.html
or maybe even:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/10/03/bc-fusion-energy-project.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion
You forgot the lack of a carbon tax or cap and trade system for co2 emissions. That's a massive subsidy of today's oil companies by future generations who will be paying to re-do the economy as a whole in a world of greatly warmed climate, shifted arable zones, an acidified ocean, and enviro-wars.
You may as well be discussing the pros and cons of the new heroin shipping routes.
The fossil fuel addiction is just as destructive and involves the same level of denial of reality.
Specially for tech people. Get off the obsession with oil based technology and make us some seriously steampunk alternatives that work.
I'm pretty sure that, in common law jurisdictions, it would be found that there is a common law right (established by tradition) to make payments using anonymous currency.
Whether the anonymous currency is metal or bits is immaterial ! :-) (to the legality of using anonymous currency)
Technically, the cash register person who refuses the $50 bill must, in legal terms, be refusing to make the sale to you, rather than refusing to accept the legal tender after the sale is made. Perhaps though you could legally argue that it was discriminatory in some way for them to refuse to enter into the selling transaction with you.
Newsflash: Absolutely nobody cares what you do in private.
You should be so lucky, to have one person who cares what you do in private.
The Jerk (1979) - IMDb
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079367/
I hope Google has serious liability insurance.
These interactive glasses would be way more attention distracting than a cell phone call or texting.
The fact that you are still looking in the direction of straight ahead doesn't matter at all.
Your brain can only pay attention to one thing at a time.
There are many experiments demonstrating people looking straight at things and not noticing them because they are attending mentally elsewhere.
Faceplants into poles while walking would be the least of your worries.
"Straighten Up and Fly Right"
(Nat King Cole)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekaqtBcfhwk
No no no.
Don't you realize how dangerous it would be to have your fixed beliefs changed by:
a) A changing situation or
b) Your changing level of knowledge of the situation.
There is no telling where that could lead. It could lead to DANCING, for God's sake!
However, remember that just because a "FAKE AI" chatbot can now fool a bunch of not very astute humans does not imply that real deep AI is impossible.
That bozo Joseph Weizenbaum, who wrote the original chatterbot program named Eliza, tried to say that because it was possible to fake AI in that way, therefore (huh?), all AI must be fake.
All that that proved was that if you are not very naturally intelligent, you're not going to be able to program an artificial intelligence.
I haven't had a TV for 15 years or so.
Strangely, I find myself able to form my own political viewpoints and impression of what's going on.
Netflix and iTunes for movies and commercial-free old tv series. News sites for news.
Go to the pub to watch big sports events like Stanley cup and World Cup soccer (the vibe is better than the living room anyway).
Olympics etc come online now too. Not a fan of (the mostly non-foot variety of) football, so no problem at all there with weekly sports viewing.
Only thing is, Canadian Netflix and iTunes movie and tv show selection sucks sucks sucks due to separate licensing agreements for the content compared to in US. It's like spending an hour in a video rental store trying to find a movie that you haven't seen that actually wasn't straight to DVD. Most of their selection is "wasn't good enough for the big screen" crap or something from pre-1965. Almost bad enough to make you want to get a TV or a US proxy net connection and fake US zip code and US bank VISA card, but not quite.
Suggestion. Rent a car for longer trips. EV for around the city.
The Fisker Karma (series hybrid) has a solar PV roof used to offset the additional power consumed by the air conditioner.
Adds a tiny bit of range too but negligible.
Gotta know your orders of magnitude with systems. If you don't know anything else, know your orders of magnitude.
This will prevent you making mistakes like kicking a government out because they wasted a million dollars on an advertising contract, when for example they were managing a 150 billion dollar budget.
Or it will prevent you complaining that city counsellors should take a 10% pay cut to lower your property taxes.
Or it will help you know why a 5 cents a gallon carbon tax would be completely useless but a $2 a gallon tax might start to have an effect on the environment, after 50 years or so of CO2 emissions-levels inertia.
It's all in the orders of magnitude.
The fact that USA is producing much of its electricity from coal is an essentially separate problem from whether EVs are a step in the right direction or not.
With the electricity thing, I would just say: "Stop doing that, morons. It's really bad for the climate and there are practical alternatives, and/or alternatives that you could make practical with 10 years of focused, adequately funded R&D to optimize them."
The thing with an electricity grid and batteries is you can supply them with energy made in many different ways, many of which are not fossil fuel based. The fact that you aren't doing that yet is just an almost criminal level of complacency and laziness.
As soon as you get your electricity generation (and smartgrid and electrical energy conservation) act together, the EVs will be much less environmentally damaging than the ICE vehicles. So they are a step in the right direction.
Firstly, oil is almost entirely old plants and plankton etc, not dinosaurs, but I'm sure you knew that.
Secondly, the problem was we needed to be producing 400 to 500 times of the stuff per year than we were, to keep up with current demand.
Why not use solar energy to produce the solar panels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Solar_Breeder_Project
Umm. High density urban living has a much lower ecological footprint than low-density sprawled living.
With high-density urban living with good rapid transit, most people could get by without a car and rent one for the occasional weekend holiday or renovation project.
Once programs reach a certain complexity, the programmers can't know what the program is going to do exactly.
For one thing there's this little theoretical computer science result called the halting problem where it's provable that you can't tell in advance when or if a program is going to halt, given an arbitrary input. If you can't tell when or if the program is going to halt (i.e. stop looping), then you can't say what result the program is going to return.
There is no programmer in the universe (even working at Google) who knows what the next google search result from a new query is going to be. It's too complex, and the input (the total set of web pages in the index) is changing all the time, as are the user statistics that help prioritize personalized searches.
Also, some of the result differences might depend on essentially random communication times between different servers, which result in a choice of which server(s) are used to answer the query. There could be a slightly different version of the search index on different servers at any given moment.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There will be many programs of an AI nature that are completely unpredictable by their programmers.
One thing though. A "decision" by a computer is a decision. It is not in and of itself speech. Currently, speech is defined in law as something that a person utters.
Effectively, with unpredictable computer programs unleashed, there is no human person uttering the speech.
Yes. There are two reasons that religions exist and persist in human society:
1. They produce social cohesion and the resulting increased opportunity for trustworthy trade and co-operation.
2. They make societies easier to govern, through behavioral constraint and institutionalized punishment mechanisms.
Note that neither of these reasons has anything to do with the actual existence of a god.
One can frame an argument, at least in biological/sociological/meme terms, that religion is good for societies
(and the average fate of an individual within one) even though its core stories are completely full of shit.
In other words that the harm prevention (through enforced prevention of social discord, inside each adherent population), is of more practical consequence than the fact that the populace believes a bunch of falsehoods.
Those who claim that religions cause more strife than they prevent simply don't know what they're talking about. Religions enforce a common ethos, and peace, within the adherent group, and restrict conflicts to at the borders of the religious group, where it bumps into another one. Purely mathematically, this is less conflict per individual per lifetime than if one lived in a non-aligned society of many many free agents and fewer agreed social norms.
I'm not sure where I come down on this argument. The trade-off, however, is clear.
The challenge for atheists (like myself) is to come up with a means of aligning human societies (and their norms of behaviour) without resorting to the bullshit-laden moral fairytales of religions.
And this has to work with human people as they are (of a vast range of education and intellectual capacity, with the average not that impressive), not just for a crust of scientific or rational-superman types.
In other words, there is truth, and there is pragmatics. Do we have to choose one?